All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.
—ENOCH POWELL, 1977
It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.
—HENRY KISSINGER, Years of Upheaval
By the spring of 1974, public attitudes toward Nixon and Kissinger were heading in opposite directions. The president’s political survival seemed more uncertain every day, while Kissinger’s public standing reached new heights. On April 3, the White House felt compelled to issue a statement responding to a report from the Joint Congressional Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation saying Nixon owed $432,787 plus interest for impermissible deductions, principally for the gift of his vice-presidential papers to the National Archives.
Although the statement emphasized the absence of any IRS suggestion of fraud, the news intensified feelings of distrust toward the president. A Gallup survey between March 29 and April 1 gave Nixon a 65 percent disapproval rating, with only 26 percent content with his job performance. At the same time, 58 percent of college students cited distrust of government as the most important problem facing the country.
By contrast, Kissinger was lionized as the single administration official untainted by Watergate. Time described him as “the one figure of stature remaining amid the ruins of Richard Nixon’s stricken Administration.” Henry was seen as someone who could ensure continuity in foreign policy if Nixon was driven from office. By contrast with Nixon, the poor boy who made good and then ruined himself by overreaching, Kissinger was the self-made man who gave success a good name. His marriage to Nancy Maginnes on March 30, 1974, added to his standing as a celebrity whose private life excited constant press attention. Forty reporters kept watch at an Acapulco estate in Mexico, where the couple honeymooned, while twelve secret service agents provided protection. In a bizarre phone call of congratulations to the bride, Nixon warned her against poisonous snakes in Acapulco and the need to extract the venom promptly should either of them be bitten.
On April 2, France’s President Pompidou died after a long struggle against cancer. Nixon seized the opportunity to escape his domestic crisis temporarily by traveling to Paris. It allowed him not only to get away from Washington, however briefly, but to project an image of a confident world statesman. Holding court at the U.S. embassy, where he met with the British, Italian, West German, French, Danish, Soviet, and Japanese heads of state, Nixon impressed the French press as “the Sovereign of the Western World,” who “continued to dominate international politics.” Le Figaro, the leading French conservative paper, carried a cartoon of Nixon seated on a throne with a crowned woman representing Europe kneeling before him.
The conversations reflected a different reality. Although Nixon’s counterparts were all respectful toward him, they were less than accommodating. Suspicious that détente was diminishing U.S. willingness to defend Western Europe, angry at American unilateralist dealings with the Middle East, and seeing Nixon as a damaged leader who was discredited at home, the Europeans seemed indifferent to Nixon’s warnings that alliance divisions could strengthen isolationist impulses in the United States.
Nixon offended the French by using Pompidou’s funeral to bolster his public image. A government official complained that Nixon “shamelessly substituted a publicity campaign for the mourning of an entire nation”; he described it as discourteous and clumsy. The liberal Le Monde dismissed the president’s performance as “the Nixon Festival.”
The Watergate scandal was waiting for him when he returned to Washington on April 7. On April 4, the Judiciary Committee had threatened Nixon with a subpoena unless he provided tapes it had requested in March. A St. Clair response on April 9 that he would provide materials by April 22, which would allow the committee to complete its investigation, could not dissuade it from voting 33 to 3 on April 11 to subpoena forty-two tapes.
St. Clair’s response to the Judiciary Committee, Scowcroft told Kissinger on his return from Mexico, “was received very badly on the Hill.” At the same time, Jaworski weighed in with a request to Judge Sirica for a subpoena directing the release of sixty-four more taped conversations. Sirica issued the order on April 18.
Nixon hoped to fend off the House and special prosecutor’s demands by promising to release edited transcripts of his conversations at the end of April. In the meantime, he and Kissinger made fresh efforts to use foreign affairs to keep the president in office. Henry urged Nixon to plan a Middle East trip for the end of May or the beginning of June. Nixon said it depended on whether the House “left us off the hook by that time or got us on.” Henry doubted that the House could act that quickly and that a trip following a Syrian-Israeli disengagement agreement “will be a political event in the Middle East of the first magnitude.”
In another conversation four days later, Kissinger reported on a speech he had given at the UN, in which he had quoted the president, and the grudging response of the New York Times. “It just breaks their heart to say anything positive,” Henry said. Nixon recounted a conversation with Mike Mansfield about a dinner meeting with Chinese diplomats. He described them as “very supportive and friendly about the President and about you.” Henry berated critics of “our China…Russian policy” as “idiots,” who couldn’t understand what we were doing.
The Nixon-Kissinger conversation became an exercise in self-deception. “Well, we are coming along,” Nixon declared, “and just remember if we have been able to take the heat of this last year and accomplish what we have, we sure as the dickens are going to be able to take it a little while longer.” Henry believed that “public opinion is on the verge of turning if we can just—if there was just one unambiguous event like a House vote in your favor.” Nixon doubted that he could get anything from the House, but he saw “an undercurrent of support” on foreign policy “that is just ready to break loose. What do you think?” Nixon asked. “That is my absolute conviction—that is my firm conviction,” Henry replied. “In foreign policy it never has left us,” Nixon asserted.
Conversations with Gromyko during a two-day visit to Washington on April 11 and April 12 gave the lie to their happy talk about significant future foreign policy gains with Moscow. Nixon and Kissinger agreed that recent discussions with the Soviets had produced no “easy answers where our positions had diverged.” Gromyko’s visit reinforced the impression that Soviet-American relations were at a standstill. On April 11, when Brezhnev expressed concern to Ambassador Stoessel that Watergate might hinder Nixon’s freedom to negotiate additional agreements, it deepened concerns that dealings with Moscow would not translate into a domestic political benefit. Because they could not be optimistic about new agreements on any of the largest issues, Gromyko suggested that they were like two deaf men who talked past each other. They maintained some hope for better relations by not hearing what each other said.
In the two and a half weeks after Gromyko’s visit, Nixon was almost exclusively occupied with managing the demands for additional tapes, which threatened impeachment and an end to his presidency. When Kissinger tried to get five minutes with the president on the morning of April 17, Scowcroft was uncertain that Nixon would see him. “The mood over here is not very good this morning,” Scowcroft reported. “He is not in the cheeriest mood.”
Henry had his own problems: He complained that a conference with Latin American foreign ministers made him feel as if he were “dealing with a nut house…These guys are the biggest gassers you’ve ever seen,” he said. By the afternoon, Nixon’s mood was still “not real good,” and Henry had to press Scowcroft to squeeze Egyptian Foreign Minister Fahmy into the president’s schedule for half an hour.
Two days later, Kissinger, who was struggling to focus Nixon’s attention on Middle East negotiations, told Sisco that he was trying to “get to the President who is raving around here.” Press speculation that the president and secretary were not coordinating policy provoked Henry into informing Haig that he wanted to tell a journalist “that my public position is worked out closely with you and the President and has your full approval.” Haig assured Henry that, as in the past, he would continue to say this to the press.
In fact, Nixon was too preoccupied with impeachment worries to concentrate on foreign affairs. True, on April 17, at a dinner honoring Latin American ministers, Nixon trumpeted a “new dialogue” with the republics to the South, which he described as “more than a slogan.”
At the same time, Nixon proposed to the cabinet that they provide him with a list of suggestions, “new initiatives, new ideas, new thrust of some kind that the President could do as President.” As with his rhetoric about a “new dialogue,” he was intent on some bold announcements that could distract attention from his personal crisis. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” Kissinger exclaimed, when Kenneth Rush described Nixon’s pronouncement to the cabinet. “I don’t want anything to go to the President [on international affairs] that I don’t see.”
But Nixon was too absorbed by the challenge of casting the taped conversations in the best possible light to give more than passing mention to new initiatives of any kind. Between April 17 and April 29, when the White House issued a 1,200-page “Blue Book” of transcripts titled Submission of Recorded Presidential Conversations to the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives by President Richard Nixon, he devoted himself to sanitizing a record that could confirm the worst suspicions about his involvement in a White House cover-up of campaign wrongdoing.
When he reviewed the transcripts prepared by fifteen secretaries and vetted by two attorneys, “he eliminated words, phrases, and passages. He crossed out curse words [substituting expletive deleted], insulting references to various senators…and other material,” Ambrose explained. Nixon also believed that the bulk of the material would mute damaging revelations in the transcripts about his skullduggery.
To win the public relations war against impeachment advocates, Nixon announced the release of the “Blue Book” in a nationally televised speech from the Oval Office on the evening of April 29. In the sort of appeal for national support reminiscent of his televised Checkers talk twenty-two years before, Nixon insisted that the transcripts would entirely exonerate him and definitively end the speculation about a presidential part in either the Watergate break-in or the subsequent cover-up. He acknowledged his reluctance to release the tapes; it had nothing to do with the scandal. Rather, he was protecting the tradition of presidential confidentiality.
The response to his speech was much less than he hoped. The press and fellow Republicans condemned the president’s involvement in a cover-up of White House wrongdoing. William Safire said that “the reaction after reading the poisonous fruit of his [Nixon’s] eavesdropping tree is (expletive deleted).” An academic expert on textual criticism described the transcripts as “systematically debased and corrupt.” The Judiciary Committee criticized the edited White House version of the tapes as unreliable, and on May 1, by a partisan vote of 20 to 18, declared Nixon in noncompliance with its subpoena.
Al Haig concluded that sooner or later the committee would force Nixon to release the actual tapes. “How much better it would have been,” he said, “to have seen the tapes go up in smoke the previous summer.” In 1981, shortly after President Ronald Reagan was wounded by an assassin, Nixon told Reagan press aide Lyn Nofziger, “Lyn, don’t let the president make any decisions until he’s completely well, because you don’t make good decisions when you’re sick. You know, I made the decision not to burn the [Watergate] tapes when I was recovering from pneumonia.” However, it wasn’t the only time that Nixon considered and rejected the idea; he assumed that the negative political consequences from destroying the tapes would be more harmful than preserving and controlling anything he released from them.
Two days after Nixon’s speech, Gallup asked Americans if recent developments had changed their feelings about the president. Of those surveyed, 74 percent had the same or a less favorable view. Nixon’s speech and action improved his standing with only 17 percent of the public. By 44 percent to 41 percent, Americans thought that Nixon should be impeached and tried by the Senate. Nixon’s overall approval remained at its low of 25 percent, and 73 percent of the country believed that the president either had advance knowledge of the break-in or was involved in the cover-up. The 25 percent represented the low point for any president in a second term since the advent of scientific polling.
Although Nixon continued to hope that his foreign policy leadership could rescue him from impeachment, he was so preoccupied with his domestic crisis that he once again relied on Kissinger to manage foreign affairs. In April, searching for a formula that could overcome Syrian-Israeli differences about Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights produced almost daily exchanges between Henry and the Egyptians, Saudis, Syrians, Israelis, and Russians, who continued to feel shoved aside.
On April 26, with Kissinger about to leave for discussions with Israeli and Arab officials, Nixon emphasized his eagerness for some sort of disengagement agreement that would allow him to travel to the Middle East. “If I do take a trip,” Nixon said, “I think the sooner the quicker.” Henry agreed, and Nixon suggested that anytime after May 20 would be good. Kissinger promised to make the arrangements. When Kissinger reported that he would hold a press conference after their phone conversation, Nixon told him to emphasize that they were seeking “a way to keep out of war in the M[iddle] E[ast and] to keep out of war in Vietnam,” and that it was the Nixon Doctrine in both places making it possible. “Hit that hard,” Nixon said.
Nixon’s mention of Vietnam rested on renewed anxieties that the January 1973 peace agreement was collapsing. On April 18, Le Duc Tho had written Kissinger to complain that he had not answered earlier messages in February and March about South Vietnamese and U.S. violations of the cease-fire. Henry responded four days later that he had seen no point in repeating earlier denials of Tho’s charges, especially since it was Hanoi that was responsible for treaty abuses. Henry urged Tho not to interpret his silence as any indication that he did not value their channel of communication. He hoped that their continuing exchange of views might yet advance their search for a stable peace.
As April came to a close and Kissinger set off on his trip, Thieu informed Nixon that continuing North Vietnamese acts of aggression had compelled him to suspend conversations with the Viet Cong. With neither Saigon nor the Communists genuinely interested in a settlement and the White House without the wherewithal to apply fresh pressure to Hanoi, the agreement remained in jeopardy. Should full-scale fighting resume in Vietnam, it would be a severe blow to Nixon’s assertions about his indispensability as a peacemaker. Press and public attention to the Middle East, however, coupled with a desire to put the conflict in Vietnam aside, muted interest in Southeast Asia.
Although preoccupied with whether his April 29 speech and release of tape transcripts would deter impeachment, Nixon was intensely interested in Kissinger’s new round of shuttle diplomacy. Henry’s initial report to him on April 30 describing ten and a half hours of discussions with Gromyko in Geneva were encouraging. On the Middle East, the Soviets were showing greater flexibility. “If one gives the Soviets some face-saving formula,” Henry predicted, “they will not obstruct the current effort and may even be moderately helpful.” He also reported a productive SALT discussion, and was optimistic about prospects of a successful Summit in June.
Kissinger sent more good news after his preliminary talks in Jerusalem. A meeting with Meir had encouraged hopes of an early break in negotiations with Syria. He believed that the consequences to Israel of failed talks were dictating greater flexibility. He told Meir and the Israeli cabinet that any failure would be blamed on them and would reduce the likelihood of reliable U.S. support. This was what the Israelis called “Henry’s Doomsday Speech.” Kissinger asked Nixon to send the Israelis a letter emphasizing this point.
In Syria, the next day, Kissinger urged Assad against “provocative statements…We have to avoid a situation which helps Israeli propaganda and the Jewish newspapers in the United States; we have to avoid an image that you are a Soviet stooge.” Assad blamed Syria’s poor image in America on Zionists. “That is why it is important rapidly and visibly to have an improvement in U.S./Syrian relationships,” Kissinger said. “We want to change public opinion regarding the Arabs in the United States.” Henry also complained about his reception in Israel as compared to Damascus, which he described as friendlier.
As Kissinger tried to work some magic in bringing an agreement out of the Israeli-Syrian standoff, Nixon fell into deeper despair over his future. The Judiciary Committee’s refusal to accept the transcripts as a substitute for the tapes, coupled with Jaworski’s insistence on receiving sixty-four conversations, left Nixon with the slim hope that the Supreme Court would back his claim of executive privilege and block the release of tapes that would likely force him out of office.
On May 5, Jaworski proposed a deal to Haig. If Nixon would give him eighteen conversations he considered most important in establishing the president’s guilt or innocence, Jaworski would drop his request for the additional tapes and not reveal that the grand jury had unanimously named the president as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Watergate cover-up. The jury had wanted to indict him outright, but Jaworski advised them that this would be unconstitutional. An indictment or impeachment of a president was a power reserved to the House of Representatives.
It was a stunning disclosure. Haig believed it “would shatter what was left of the President’s credibility…Jaworski’s revelation could destroy him.” But because Nixon and his lawyers saw Jaworski’s proposal as “prosecutorial blackmail,” they decided to resist his demand. Nixon initially agreed to Haig’s suggestion that he listen to the eighteen conversations before deciding what to do. But after several hours in his hideaway office hunched over a tape recorder with earphones, Nixon called in Haig and said, tell Jaworski, “No. No more tapes…We’re not going any further, not with Jaworski, not with the Judiciary Committee. We’re going to protect the presidency.” Haig “had seldom seen him so disturbed or so determined. ‘No one is to listen to these tapes,’ he said. ‘No one—understand, Al? No one. Not the lawyers. No one. Lock ’em up.’”
As Nixon understood, these eighteen tapes could doom him by demonstrating his central part in the cover-up of Watergate crimes. He believed it better to fight the demand on grounds of high principles than block news of the grand jury’s action. He instructed Ziegler to release a statement saying that Washington was swamped by false rumors, led by predictions that the president would resign. “His attitude is one of determination that he will not be driven out of office by rumor, speculation, excessive charges, or hypocrisy. He is up for the battle, he intends to fight it and he feels he has a personal and constitutional duty to do so.”
Nixon had talked himself into believing that his wrongdoing was less important than defending himself and, by implication, the presidency, from an unprecedented resignation or congressional action to remove him from office. What kept him from resigning, he told Rabbi Baruch Korff in a private meeting on May 13, was his innocence and determination not to undermine an institution essential to the country’s future well-being. He would not succumb to “the savagery” or “viciousness” of the “libelous” personal assault on him. If “these charges on the Watergate and the cover-up, et cetera, were true, nobody would have to ask me to resign,” he declared.
For Nixon, Kissinger’s Middle East negotiations now took on even greater importance. Nixon sent the threatening letter to Meir that Henry had requested and instructed him to stay in the Middle East until he worked out an Israeli-Syrian settlement. Kissinger was happy to play the go-between in the talks—not only because an agreement could reduce the chances of another war but also because it could decisively inhibit Moscow from asserting greater influence in the region.
Kissinger was also happy to be away while the Watergate battles played themselves out. Even from afar, however, Henry could not entirely escape implicit involvement. Assertions by Ehrlichman and Colson describing Kissinger as warmly disposed to the establishment of the “plumbers” to plug national security leaks led Scowcroft and Haig to advise Henry to avoid saying anything about the issue.
During thirty-three days between April 28 and May 30, while he made forty-one flights between Jerusalem, Damacus, Cairo, Riyadh, Amman, and Cyprus, where he met with Gromyko, Kissinger struggled to keep the discussions alive. “Each issue becomes the subject of intensive bargaining over every detail,” he wrote Nixon. “It’s the most nerve-racking negotiation I’ve ever been involved in,” he told Joe Kraft afterward. He complained that it was undignified for a secretary of state to be traveling “around for four weeks talking about a hill here and a hill there, while not conducting any other foreign policy.” He complained to the Israelis, “I am wandering around here like a rug merchant in order to bargain over one hundred to two hundred meters! Like a peddler in the market! I am trying to save you, and you think you are doing me a favor when you are kind enough to give me a few extra meters.” On the plane flight home, he told reporters off the record, “The Syrians and the Israelis are the only two peoples who deserve each other.”
A James Reston column in the New York Times criticizing Kissinger’s attention to the Middle East to the exclusion of other matters agitated Henry. During a shuttle flight, he asked Marvin Kalb, who was covering the negotiations for CBS television, to join him in his cabin. Kalb describes him as “unkempt, looking like a slob with one or two buttons missing from a partly open shirt.” While he nervously shoved peanuts into his mouth, he asked Kalb what he thought of Reston’s article. Kalb wanted to know how close Kissinger was to a deal. When Henry said, “close,” Kalb urged him to stay with the negotiations.
By May 21, when a breakthrough in the negotiations seemed imminent, Nixon cabled Kissinger. “Of all your superb accomplishments since we have worked together, the Syrian/Israeli breakthrough…must be considered one of the greatest diplomatic negotiations of all time…I believe we should follow up this development with a trip to the Middle East at the earliest possible time.” Nixon also assured him that despite a New York Times report to the contrary, “nowhere in the transcripts or the tapes did I ever use the terms ‘Jew boy’ or ‘Wop.’” (Kissinger knew better.) Nixon looked forward to discussing plans for a joint briefing of congressional leaders.
Judicial challenges to Nixon at the end of May made him more eager than ever to use a Middle East breakthrough for domestic political purposes. On May 20, Judge Sirica ordered him to turn over the tapes subpoenaed by Jaworski. On May 29, the Judiciary Committee issued a new subpoena, reiterating its rejection of White House transcripts as a substitute for the tapes and warned that a refusal could be grounds for impeachment. On May 31, the Supreme Court rejected a Nixon plea to delay consideration of whether the president had the right to withhold tapes from the Special Prosecutor, promising to decide the matter before its summer recess. Of the public, 48 percent now favored impeachment, with only 37 percent opposed.
On May 29, in a nationally televised statement from the White House, Nixon announced an Israeli-Syrian settlement that returned some of the Golan Heights to Damascus and provided for a wider separation of Israeli and Syrian forces. Although he praised Kissinger for his painstaking efforts, he emphasized his administration’s responsibility for this major diplomatic achievement. The task before them now was to arrange a permanent peace. An announcement of a presidential visit to the region would suggest that Nixon was about to put such an arrangement in place.
Kissinger resisted tying the Israeli-Syrian settlement to a Nixon trip. He worried that the press would cynically interpret his shuttle diplomacy as principally aimed at serving the president’s political needs. “I objected to the idea that all of this was being done to arrange a Presidential trip to the Middle East,” he told Kraft, who had made that point in a column. “That may be the result, but that was not the intention,” Henry declared. It certainly was not Kissinger’s primary motive for arranging a settlement but, as Kissinger acknowledged later, insistent White House cables urging him to continue the discussions until there was an agreement rested on an “obsession” with a presidential visit.
Nixon’s determination to use Kissinger’s achievement to counter impeachment registered clearly in a May 31 Nixon-Kissinger bipartisan congressional briefing. Henry described the arduous—“excruciating”—process required to arrange the disengagement agreements between Israel and its two principal adversaries. But these accomplishments “only open the long road toward a permanent settlement,” Nixon emphasized. The president and Kissinger also described their success as partly the result of détente. Moscow avoided sabotaging the Middle East negotiations because it would jeopardize improved relations with Washington. The message was clear enough: Nixon and Kissinger were essential to international peace; removing the president would risk undermining all the good things his administration had put in place around the world.
A newspaper story on June 6 that Nixon was an unindicted co-conspirator and an attack on Kissinger at a news conference the same day for involvement in wire tapping raised questions as to whether anything could shift attention from White House wrongdoing to foreign affairs. After reporters raised the possibility that he might face a perjury indictment, an enraged Kissinger threw a tantrum, turning red in the face, stamping his feet, and storming out of the room. Afterward, he told Nixon, “The disgusting thing is…the whole world applauds what is being done [abroad]. These SOBs [in the press corps] turn it [wiretapping] in as if I’d been engaged in a criminal activity.” Nixon assured him that “all the wiretapping we did was totally legal…Every damn one was approved by Mitchell or Hoover. Every one. Some of them turned up some very important evidence, as you well know.” Henry agreed, but neither said what that evidence was. Kissinger was not reassured. He told Ziegler, “They [the press] won’t rest now until they have made me a Watergate figure.”
Despite the press preoccupation with administration scandals, Nixon thought that his strategy of trumping Watergate with foreign policy was working. In diary notes he made on the evening of June 7, he wrote, “What will motivate the House members at the present time I think may be their concern that if they impeach, they run the risk of taking the responsibility for whatever goes wrong in foreign and domestic policy after that.” Nixon congratulated himself for hanging on despite so many discouraging developments. He took satisfaction at having been able to hide his distress from the press and the public.
In a series of speeches—a radio address on Memorial Day, a commencement speech at the Naval Academy on June 5, and a luncheon talk on June 9 to supporters describing themselves as “the National Citizens’ Committee for Fairness to the Presidency”—Nixon emphasized how fragile international stability was and how his administration had improved chances for lasting peace. But it required the “right balance” of influences for stability to be realized. Taking anything for granted now (that someone other than the team of Nixon and Kissinger could build on recent achievements) would be a great error.
On the eve of his departure for ten days in Europe and the Middle East, Nixon told himself that “the success or failure of this trip might make the decisive difference in my being able to continue to exercise presidential leadership abroad and at home despite the merciless onslaught of the Watergate attacks.” Yet he also understood that “most of the press will be more obsessed with what happens with the minuscule problems involved in Watergate than they are with the momentous stakes that are involved in what I will be doing and saying in the Mideast.”
Nixon had it right. The press, the Congress, and the public continued to see Watergate as more than “minuscule problems.” During the trip, however, it was Kissinger, not Nixon, who became the focus of new headlines about administration scandals. Press accounts during the few days between Henry’s press conference and the start of the trip on June 10 put him in a bleak mood. Newsweek called allegations about his part in arranging wiretaps of suspected leakers, “An Ugly Blot on Mister Clean.” New York Times and Washington Post editorials questioning Kissinger’s honesty rekindled his rage at being under such scrutiny.
A syndicated article by reporter Nick Thimmesch that the state department cabled Kissinger in Salzburg added to his anger. Thimmesch described Kissinger in “a slightly faded Superman suit” as “the latest victim of the Watergate fungus.” Reviewing Kissinger’s earlier denials before senators of any involvement with the Plumbers, Thimmesch dubbed the legislators, who had turned a blind eye to the secretary’s transgressions, “a world’s championship sleeping society.” Although Thimmesch saw nothing illegal in Kissinger’s trying to plug national security leaks, he joined other journalists in accusing him of lying and possible perjury.
Because a Newsweek cover pictured Kissinger in a Superman suit and he had reached “the highest point of public acclaim ever accorded to a Secretary of State,” Henry was confident that he could effectively beat back the assault on his reputation. Against the advice of Nixon, Haig, and all his closest associates, Kissinger held a press conference in Salzburg. Nixon was convinced that it would simply give the press another Watergate story that would detract from the Middle East trip. Following an opening statement exonerating himself, an angry, uncharacteristically unsmiling Kissinger protested his innocence, reminded reporters of his contributions to peace—“perhaps some lives were saved and…some mothers can rest more at ease”—and threatened to resign if the matter was not cleared up by the press.
It was a bravura performance masking the truth about his role in the administration’s wiretapping. Although he described himself, in William Safire’s words, as “a reluctant participant in a distasteful program,” he was in fact a “sycophantic and enthusiastic” supporter of the administration’s efforts to “destroy” (Kissinger’s word) leakers by providing the names of suspects to Hoover. “Kissinger, who takes the lion’s share of credit for the Nixon foreign policy successes,” Safire added, “cannot avoid at least a lamb’s share of blame for some of these illegal doings…This tolerance of eavesdropping was the first step down the Watergate road.” Kissinger “cannot escape history’s judgment of the way he watered the roots of Watergate.”
Nixon believed that Henry’s news conference was a “mistake,” especially the hyping of “his case with the threat to resign, which…is an empty cannon.” But Kissinger, in fact, had read press, public, and congressional sentiment more accurately than Nixon. The response to his threat was all he could have wished. The White House report to Kissinger about the evening news coverage of his press conference described his “many admirers and few critics on the Hill” as “stunned” by Henry’s threat. NBC television called Kissinger’s threat to resign “astounding.” The New York Times reported the “Capital [Was] Rallying Round Kissinger.”
Kissinger saw the reaction to his news conference as vindication of his decision, but it also rekindled smoldering tensions with Nixon. Kissinger believed that if Nixon had survived Watergate, he would have fired him. It seems doubtful, however, that Nixon could ever have regained enough credibility to dispense with the one person in the administration who gave it a continuing hold on public opinion.
AS THE TRIP BEGAN, Nixon had other worries. He was suffering from phlebitis in his left leg—an inflammation of a vein that was quite painful, caused him to limp, and carried the greater threat of a blood clot that could break loose and travel to the lungs, where it might cause an embolism and death. During the stop in Salzburg, Nixon consulted with his White House physician, who thought that the pronounced swelling in the leg and pain was the result of the inflammation, but that the danger of a clot and an embolism had passed. The doctor told Nixon to wrap his leg in hot towels four times a day and stay off it as much as possible.
After the doctor left, Nixon called in Haig, who found the president with “his trouser leg pulled up and his leg on an ottoman. It was blue and swollen and looked absolutely like it was just moments from amputation,” Haig recalled. Nixon told Haig that his doctors had urged him not to make the trip, but he had insisted on going. “I’m not so sure he wasn’t hoping for something more serious,” Haig believed. “And that began to worry me a great deal…because everything had gone black for him.” Thirty-one years later an interviewer asked Haig, “You say you observed a man who had lost the will to live, and may even have had a death wish. Is that putting it too strongly?” Haig replied, “That was my concern, of course…And he did mention in that discussion with me…he said in the army, Al, you have a solution to this. When you have a disgraced leader, you put a pistol in his desk drawer and he takes care of the rest. And so that really concerned me, because he never said things lightly.”
Although three days in Egypt slowed his recovery from phlebitis, the visit buoyed Nixon as nothing had since his landslide election in 1972. On the roads and streets from the Cairo airport, perhaps as many as a million people turned out in 100-degree temperature to greet the president and Sadat, who stood in an open-top limo waving to the crowds. The next day, during a three-hour train ride to Alexandria, the two presidents repeated the performance from the back of an open coach as millions of Egyptians lined the route. Although official directives urged people to come into the streets, the demonstrators reflected a genuine enthusiasm generated by the prospect of economic help from the world’s richest nation and by the regard Nixon showed for Sadat and Egypt. As Nixon said at a state dinner, “You can turn people out, but you can’t turn them on.” The long periods standing in summer heat increased the pain in Nixon’s leg but the shouts of “Nik-son, Nik-son” renewed his hope of weathering Watergate and advancing the peace process between Israel and the Arabs.
With an eye on U.S. congressional and public opinion, Nixon seized the numerous opportunities during the visit to issue ringing public declarations about the importance of the renewed relationship with Egypt. “We stand here at a time in history which could well prove to be not only a landmark but which could well be remembered centuries from now as one of those great turning points which affects mankind for the better,” Nixon said on his arrival in Cairo.
Sadat’s hyperbole was a match for Nixon’s. He declared himself convinced that a “statesman of the stature of President Nixon” was essential to meet the challenges facing them in the region. At a state dinner on June 13, Sadat spoke of his “admiration for your courage in taking the initiative in making daring and decisive decisions on all levels on the international plane.” Sadat was “confident” that Nixon’s “vast experience and your universally acknowledged reputation as a statesman” would open the way to “a just and durable peace.”
“For once on a state visit,” Kissinger said, “the statements [and subsequent toasts] reflected a reality. The leaders of both countries were determined to make peace.” When a journalist asked Sadat, “You are not suggesting bilateral discussions with Israel?” He answered, “No, not at all. Not yet.” It opened the way to the 1978 Camp David peace accords between Egypt’s Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin.
Despite Kissinger’s central part in preparing the way for Nixon’s visit to Egypt, the president kept him in the background. Sadat’s praise of Nixon for “his role as the key factor in the peace process,” coupled with the president’s coolness after the Salzburg news conference, angered Henry. “Having been spoiled as the recipient of abundant flattery and attention on previous trips,” Henry wrote later, “I found it—not to my credit—somewhat disconcerting, even painful, to be relegated to what in the context of a Presidential trip was quite properly a subsidiary role. The press…gleefully reported both the fact that I received ‘little attention’ and that I seemed ‘glum.’”
Although less evident to the press, Nixon’s understanding that a triumphal tour of Egypt would not be enough to avert impeachment curbed his elation during the visit. Kissinger recalls that Nixon’s reception in Egypt “alternatively buoyed and depressed him.” Moments of “relief and elation” repeatedly gave way to “despondency…As the trip progressed, his face took on a waxen appearance and his eyes the glazed distant look of a man parting from his true—perhaps his only—vocation; it was excruciatingly painful to watch. In Washington he had been inundated by the sordid details and desperate struggles of Watergate, yet ironically it was on his triumphant Middle East travels that the true dimension of his personal disaster was brought home to him: He was being vouchsafed a glimpse of the Promised Land that he would never be able to enter.” Golda Meir later told Kissinger: “Nixon was here but his thoughts were far away.”
Nixon’s reception in the four other Middle East countries he visited was more subdued. Aided by memos Kissinger prepared on what the president could expect in Saudi Arabia and Syria, Nixon effectively blunted the diplomatic pressure from King Faisal and Syria’s Assad to oust Israel from occupied Arab territories, including Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank of the Jordan, and to assure a homeland for the Palestinians. Without revealing exactly what he had in mind, Nixon promised a step-by-step process that could eventually bring peace to the region.
Assad was the most difficult of the Arab leaders Nixon saw on his trip. Years of America-and Nixon-bashing were not easily put aside by Assad or his people. He acknowledged that hating Americans and Nixon in particular was a way of life in his country. Nevertheless, Assad’s eagerness for a larger Syrian role in Middle Eastern affairs made Nixon a welcome guest in Damascus. Although nothing substantive was settled during the visit, the symbolic coming together was seen as a large advance. As Nixon said good-bye at the airport, Assad kissed him on both cheeks—“an extraordinarily important gesture” for someone who had been “the leading anti-American firebrand of the Arab world.”
Conversations in Israel were also more symbolic than substantive. The Israelis were passing through a political transition when Nixon arrived on June 16. Yitzhak Rabin, a former general, chief of staff, and ambassador to the United States, was replacing Golda Meir, whose government was ousted after the surprise and losses in the Yom Kippur War. Nixon described his reception as “warm,” but “the most restrained of the trip.” Although grateful for U.S. aid that had rescued them from defeat in the recent conflict, Israelis saw Nixon’s peace program as likely to serve Arab interests at Israel’s expense in territory and security. As the New York Times reported, signs on the way in from the Tel Aviv airport confronted Nixon with the sort of hostility he had fled in the United States: “You Can’t Run from Justice” and “Welcome, President Ford” two of them said with reference to Watergate; “We Are All Jew Boys,” another declared with allusion to the president’s alleged anti-Semitism.
Rabin, who headed a shaky coalition government, was in no mood to discuss larger political questions, except for U.S. intentions about future military and economic aid. Where Rabin and his colleagues were focused on obtaining long-term commitments that could help ensure Israel’s national security and prosperity, Nixon wanted to discuss future peace talks. Defense minister Shimon Peres emphasized the current limits of Israel’s capacity to defend itself: The Syrians and Egyptians had twice the number of tanks Hitler had when he attacked the Soviet Union in 1941.
Nixon expressed nothing but sympathy for Israel’s problem. But he refused to make any long-term commitments. The problem was with Congress, which was averse to anything but year-to-year commitments. This was true enough, but it was also Nixon’s way of pressuring the Israelis to agree to further peace talks. In line with Kissinger’s earlier threats, he emphasized that if the negotiations failed, it would lead to another war, in which he doubted that Israel would be able to command the extraordinary aid provided in the past year.
Nixon returned to Washington on June 19, not to a hero’s welcome but to fresh recriminations over White House scandals. A poll taken between June 21 and June 24 gave him only a 26 percent approval rating; 61 percent disapproved of his job performance. When people were asked what concerned them most, the answers were high prices and Watergate. As Gallup stated the problem, where “personal diplomacy on earlier occasions [had] boosted his standing with the American public, a similar effect is not found in the current survey.”
Nixon, Ford, and the rest of the White House aggressively tried to shift public perceptions of the president as a political manipulator hiding his role in Watergate to that of righteous peacemaker. On the afternoon of June 19, Nixon told administration faithful greeting his return on the White House south lawn that he was determined “to stay the course” in the arduous struggle for Middle Eastern and world peace. He said it would be shameful if the United States abandoned its responsibility for leading the world toward this noble goal. “Blessed is the peacemaker,” Vice President Ford said in response.
“We must have gotten some lift from the trip,” Nixon confided to a diary, “although it seems almost impossible to break through the polls.” He blamed it on the media: “Of course, this is not surprising after the terrible banging we are taking. As I pointed out to Ziegler, when he was telling me about the five or six minutes that we were getting on each network while we were away, I said, ‘Compare that with the eight or ten minutes that they have been hearing on Watergate for over a year!’” Yet Nixon was hopeful that the trip had some impact. “How great and how long lasting only time will tell.”
In a bipartisan congressional briefing on the morning of June 20, Nixon made a case for himself as the architect of foreign policies that had produced profound changes in world politics. Yet no one should think that they had arrived at the Promised Land, he cautioned. They faced tough problems that required continuing attention. It was important for congressional leaders to understand that “American leadership is essential to avoid future wars,” and that “We need the support of the Congress.” The leaders gave no indication that the president’s briefing changed any minds about full White House disclosure on Watergate.
Kissinger remained publicly supportive of Nixon, but was privately skeptical of his political survival and viewed the national well-being as principally tied to himself. After returning from the Middle East, Henry told Jacob Javits, “I couldn’t let myself be bled to death one leak at a time while I was traveling…You know what really worries me, Jack…with the President facing impeachment, what’s been holding things together is my moral authority abroad and to some extent at home. If that’s lost, we may be really in trouble.”
More than egotism was at work in Kissinger’s assessment; a June Sindlinger poll showed overwhelming public support for Henry: “Eighty-four percent of those sampled gave him a positive rating and no other politician or institution in the United States rates as high.” Fifty-four percent said he was doing an excellent job compared to 5 percent for Nixon and the Congress.
In the days immediately after they returned home, events in the Middle East undermined Nixon’s argument for himself as an effective peacemaker. PLO attacks on northern Israeli kibbutzim the day Nixon arrived in Washington provoked Israeli air raids on Palestinian camps in Lebanon. The violence refuted Nixon’s pronouncements on U.S. progress in reducing Middle East tensions. Nixon directed Kissinger to have Scowcroft tell the Israeli embassy that the president “is disturbed beyond expression that the Israelis started retaliatory raids on Lebanon the day he left there…If they expect political support from us, they cannot keep doing these things.”
Nixon asked Henry the next day, “How about our Israeli friends? Are they still bombing?” Kissinger replied that a “sharp protest” had helped convince them to stop. “That’s good,” Nixon said. “If they go too far, we’ll get one hell of a reaction here.” Nixon believed that people wanted further progress in détente and that highlighting the likely achievements of an upcoming Summit meeting in Moscow might give him some protection against unrelenting Watergate headlines.
He knew, however, that he would need more than another foreign policy triumph to save his presidency. In the six days between his return to the United States and his scheduled departure on June 25 for Western Europe and Russia, press stories about the differences between the taped conversations and the transcripts given to the House Judiciary Committee seemed likely to lead to his impeachment. Yet he refused to believe it: The quality of the evidence against him gathered by the committee, he told himself, “was weak; most of it had little or no direct bearing on my own activities.” There was even better news from Joe Waggonner, a Louisiana House Democrat, who assured the president that there were 70 anti-impeachment votes among Southern Democrats, which when coupled with 150 Republican votes, could block a Senate trial. Waggonner warned, however, that should the Supreme Court rule against the president on access to his tapes and Nixon refused to comply, his supporters would turn against him.
Nixon confided to his diary that “what happens in the Supreme Court is going to put us to a real test.” He was uncertain whether the Court would want to set “a devastating precedent” by overriding executive privilege and compelling the release of his tapes. He feared that “the poison they see in the Washington Post must really seep in. It is very difficult for people to read it every day and not be affected by it.” In Nixon’s skewed outlook, if the Court forced him into releasing tapes and the Judiciary Committee then impeached him, it would be the consequence not of evidence demonstrating wrongdoing but of press stories by reporters and editors who conspired to bring him down. It was a chilling indication of what little confidence he had in the Supreme Court’s judgment and how unprepared he was to face up to his own responsibility for the crisis that had descended on his presidency.
Denial was easier than acceptance of blame for the grief he, his family, and administration insiders were suffering over Watergate. Nor could he bring himself to accept that he had inflicted a deep wound on public confidence in executive authority. It was more than he could bear to accept responsibility for the pain he had caused people closest to him and the injury he had inflicted on the country’s political institutions.
He clung to hopes that his upcoming Moscow visit might help “break the momentum.” Kissinger encouraged him to believe that the mood in the country was shifting. “Of course, he has said this before,” Nixon told himself. Haig urged him to believe that the press was getting tired of Watergate and was ready to change the subject.
The chance that Kissinger and Haig might be right gave Nixon reason to work hard for a successful Moscow Summit. In addition, he was more single-minded than ever about serving the national well-being, which he believed was tied to détente. Events preceding the Summit, however, made clear that nothing they did in Moscow could exceed or even match earlier agreements on arms control and economic exchange.
It had less to do with the Soviets than with opposition in the United States. In late May, a Soviet delegation visiting Washington brought a message from Brezhnev saying that he remained committed to détente and that he expected good results from the third Summit meeting in June. He hoped that the upcoming talks would conclude with new arms limitations, advances toward a successful European security conference, and Middle East cooperation. During a White House meeting, Nixon echoed the optimistic rhetoric of his visitors, though he told them that Congress was being uncooperative and that “he was not a magician who could produce instant solutions.”
When Dobrynin saw the president five days later, he repeated Brezhnev’s hopes but candidly declared Soviet puzzlement at events in the United States. “Much of what is happening is not understandable to us,” he said, “but it is clear that the forces that are up in arms against the President are not friendly” to the Soviet Union. Nixon hid his own doubts and assured Dobrynin that domestic politics would not affect relations with Moscow or his planned trip.
Soviet professions of accommodation were at odds with uncompromising positions on the Middle East and arms limitations. Moscow continued to insist on a larger and more direct role in Arab-Israeli negotiations. At the beginning of June, when Kissinger learned that Sadat would be giving him the highest Egyptian decoration, he told Scowcroft, “I don’t see how we can say I can’t accept it. I tell you the Russians are going to go out of their cotton picking minds.”
Henry also worried that the Soviet defense ministry was resistant to an expanded nuclear test ban agreement and a second SALT treaty. “They are sabotaging everything right now,” Kissinger told Nixon. “Well they are trying to, but they are not going to…They have tried to before,” and failed to block arms agreements at the first Summit, Nixon responded optimistically. It said more about his need for a successful Summit than about Soviet intentions.
Moscow was also pressing the case for a security conference that could win Western recognition of post-1945 European borders. “My problem with the European Security Conference is if it had never been invented, my life wouldn’t be unfulfilled,” Kissinger told the German foreign minister in June. “Second, the substance bores me to death. I have studied none of it.”
Nixon needed the support of anti-Soviet Americans if there was to be substantive achievements in Moscow. But this was out of reach. Jim Schlesinger and Senator Henry Jackson, backed by the Joint Chiefs, opposed a SALT II agreement unless it gave distinct advantages to the United States the Soviets would never accept. When Paul Nitze, the defense department’s chief arms-control negotiator, resigned in June out of concern that Nixon would sign an arms-limitation treaty that did more to serve his domestic political purposes than America’s defense needs, it created a serious bar to successful SALT II talks. Jackson compounded the problem by charging that Nixon and Kissinger “had made a secret deal with the Soviets enabling them to exceed the limits” of SALT I.
Schlesinger and Admiral Zumwalt were unyielding opponents of a new SALT agreement that might allow the Soviets to catch up with the United States in MIRVed missiles. After Schlesinger’s opposition to SALT II had become abundantly clear to Congress and the press, Nixon tried to convince him during an Oval Office meeting to change his stance. Kissinger recalls that the president had grown so politically weak that he had to deal with his defense secretary as if he were “a sovereign equal.” Nixon told him, “We need your help…Many of my friends are horrified at our even talking to the Soviet Union. But are we going to leave the world running away with an arms race, or will we get a handle on it?”
Schlesinger rejected Nixon’s appeal. During an NSC meeting on June 20, after Nixon refused to follow his suggestion that he ask the Soviets for arms arrangements they had consistently opposed, Schlesinger, who was sitting next to him, said, “But, Mr. President, everyone knows how impressed Khrushchev was with your forensic ability in the kitchen debate. I’m sure that if you applied your skills to it you could get them to accept this proposal.” Schlesinger saw it producing a “major breakthrough.” Kissinger dismissed it as nonsense: “Forensic skill could not achieve it; the task would have defeated Demosthenes or Daniel Webster. It would require a downright miracle. Only a conviction that Nixon was finished could have produced so condescending a presentation by a cabinet officer to his President,” Kissinger concluded. Nixon considered Schlesinger’s remarks “an insult to everybody’s intelligence and particularly to mine.”
The infighting over SALT was as ugly as anything Nixon’s administration had seen in five and a half years. “The President thinks that the JCS are all ‘a bunch of shits’ and that you are ‘the biggest shit of all,’” Schlesinger told Zumwalt. Zumwalt said that he had gotten at cross-purposes with Kissinger when he refused to follow his lead on defense issues or be his “whore.” Zumwalt also complained that Kissinger “had deceived us, lied to us, and avoided consulting me” about defense questions on which they disagreed. Schlesinger characterized Nixon, Kissinger, and Haig as “paranoid” and “very sick people” who were threatened by the JCS. On June 29, when Zumwalt retired, the White House ordered Schlesinger not to appear at the Annapolis ceremony or to give him a medal. Schlesinger defied Nixon by refusing to fire Zumwalt three days before his retirement and by ignoring the White House order about his participation in the Annapolis ceremony.
Kissinger believed that the combination of opposition from Jackson, Schlesinger, Nitze, the JCS, and conservatives leery of détente ended the likelihood of a SALT II agreement before they ever arrived in Moscow.
As Nixon prepared to leave for Russia, he was determined to make the case for the value of another Summit and a SALT agreement in particular. Nixon told his cabinet on June 20, the Summit was another part of the effort to avert a future confrontation with Moscow and a possible nuclear war. Kissinger conceded that the Summit would not produce “spectacular agreements.” The same day, Kissinger echoed Nixon’s point to a bipartisan congressional group about reducing mistrust and minimizing misunderstanding. It was essential to moderate the arms race if they were to avoid instability and greater tensions.
Although many in Congress, the press, and the public remained skeptical of Nixon’s motives, at least fourteen senators, most of them liberal Democrats, were persuaded by his appeal. They sent him a letter expressing their confidence in “your objectives at the Summit meeting with General Secretary Brezhnev. Agreements reached with the Soviet Union that are genuinely in the interests of our two countries will receive sympathetic attention in the Senate.” It was hardly a ringing endorsement; 86 senators withheld overt support of Nixon’s latest journey to Moscow.
On June 25, as Nixon left for a meeting in Brussels to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of NATO, the press revealed that he was suffering from phlebitis. The president instructed Ziegler to guard against letting anyone “build it up in a way that they think the President is crippled mentally as well as physically…We must make sure that people never get the idea that the President is like Eisenhower in his last year or so, or like Roosevelt, or, for that matter, even like Johnson when everybody felt that Johnson was probably ready to crack up, and was drinking too much and so forth. I think we can avoid this by proper handling.”
REGARDLESS OF ENDURING DIFFERENCES with allies at Brussels and the Soviets in Moscow, the premium was on describing Nixon’s trip as a personal and diplomatic triumph. A variety of domestic economic problems, including oil shortages, were troubling NATO countries. They also remained concerned that détente might erode U.S. defense commitments to Western Europe. Aside from three one-on-one meetings, Nixon spent all of ninety minutes with NATO government heads, which did little to ease their concerns. Nevertheless, the White House described the NATO talks as producing “very positive results.”
A press conference Kissinger held in Brussels before departing for Moscow with the president put the best possible face on the upcoming talks. “How inhibited will the President be in negotiating because of his domestic weakness?” one reporter asked. Kissinger denied that impeachment threats would affect Nixon’s capacity to deal with the Soviets; nor would the president take account of anything but the national interest. He acknowledged that the Summit was unlikely to produce a new agreement on arms limits, but nevertheless he expected some progress on SALT II. The alternative was a continuing arms race, which, after ten years, would lead to no strategic advantage for either side.”
The meetings in Russia between June 27 and July 3 were a disappointment, as Nixon freely acknowledged in his memoirs. Although they agreed to reduce the number of ABM sites from two to one in each country and to sign a Threshold Test Ban Treaty, eliminating underground nuclear tests of over 150 kilotons, they could not agree on a comprehensive test ban or a SALT II treaty that reined in the arms race and particularly nuclear arsenals.
The reasons for the deadlock were transparent to both sides. A Soviet refusal to allow on-site inspections of otherwise undetectable small underground tests put a comprehensive ban out of reach. The conviction that their respective arms control proposals would give the other side an advantage that their defense establishments would vigorously oppose eliminated any hope of an immediate SALT II agreement.
“Both sides have to convince their military establishments of the benefits of [arms control] restraint, and that is not a thought that comes naturally to military people on either side,” Kissinger said candidly at a press conference as the Summit concluded. He also predicted that the failure to get the arms competition under control would produce a pointless buildup without “strategic superiority” for either side. Besides, he emotionally declared, “What in the name of God is strategic superiority? What is the significance of it, politically, militarily, operationally, at these levels of numbers?” His remarks, as he put it “were a cri de coeur.” They echoed warnings that more nukes could only make the rubble bounce.
Despite disappointing results at the Summit, Brezhnev and Nixon had too much invested in détente to acknowledge that they had reached a dead end in their dealings with each other. A communiqué at the end of the meetings declared that “the talks were held in a most businesslike and constructive atmosphere and were marked by a mutual desire of both sides to continue [to] strengthen understanding, confidence and peaceful cooperation between them.” To encourage hope that they would make additional progress in the future, the communiqué ended with the announcement that Brezhnev had gladly accepted an invitation to visit the United States again in 1975.
Judging from Nixon’s diary notes, he and Brezhnev had developed a genuine regard for one another. Private pronouncements on saving the world from a nuclear war punctuated their conversations. Walks “through the lush greenery surrounding Brezhnev’s hillside villa” in the Crimea and a ride in his yacht on the Black Sea graphically displayed their camaraderie: While they sat talking together in the back of the boat, Brezhnev “put his arm around me and said, ‘We must do something of vast historical importance. We want every Russian and every American to be friends that talk to each other as you and I are talking to each other here on this boat.’”
Nixon spoke glowingly about the Summit in a report to Congress. “As the result of our most recent round of talks…I believe our relations will continue to improve.” The ABM and Threshold Test Ban agreements represented “considerable progress.” Most important, though they weren’t there yet, they were intent on signing a second treaty on strategicarms limitations that would begin in 1975 and last for ten years. The report was more an exercise in domestic politics than a realistic assessment of new advances in détente.
A nationally televised speech from Loring Air Force base in Maine, where Nixon landed on his return from Moscow, carried the same hopeful message. The conference had advanced the cause of world peace. The twenty-five-thousand miles he had traveled during the last month were aimed at building a stable structure of peace. The cornerstone of the effort was détente—“irreversible” improvements in Soviet-American relations. The talks in Moscow were notable for preparations to achieve an arms-limitation agreement that would last a decade. When coupled with the new ABM and Threshold Test Ban treaties, the latest Summit represented a significant advance toward controlling the arms race.
Despite all the upbeat talk, Nixon could not deny that the latest Summit was something of a flop. In his memoirs, he said that Watergate was less to blame than “American domestic political fluctuations, most of which had preceded Watergate, that cast the greatest doubt on my reliability: the failure to produce M[ost] F[avored] N[ation trade] status and the agitation over Soviet Jews and emigration had made it difficult for Brezhnev to defend détente to his own conservatives. Similarly, the military establishments of both countries were bridling against the sudden reality of major and meaningful arms limitation and the real prospect of arms reduction if and as détente progressed. These problems would have existed regardless of Watergate.”
Kissinger was less certain. He thought that the Soviets doubted Nixon’s ability to push treaty commitments through the Senate. They viewed Nixon as unlikely to defeat the political assault on him and remain in office.
Nixon was probably closer to the truth than Kissinger about impediments at the Summit. True, Watergate was evident in Moscow: Nixon seemed preoccupied throughout the meetings. The president was so distracted by his Watergate troubles, one participant said, that he “‘often didn’t know what he was talking about.’…One of Nixon’s closest aides told me,” an American journalist recorded later, “the President spent much of his time in Moscow in 1974 listening to White House tapes.”
Yet Nixon’s Watergate troubles were less at fault in limiting Summit gains than fundamental divisions between Moscow and Washington. Long-standing distrust or irremediable tensions in relations between two diametrically opposed systems stymied mutual accommodations. In the Middle East, as with arms-control negotiations, each jousted for advantages that could assure their national security. What eventually resolved Soviet-American differences was not rational discourse about mutual national needs on armaments and other issues but the collapse of the U.S.S.R.’s Communist rule and an end to the Cold War.
AS NiXON RETURNED from Russia, he dreaded the “depressing atmosphere” of Washington. His decision to speak at an air force base in Maine before a friendly audience rather than one composed partly of hostile reporters at Andrews in Maryland reflected his anxiety about ongoing impeachment proceedings. He had a “sinking feeling in the bottom of his stomach,” and saw “sleepless” nights ahead. He told Ziegler and Haig on the plane that the accusations against him had left “deep scars…[on] the public mind and will not go away. Our only course of action,” he told himself, “is to keep fighting right through to the last.” In diary notes, he urged himself to hold “together through this next very difficult two-month period.” He believed that if he could get “by the impeachment vote, we will then have a couple of years to do as many good things for the country as we possibly can.”
Nixon had no doubt that the Judiciary Committee would vote out articles of impeachment. During the ten days after he returned from Russia, he faced an avalanche of bad news—committee releases about damaging omissions from tapes’ transcripts; the Ervin investigation’s final report asserting that in 1972 Nixon had destroyed “the integrity of the process by which the President of the United States is nominated and elected”; a perjury conviction of Ehrlichman; and headlines that Nixon and Kissinger were “headed toward a falling-out” over the president’s refusal to renew support of Henry against charges of wiretapping. Although Kissinger angrily dismissed the rumors in private as “bullshit” and Nixon described Henry’s involvement as limited to carrying out his orders, the stories further weakened public regard for the president.
Nixon took refuge in San Clemente, where Ford, along with several economic advisers, met with him on July 13 to discuss inflation, which was running at almost 15 percent and had become the public’s primary concern, three times greater than government wrongdoing. “I had a growing sense of his frustration, his resentment and his lack of a calm, deliberate approach to the problems of government,” Ford said. “He complained bitterly how he was being mistreated by Congress and the press.”
While Nixon was brooding in San Clemente, a crisis erupted between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus. Although Nixon was nominally involved in day-to-day efforts to stave off a war, Kissinger largely set and implemented U.S. policy. But the crisis gave Nixon renewed hope that the House would not move against him. It “brought home the fact,” he noted in his diary, “that with the world in the situation it is, with the peace as fragile as it is in various parts of the world, a shake-up in the American presidency and a change would have a traumatic effect abroad and…at home.”
As Nixon’s diary shows, he was understandably obsessed with Judiciary Committee proceedings that were scheduled to culminate on July 24 in public hearings on impeachment. Nixon described this as his “Seventh Crisis in spades. Because the next month will be as hard a month as we will ever go through.” As he told a gathering of friends in Los Angeles on July 21, “the Office of the Presidency must never be weakened, because a strong America and a strong American President is something which is absolutely indispensable if we are to build that peaceful world that we all want.” Nixon hoped that the presidency and public eagerness not to undermine the institution might give him a bye for wrongdoing, allowing him to remain in power.
Kissinger was also agitated about the state of public affairs. “I’m beginning to get to the view that I cannot live any longer in this town,” he told a journalist friend. “Every time you move some @#*! is putting out some story.” His friend urged him “not to worry about this crap…People like to criticize about foreign policy but they’re not really making any passes at you.” Henry was not appeased. “All the animals are out of the cages,” he said. “And here we’ve got a war cooking and the goddamnest leaking is going on—inaccurate. You go to meetings…and you don’t worry anymore about the country, you worry how what you say will read when you see it in the Times or Post.”
Not the least of Kissinger’s concerns was ongoing recriminations over Vietnam. Replying to messages dating back two months to May and June, Kissinger told Le Duc Tho that negotiations in the Middle East and Moscow had delayed his response. He complained that Tho was simply repeating to him in private what he was saying publicly; it was destroying the utility of their back-channel communications. Henry reiterated earlier warnings that continuing attacks and infiltration were jeopardizing their Paris agreement. He also took issue with an article by the American journalist Tad Szulc saying that “the Vietnam problem will…not go away.” Say what he might, it was a reality over which Kissinger had no control.
Nixon was too preoccupied with possible impeachment to pay attention to Kissinger’s ongoing worries about Vietnam. On the morning of July 23, as the Judiciary Committee was about to launch its public hearings the next day, Lawrence Hogan, a conservative Maryland Republican on the committee, announced his intention to vote for impeachment. He said that the evidence demonstrated a pattern of lying about Watergate and a direct part in the cover-up. Only Nixon’s removal from office could lift the cloud of “mistrust and suspicion” that had descended over government and politics.
Although Nixon now expected to be impeached, he was not quite ready to give up. He called Alabama Governor George Wallace that afternoon to see if he would lobby an Alabama congressman, but Wallace said no. When he hung up the phone, Nixon turned to Haig, who had been urging him to call Wallace, and said, “Well, Al, there goes the presidency.”
Nixon felt that he had reached the “lowest point in the presidency, and Supreme Court still to come.” He didn’t have long to wait. On the morning of July 24, Haig woke him at 8:30 A.M. in California to report that the Court had come down unanimously for the release of sixty-four tapes. “There’s no air in it at all,” Haig said. “None at all?” Nixon asked. “Tight as a drum,” Haig answered. After some discussion with advisers, Nixon concluded that he had no choice but to fully comply with the Court’s decision.
It meant revealing a June 23, 1972, conversation with Haldeman, in which Nixon instructed that the CIA inhibit the FBI’s investigation of the break-in. As Nixon understood, anyone hearing that discussion would conclude that political rather than national security concerns, as he had publicly asserted, motivated his decision. The tape was what his counsel Fred Buzhardt described to Haig and St. Clair as the “smoking gun” that would cost the president his office. That tape, Nixon said, was “like slow-fused dynamite waiting to explode.”
At 10:30 on the morning of June 26, a half hour before the president was scheduled to meet the German foreign minister in his western White House office, Kissinger gave Nixon a three-page summary of talking points. Kissinger “was shocked by the ravages just a week had wrought on Nixon’s appearance. His coloring was pallid. Though he seemed composed, it clearly took every ounce of his energy to conduct a serious conversation. He sat on the sofa in his office looking over the Pacific, his gaze and thought focused on some distant prospect eclipsing the issues we were bringing before him. He permitted himself no comment about his plight. He spoke rationally, mechanically, almost wistfully. What he said was intelligent enough and yet it was put forth as if it no longer mattered: an utterance rather than an argument.”
That afternoon, a shaken Kissinger called Senator Stennis of the Armed Services Committee and urged him to help squash talk about Kissinger-Schlesinger tensions. “With our President being under attack,” he told Stennis, “we cannot have foreign governments see the two senior officials who have to handle crises in disagreement…The country must now be preserved. I’m very worried about what’s going on.” A half hour later, Henry spoke directly to Schlesinger. “Whatever our personal feelings may be, within this present crisis you and I cannot leave the impression to foreign countries that we are at each other’s throats.” Besides, Henry added, if we battle, “it is like fighting for the captaincy of the Titanic.”
Kissinger now also discussed the crisis with Haig. By doing so, he broke “an unspoken rule” that they avoid talking about Nixon’s resignation, which would be a way of showing doubt and implicitly undermining the president. But Kissinger believed that because “the end of Nixon’s presidency was now inevitable, it was in the national interest that it occur as rapidly as possible.” Their goal was to find the best means of assuring “a smooth transition.” Haig agreed. But he shared Henry’s feeling that it was not up to presidential appointees to push in that direction; “we had a duty to sustain him in his ordeal,” Kissinger asserts. Elected officials would have to urge Nixon to resign. The Kissinger-Haig refusal to discuss resignation between themselves or with Nixon was either an exercise in sensible statecraft or a rationalization for giving the president uncritical support as a way to help protect their hold on power.
On July 27, when the Judiciary Committee voted by a lopsided 27 to 11 to impeach Nixon for obstructing the Watergate investigation, Kissinger tried to comfort the president. In a conversation with him, Henry was “very mournful” and tried to ease Nixon’s pain by saying that his wife, Nancy, thought “that history in four years would look back on the President as a hero.” Haig predicted that history would show him “to have been an outstanding president.”
That day, Nixon was focused less on history’s judgment than on what his post-presidential life might be like. He worried about his family’s financial future and how to manage it. Although he believed that once his associates heard the June 23 tape they would urge him to quit and that the nation would be ill-served by a six-month trial, he still hesitated to resign, arguing to himself that “this would be a very bad thing for the country.”
On July 29 and 30, the Judiciary Committee issued two additional articles of impeachment for illegal use of executive agencies—the IRS and FBI—and for defying committee subpoenas. With a full House debate on impeachment not to begin until August 19, Nixon still had time to consider his options. On the afternoon of July 30 Kissinger told him in a telephone conversation: “You can count on me.” Nixon responded, “The whole point is it has to go to the Senate and we just have to beat it.” Kissinger said, “It is an awful experience.” But Nixon assured him, “We are not going to wring our hands about it.” Nevertheless, Henry considered it “a terrible thing to watch and heartbreaking. You don’t have to worry about anything from me,” Kissinger reiterated. Nixon said, “I know that.”
Unable to sleep on the night of July 30, Nixon penned a note to himself at 3:50 A.M. The brave front he had put up was crumbling: He could resign immediately; wait to see if the House impeached him and then resign; or fight an impeachment in the Senate. His impulse was to end his career as he had begun, “as a fighter.” But on July 31, after Haig and Ziegler listened to the June 23 tape, they described his situation as hopeless. The next day, Nixon told Haig that he had decided to resign.
In reaching his decision, Nixon not only thought through his family’s financial future but also prospects for criminal proceedings against him. He never asked Ford for assurance that if he resigned, Ford would preempt legal action against him by issuing a pardon. But he did have Haig speak to Ford about a president’s pardoning powers, telling Ford that a president could preempt charges of criminal action with a pardon.
Nixon believed that he didn’t need to get a Ford commitment; he was confident that Ford would pardon him for any Watergate wrongdoing before any court action was taken against him. Nixon thought that Ford, an entirely decent man with the good of the country at heart, would understand that he could not govern effectively if criminal indictments were being mounted against an ex-president. As Ford later explained his pardon of Nixon, “No other issue could compete with the drama of a former president trying to stay out of jail…America needed recovery, not revenge.”
On August 1, it became a question of when, not if, Nixon would announce his resignation. On August 3, however, during a weekend at Camp David, when his family urged him to keep fighting, he backed away from the decision. He decided to release the June 23 tape before making a final judgment. “If it was as bad as I expected, then we could resume the countdown toward resignation.” He hoped that if “by some miracle the reaction was not so bad,” he could then consider continuing to fight. With the tape scheduled for release on Monday, August 5, Nixon told his family, “It’s fight or flight by Monday night.”
On August 3, he tried to focus on an Israeli arms request. Haig was uncertain that the president had the emotional resources to make the decision. But during a brief conversation with Kissinger, Nixon instructed him to announce that the president had decided what to give the Israelis. “The President has approved this thing,” Henry told Scowcroft later in the afternoon. “Although I’m not quite sure he knew what he was approving.”
On Sunday, August 4, Nixon again concluded that he had to resign. When he asked his staff to accompany release of the June 23 tape with an explanation that on July 6, 1972, the president had directed the FBI to go forward with its Watergate investigation, the staff rebelled. They wanted to emphasize that their defense of the president had partly rested on ignorance of the contents of the June 23 tape. In response, Nixon gave up the fight: “The hell with it,” he told Haig. “It really doesn’t matter. Let them put out anything they want. My decision has already been made.”
On the afternoon of August 5, no one could tell from a statement Nixon released about the June 23 tape that he intended to resign. Although acknowledging that he had committed a serious act of omission in not informing his attorneys about the content of the tape, he excused it by saying that he “did not realize the extent of the implications which these conversations might now appear to have.” He also conceded that the “June 23 conversations are at variance with certain of my previous statements.” Nevertheless, he urged everyone to look at all the evidence. He was “firmly convinced that the record, in its entirety, does not justify the extreme step of impeachment and removal of a President.”
Nixon’s statement about the June 23 tape incensed Barry Goldwater. “It was the same old Nixon,” Goldwater said, “confessing ambiguously, in enigmatic language, still refusing to accept accountability. It was, above all, an insincere statement, as duplicitous as the man himself.” The fact that twenty-one of the president’s associates were under indictment, with fourteen already convicted, and the Republican party facing likely congressional and White House defeats in 1974 and 1976 respectively, underscored for Goldwater Nixon’s ruthless indifference to everyone’s suffering but his own.
Despite Nixon’s explanation and self-defense, the June 23 tape touched off a firestorm of speculation that he would now have to resign or face not only impeachment but also conviction by the Senate and removal from office for high crimes and misdemeanors. The reaction to the “smoking gun” left Nixon without support. The eleven members of the Judiciary Committee who had voted against the articles of impeachment now said that they would vote with the majority on Article I charging Nixon with participation in a cover-up.
When Kissinger spoke to Scotty Reston that morning, Reston, who was scheduled to leave for Europe, said, “It’s a good time to get out of town.” Henry shared his feeling. He told Reston off the record that when he ran into Len Garment at the White House earlier, Garment joked that if Henry could send him on a diplomatic mission, he would be his friend for life. “There are probably a lot of other takers, too,” Reston laughingly declared.
On August 6, Nixon acted as if he were still determined to fight impeachment. At a morning cabinet meeting he held to business as usual, beginning with a discussion of inflation, “the most important subject before our nation.” When he turned to his crisis, he acknowledged the pressure on him to resign but invoked the familiar argument against damaging the presidency. Kissinger believed that he was asking “a vote of confidence from his cabinet.”
After “an embarrassed silence” amid a shuffling of papers and “much fidgeting,” Ford asked for the floor. He explained that if he had known what he had learned in the last twenty-four hours, he would never have made some of the statements he had issued as minority leader and vice president. He would no longer speak publicly about Watergate. He was sure the House would vote for impeachment but couldn’t predict what the Senate would do. Ford promised to continue supporting the administration’s foreign policy and fight against inflation. When Nixon responded by focusing only on the inflation problem, endorsing a Ford suggestion for a Summit of American business and labor, Attorney General Saxbe bluntly objected to a Summit, saying, “We ought to be sure you have the ability to govern.” Speaking as chairman of the Republican National Committee, George Bush described the plight of the party and declared the need for a prompt end to the Watergate crisis, implying that Nixon needed to resign.
Kissinger spoke up to urge against focusing on Nixon’s Watergate troubles. “We are not here to offer excuses for what we cannot do. We are here to do the nation’s business…Our duty is to show confidence…For the sake of foreign policy we must act with assurance and total unity.” Although he later represented his comments as a way to preserve the president’s dignity, they may be read as a defense of Nixon against proponents of a quick resignation. True, Kissinger was genuinely concerned about national solidarity in dealing with overseas adversaries, but he was also defending Nixon against pressure to quit.
Later that day, a Kissinger friend, who was a New York attorney, asked, “How was the President today?” Henry replied: “He was all right.” She wanted to know if Nixon was “rational.” Henry would only say, “It’s pretty rough.” When she predicted that Nixon “will be convicted and will go to jail,” Henry said, “It’s unbelievable.” He added: “Some awful mistakes were made by the President but he doesn’t deserve this.”
Kissinger was painfully ambivalent about Nixon’s predicament. On one hand, he saw the ongoing crisis as an impediment to the national security and well-being which could be ended with Nixon’s ouster, and on the other, he was genuinely loyal to Nixon for opening the way to his national and international eminence. He savored his position as the administration’s principal foreign policy maker and could not be sure how he would fare in a Ford presidency. Would he stay on if Nixon left? his friend asked. He intended to “give it six months and see where we stand,” he replied.
A private conversation Kissinger had with Nixon after the cabinet meeting illustrated Henry’s divided feelings. Nixon remembered thanking Henry for “his support,” “loyal friendship,” and handling of foreign policy, implicitly stating his appreciation that Henry was the only cabinet officer to speak up for him at the meeting. Nixon then recalled telling Henry of his intention to resign. Kissinger thought it was the best thing to do. It would shield him from the horrors of a Senate trial and would preserve the country from a foreign policy crisis.
By contrast, Kissinger recalled initiating the discussion of a resignation, which he promised not to repeat outside the Oval Office. Nixon responded coolly: “He said he appreciated what I said. He would take it seriously. He would be in touch.” Nixon’s noncommittal response masked his anger at being in the humiliating position of having to discuss his resignation with a subordinate who had displaced him as the administration’s most influential figure. Nixon’s anger registered clearly enough on the evening of August 6, when he called Henry to say that he was rejecting Israel’s request for long-term military aid and intended to cut off all help unless they agreed to a comprehensive peace. Although nothing would ever come of Nixon’s intemperate instruction, Kissinger wondered, “Was it retaliation for our conversation of a few hours ago—on Nixon’s assumption that my faith made me unusually sensitive to pressures on Israel?”
On the afternoon of August 6, Nixon still resisted resigning. Goldwater, who was having lunch with other Republican senators and Ford, received a call from Haig in the Oval Office. Hearing a second click on the phone, Goldwater assumed Nixon was listening in. “Haig asked how many votes the President had in the Senate. I told him no more than a dozen. I added that it was all over. Nixon was finished.” To remove any doubt about his personal view, Goldwater said, “Dick Nixon has lied to me for the very last time.”
Nixon now accepted that he could not survive a Senate trial. He instructed Haig and Ziegler to prepare a resignation speech for delivery from the Oval Office on Thursday evening, August 8. Ever the loyalist, Haig said, “It would be an exit as worthy as my opponents were unworthy.” Nixon, at last, privately blamed himself: “Well, I screwed it up good, real good, didn’t I?” The question suggested that he still wanted reassurance that his enemies, not him, were at fault. But in his memoirs, he said, “It was not really a question.”
A Nixon meeting on the afternoon of August 7 with Goldwater, Senate Republican Minority Leader Hugh Scott, and House Minority Leader John Rhodes to review congressional sentiment was an exercise in the obvious. But Nixon continued to resist unpleasant realities. Earlier in the day, Haig had told Goldwater that Nixon was still in flux. He urged Goldwater not to argue for resignation when he saw the president. Nixon, he said, was “a man dancing on the point of a pin.” He “could be set off in any one of several directions…The best thing to do would be to show him there was no way out except to quit or lose a long, bitter battle that would be good for no one.” As the three Republicans arrived at the White House, the Nixon press office released a statement saying that the president “had no intention of resigning.”
As during the Mideast trip, Haig was again worried about the president’s emotional stability. “One day he was going to resign and the next day he was going to fight it out and go to prison,” Haig told a TV documentary producer in 2005. During “a final period leading up to his resignation,” Haig added, “I told the White House doctors to be very careful of the pills available.” To be clear about Haig’s statement, the interviewer responded: “You were so concerned that you were talking to the doctors about just making sure no harm comes to the President. This was a very real danger in your mind.” Haig replied: “I thought so…Everything that he had ever dreamed of in his lifetime, every aspiration he ever held, was to be President of these United States…It was everything. It was his whole embodiment.”
At the meeting, Nixon impressed Goldwater as intent on trying “to beat the rap until it was absolutely clear that the situation was hopeless.” Goldwater told him that he had at most ten Senate votes, but only four were firm. The other six, including himself, were undecided. Nixon’s discomfort was palpable: “His voice dripped with sarcasm. His jaw automatically jutted out as his eyes narrowed…I could see that Nixon’s blood pressure was rising.” Although Nixon remained uncommitted, the three Republicans left the White House convinced that he would resign.
At two minutes before six, shortly after the congressional leaders had departed, Haig called Kissinger, who was in a meeting at the state department, to come immediately to the White House. Kissinger found Nixon in the Oval Office staring out at the Rose Garden. Although he “seemed very composed, almost at ease,” Henry sensed his “torment” and “solitary pain.” Nixon told him that he had decided to resign and expected Henry to stay on to ensure continuity in foreign policy. His effort in reporting his decision “seemed to drain him,” and Henry feared that he would lose his composure. Kissinger tried to comfort him by saying that “history will treat you more kindly than your contemporaries have.” In an uncharacteristic gesture, Henry remembered putting his arm around the president’s shoulder. He felt toward him “a great tenderness—for the tremendous struggle he had fought within his complex personality, for his anguish, his vulnerability, and for his great aspirations defeated in the end by weaknesses of character.”
Kissinger’s response echoed the ancient Greek observation that fate is character. “It was like one of those Greek things where a man is told his fate,” Henry told Hugh Sidey, “and fulfills it anyway, knowing exactly what is going to happen to him.”
At 9 P.M., while Kissinger was having dinner at home with his wife, children, who were visiting from Boston, and Joe Alsop, Nixon called, asking Henry to come to the White House living quarters for a talk. When Henry arrived at the Lincoln Sitting Room, the president’s earlier composure had dissolved, and, as Kissinger described it later, he was “almost a basket case.” The president wanted Kissinger to review with him the foreign policy triumphs of their administration, which Henry did with great emphasis on Nixon’s courageous leadership. Henry reiterated assurances about history’s favorable judgment on Nixon’s foreign policy initiatives. But ever convinced that political bias trumped historical reality or that anyone could be objective about a president’s actions, Nixon predicted that it would depend on who wrote the histories.
After some unhappy reflections from Nixon on the possibility that he would face criminal prosecutions, Kissinger promised to resign “if they harass you.” Henry became so emotional at the thought of Nixon in the dock or perhaps himself forced to leave office to rescue the president and the country from a public nightmare, he began to cry. Nixon broke down as well and between sobs insisted that Henry not resign.
After an hour and a half of this emotional roller coaster, Henry started to leave. But on their way to the elevator that would liberate Henry from Nixon’s embarrassing display of self-pity, the president asked him to kneel with him in prayer. As they prayed, Nixon began sobbing again amid cries of anguish at the misery his enemies had inflicted on him.
Shortly after returning to the state department, where a shaken Kissinger described the encounter to Eagleburger and Scowcroft, Nixon called on Henry’s private line. He begged him not to recount their meeting to anyone. Kissinger promised that “if he ever spoke of the evening, he would do it with respect.” Henry honored his promise up to a point. The events of this encounter with Nixon became public knowledge through him, but, unlike his other conversations, he allowed Scowcroft to destroy the recording and transcript of the President’s late-night call.
August 8 was the worst day in Nixon’s twenty-eight-year political career, exceeding the misery he had suffered after the 1960 and 1962 defeats. On those occasions, he could still imagine resuming the fight for political preferment, but not now. His resignation meant not only a decisive end to his reach for validation through politics but also his humiliation as a failed president—the only chief executive in the country’s history to be forced into resignation by the threat of impeachment and conviction.
The pain was almost too much for him to bear. Having stayed up the previous night working on a resignation speech, he was exhausted. When he spoke with Ford about the succession, he urged him to keep Kissinger as secretary of state. He was the “only man who would be absolutely indispensable to him…. His wisdom, his tenacity, and his experience in foreign affairs” were essential to keeping foreign policy from falling into disarray. Yet he also warned Ford against letting Henry “have a totally free hand.” Nixon said to someone else: “Ford has just got to realize there are times when Henry has to be kicked in the nuts. Because sometimes Henry starts to think he’s president. But at other times you have to pet Henry and treat him like a child.” It echoed Nixon’s complaints to Scowcroft about Kissinger’s efforts to act as president. (By one year into his presidency, Ford thought Kissinger “had the thinnest skin of any public figure I ever knew.” Henry could not accept that he ever made a mistake. “Press criticism drove him crazy,” and Ford “would literally hold his hand” to keep him from resigning. But Henry had no intention of leaving and stayed to the end of Ford’s term, despite a Ford decision to replace him with Scowcroft as national security adviser.) As the Nixon-Ford meeting ended, their eyes filled with tears.
During a half-hour meeting in the cabinet room with forty-six friends and colleagues shortly before he went to the Oval Office for his 9 P.M. speech, “the emotional level in the room was almost unbearable.” One witness to the meeting recorded that the president “was under great emotional stress” and spoke “in a rambling fashion…Several times he stopped and was so choked up and there were just those moments of absolute silence.”
Nixon recalled that when he spoke of “the great moments we had shared together,” many in the room began to cry. When he heard Congressman Les Arends of Illinois, “one of my closest and dearest friends, sobbing with grief, I could no longer control my own emotions, and I broke into tears.” Haig was worried that the president would crack up during his broadcast, but Nixon, who took special satisfaction in surmounting any personal crisis, assured him that he’d be all right.
He was, at least, to give his speech. He spoke to an audience of perhaps 150 million people. He announced that he was resigning as of noon the next day. He had been eager to complete his term: quitting was “abhorrent to every instinct in my body.” But he felt he was acting in the best interests of the country. He regretted “any injuries that may have been done in the course of events that led to this decision.” He acknowledged that some of his judgments were wrong, but “they were made in what I believed at the time to be the best interest of the nation.”
So why then was he resigning? There was no mention of any personal wrongdoing on his part, no indication that he had engaged in impeachable actions that made him vulnerable to removal from office. His decision, he said, rested on his understanding that he no longer had “a strong enough political base in the Congress…Because of the Watergate matter, I might not have the support of the Congress that I would consider necessary to back the very difficult decisions and to carry out the duties of this office in the way the interests of the nation will require.” The bulk of the speech was more an act of self-justification than contrition.
It was also at odds with earlier explanations of why he wouldn’t resign. He had warned against turning the presidency into a prime minister’s post such as in Britain, where a vote of no-confidence drives the chief executive from office. But that’s exactly what Nixon did by saying that he had lost his political base in Congress. If this were the real reason for his resignation, he could have left office several months earlier and spared the country additional Watergate stress and the loss of presidential influence over foreign affairs.
It was vintage Nixon: a use of language to evoke sympathy and admiration for himself and his family, all of whom were suffering and sacrificing for the good of the country. Never mind the self-evident truths: that his corruption had turned the courts, the Congress, and the nation against him and that a majority of Americans eager to preserve the rule of law supported his removal from office.
At his swearing-in, Gerald Ford famously assured the nation that “Our long national nightmare is over.” But it was not just the nation that was relieved to see Nixon leave; Kissinger also felt as if he were throwing off a burden. The day before Ford became president, Kissinger discussed foreign policy with him. Henry recalled that “for the first time in years after a Presidential meeting I was free of tension. It was impossible to talk to Nixon without wondering afterward what other game he might be engaged in at the moment. Of one thing you could be sure: No single conversation with Nixon ever encapsulated the totality of his purposes. It was exciting but also draining, even slightly menacing. With Ford, one knew that there were no hidden designs, no morbid suspicions, no complexes.”
One final moment of unpleasantness was played out on the morning of August 9, as Nixon prepared to leave the White House and fly to California. He gave a “rambling” final statement to his cabinet and staff, crammed into the East Room. It was part reflection on past triumphs and defeats, part self-pity, part reassurance to supporters and himself that he would continue to battle for his beliefs in “the arena.” It was also notable for the absence of anything about Pat, who had consistently supported him and silently endured his ordeal.
Kissinger remembered the talk as “too much. It was as if having kept himself in check all these years he had to put on display all the demons and dreams that had driven him to this point…It was horrifying and heartbreaking…I was at the same time moved to tears and outraged at being put through the wringer once again, so that even in his last public act Nixon managed to project his ambivalence onto those around him.”
It was a painful end to a tumultuous five and a half years, marked by mood swings in the White House and the country that would make the Nixon presidency one of the most memorable in American history.