In his Study of History, Arnold Toynbee describes what he calls the phenomenon of withdrawal and return as a “disengagement and temporary withdrawal of the creative personality from his social milieu and his subsequent return to the same milieu transfigured in a newer capacity with new powers.” His list of historical figures who illustrate this phenomenon is fascinating in its diversity. It includes among others Thucydides, Mohammed, Confucius, Peter the Great, Garibaldi, and Lenin. If he were writing today, he no doubt would have included Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle. In lesser ways, what I would describe as the wilderness syndrome is experienced by anyone who suffers a major defeat in life.
In 1932, most of his contemporaries dismissed Churchill, who was 57 years old, as a picturesque failure after he was forced to resign his post as chancellor of the exchequer in the Conservative government of Stanley Baldwin. Some, like Lord Beaverbrook, who later became one of Churchill’s staunchest allies, dismissed him as a common scold because his Cassandra-like warnings about the rise of Hitler were so at odds with the conventional wisdom that downplayed the danger of war and with the intense desire of most of his countrymen to have peace whatever the price. While Churchill had been in the wilderness before, after the military disaster at the Dardanelles during World War I, there now seemed to be no chance that he might return to power. Like Lincoln, he suffered what he called Black Dog—weeks of depression in which his mental capacities were totally immobilized. He wrote, “Here I am discarded, cast away, marooned, rejected, and disliked.” But he had a mission. He wrote books, he delivered speeches, and he made sense. After eight years of wandering in the wilderness—at the age of sixty-five, when most men were contemplating retirement—he was called back into office to lead Britain in its darkest hour. His brilliant leadership in World War II prompted Isaiah Berlin to acclaim him “a mythical hero who belongs to legend as much as to reality, the largest human being of our time.”
In 1946, Charles de Gaulle, after playing an indispensable role in restoring France to its rightful place in the family of free nations, became totally disillusioned by the French government system which provided for a strong Parliament and a weak President. He became convinced that he should resign from government and “withdraw from events before they withdrew from me.” He called a meeting of his Cabinet, announced his decision to resign his office as President, and strode abruptly out of the room and into retirement. He had a sense of destiny and did not want to be the President of France simply for the sake of being President. He wanted to be President only when he thought he was the only man who could give France the leadership the nation needed. He was convinced that the time would come when he would be called back to lead, but on his own terms. In spite of his efforts to hasten that time, the call did not come. For thirteen years, he was in the wilderness, living on his farm in Colombey. At times he was profoundly discouraged by what he saw as the hopeless indecision and drift of the weak parliamentary government. But he never abandoned the conviction that only he was the one who could provide the strong leadership France needed to return to greatness.
In 1958, the government faced anarchy because of its inability to deal with the crisis in Algeria. De Gaulle again was the indispensable man. He returned to power on his own terms and gave France his greatest legacy—a new constitution providing for a strong Presidency which produced the stability France was to continue to enjoy even after de Gaulle again resigned in 1969.
I was aware of these examples of the withdrawal-return syndrome after I returned to San Clemente in 1974. I also had my own experience to learn from. In 1960, I had suffered a shattering defeat in the Presidential campaign. It was no comfort that it was the closest election in history and that a shift of a total of 11,085 votes in Illinois, Missouri, Delaware, and Hawaii out of 69 million cast nationwide would have changed the results. Of the thousands of letters I received after that defeat, one particularly made an indelible impression on me. Bob Reynolds, the All-American football player who headed the campaign’s sports committee, passed on some advice he had received from one of his professors after Stanford’s crushing loss to Alabama in the Rose Bowl. “Defeats are poison to some men,” he wrote. “Great men have become mediocre because of inability to accept a defeat. Many men have become great because they were able to rise above defeat. If you should achieve any kind of success and develop superior qualities as a man, the chances are it will be because of the manner in which you meet the defeats that will come to you as they come to all men.”
Two years later, I suffered another defeat that was even more shattering because the election was for a lesser office, governor of California. After the results came in, I had told the press off. And not surprisingly, the press proceeded to tell me off. ABC even dug up Alger Hiss to proclaim my political obituary. Not even my closest friends thought I had a political future. I agreed. I thought I was finished as a practicing politician. I decided to make a complete break with the past, both physically and politically. I moved my base from California to New York, which was the base of my major opponent, Nelson Rockefeller. In effect, I was withdrawing from politics, in my view permanently.
The move provided some significant benefits. My new law practice provided financial security. While Washington is the political capital of the United States, New York is the financial capital. I therefore had an opportunity to expand significantly my understanding of the world of finance and business. Practicing law in New York meant competing in the fastest legal track in the world. On two occasions I was to argue a major case in the Supreme Court of the United States.
Great as these benefits were, the most important advantage was that with my political commitments behind me, I had more time to reflect, to read, to recharge my mental and emotional batteries. It provided an opportunity to travel extensively abroad, particularly to Europe and to Asia, including several trips to Vietnam, which enabled me to keep up to date on the increasingly dangerous situation developing there. I wrote magazine and newspaper articles and made major speeches before high-powered non-partisan audiences on foreign policy.
As the 1964 election approached, some of my friends privately urged me to become a candidate again. But I believed that this was not going to be a Republican year, and I knew it was not my year. However, I spent two months campaigning all over the country for the ticket and particularly for candidates for the House, the Senate, and state governorships who were desperately concerned that they would become casualties in the Johnson landslide. Most of them lost. But I gained. An iron rule exists in politics: A winning candidate believes that he won it on his own; a losing candidate will always feel a debt of gratitude for anyone who tries to help him when he is almost certain to lose.
In 1966, I was the major campaigner for the Republican ticket and by a stroke of good luck predicted almost exactly the spectacular Republican gains of forty-seven congressmen, three senators, and eight governors. For the first time the heavyweights in the national media began to speculate seriously that I might have a chance to win the nomination in 1968. But there was a down side. The winners for whom I had campaigned were now my strongest competitors in the event I decided to seek the nomination.
It was then that I made what proved to be the best political decision of my career. One of my interrogators on a national talk show pressed me about when I would start campaigning for 1968. I answered that I was going to take a moratorium from politics for six months and would make no decision about the future until the end of that period. My friends were dismayed. My opponents were delighted. Most of the political experts were just mystified. They did not understand why I would give other candidates a chance to get a head start. My decision was a calculated one. While they were spending their time campaigning to be President, I would be devoting my time to learning more how I could best serve as President if I were elected.
Over the next six months I traveled to most of the major countries of Europe and Asia. I visited Vietnam again. I went to the Mideast. I visited the Soviet Union. I went to a number of countries in Latin America and in Africa. At the end of the six months, I felt better prepared to run for President in 1968 than I had been in 1960, after having served eight years as Vice President.
The moratorium was a risk, but it paid off. It should be noted that I would not have taken this risk had I not lost in 1960 and 1962 and therefore had to spend six years in the wilderness. This time also provided me an opportunity to reassess my views about the People’s Republic of China. In 1967, I wrote an article for Foreign Affairs, “Asia After Vietnam,” in which sophisticated observers were able to see that I was raising the curtain for the China initiative that became the centerpiece of my administration’s foreign policy.
I learned a great deal in those years in the wilderness between 1963 and 1968. Three lessons stood out:
Defeat is never fatal unless you give up.
When you go through defeat, you are able to put your weaknesses in perspective and to develop an immune system to deal with them in the future.
You never know how strong you are when things go smoothly. You tap strength you didn’t know you had when you have to cope with adversity.
My six years in the wilderness in the 1960s helped me survive the crisis I confronted in 1974. But residing in the deepest valley is far different from passing through the wilderness. Historical precedents existed for what I went through in the 1960s. Others lost major elections, yet came back to win later. But there was no precedent for what faced me in the 1970s. No one had ever been so high and fallen so low. No one before had ever resigned the Presidency.
Moreover, I had nothing to come back to. Even if I had wanted to, I could not run for President again because the Twenty-Second Amendment, for which I had voted as a freshman congressman, barred anyone from being elected President more than twice. Occasionally, some would suggest that I should run for senator or governor or accept a major ambassadorship. But no one who has held the greatest office in the free world can resign himself to squabbling over water projects or patronage appointments or to writing diplomatic cables to some State Department desk officer.
I was down but not out. My enemies wanted to make sure I did not rise again in view of my past record of comebacks. They tried to discredit everything I had done, to blame me for my administration’s failures and to credit others for its successes. All the newspaper articles invariably referred to me as the “disgraced former President.” I was hated by some, ignored by others. It became unfashionable for even my friends to say anything positive about the Nixon era. While in the wilderness, de Gaulle once sardonically remarked, “Insults would have been more tolerable than indifference.” I didn’t have that problem—I was never short on insults, and many of my friends maintained a discreet distance.
I could not, however, let myself become preoccupied with such matters. My immediate priority was to recover my health. I needed to do this to have the energy to engage again in creative activities. To my great surprise, golf became my lifesaver. I had played golf only two or three times a year during my five and a half years in the White House. There just wasn’t time during the Vietnam War days to spend afternoons at the golf course. I was fortunate to have Colonel Jack Brennan as my administrative assistant in San Clemente. He had been my top military aide during my last two years in the White House. He was an excellent golfer, but even more important in the light of my physical condition, he was a patient and understanding partner.
Four months after the operation, I was strong enough to swing a club again. We soon began to play golf virtually every day. It was tortuous for me and must have been even more so for him. I had attained a 12 handicap in 1958, before giving up the game for my first run for the Presidency. Out of practice and physically weak, I shot 125 the first time we played after leaving the hospital. I almost quit on the spot. But the challenge intrigued me. When after several months I broke 100 and then 90, I kept the score cards. Combined with occasional swims in the cold water of the Pacific and a few laps in a heated pool, the golf routine did the trick. Within a year, I was shooting a few pars on the golf course and was back to par physically.
There was only one down side to my renewed interest in golf. We often played at the splendid Marine golf course at Camp Pendleton. In May 1975, as we were driving to the course, I looked out the car window and saw the camp housing thousands of Vietnamese who had been evacuated to the United States after the fall of Saigon. Every time we drove by their camp, I was saddened by the thought that had I survived in office, they might not have suffered this tragic fate.
• • •
I also had to recover my financial health. All of my assets were invested in real estate. My Presidential and congressional pensions took care of ordinary expenses. But I had to find a way to pay my attorneys’ fees. In addition, the government allowance for office expenses was inadequate to cover the staff I needed to answer my huge volume of mail. I needed extra income. I ruled out one potentially lucrative source, honoraria for speeches. It was not the right time for me to begin to speak out. But even more important, I had had a policy of not accepting honoraria for speeches ever since I had been elected Vice President in 1952. What concerned me most was that I knew that most of the organizations that offered honoraria were really interested not in what I had to say but only in procuring a speaker who would draw a crowd solely because he once held a high government office. Also, given the fact that Presidents Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, and Johnson all refused honoraria, I did not want to be the first former President to start the practice. I therefore decided to find some other source of income.
My physical recovery, while important, was not enough. A healthy vegetable is still a vegetable. As I recovered physically, I was able to tackle the more important but more difficult challenge of spiritual recovery. I could not have accomplished it without help. To recover physically involves regaining the ability to get up in the morning; to recover spiritually requires restoring the will and desire to do so.
No one can recover spiritually from a major loss without the help of others. Politics is not a team sport. While a political figure depends on others in many ways, he ultimately rises and falls as a result of his own decisions and actions. A personal defeat therefore is an isolating experience. In an unsuccessful campaign, staff members share in the loss, but only the candidate suffers a personal defeat. Spiritual recovery is hastened by overcoming the sense of isolation, by recognizing the fact that your family, friends, and supporters still stand with you, and by putting the defeat in perspective.
My first line of support was my family. No man has ever had a stronger family than I have had. They were by my side during my illness and during my stay in the hospital. In the weeks, months, and years of slow recovery, a day never passed without their offering an encouraging word of support. Never once did they moan about the disastrous impact of my shattering defeat on their lives. In many ways, it was worse for them than for me. They had to suffer in silence. They could not fight back. When they read or saw the latest negative column, news story, TV program, book, or movie, their instinct was to refute the distortions and falsehoods. But circumstances dictated stoic resignation in response to my detractors.
I also relied on support from my friends. When you win in politics, you hear from everyone. When you lose, you hear from your friends. After Watergate, it was a miracle that I had as many as I did. Some came to see me, some called me on the telephone, others wrote encouraging letters. As good friends, they did not dwell on the tragedy of the past. Thankfully, they did not express sympathy, for the only thing worse than self-pity is to be the object of pity from others. They talked only about the good times we had shared in the past and the even better times we could hope to share in the future. And finally, the mail—the letters from tens of thousands of people from all over the country and the world, most of whom I had never met—played an indispensable role in bucking up my spirits during a difficult time. I was, of course, unable to read and answer them all. But it was heartwarming to know that while there was no longer a silent majority, at least the minority which was left was not silent.
With the wounds of body and spirit healed, I was now prepared to deal with my greatest challenge—mental recovery. This was the decisive factor in my decision to write my memoirs. When I finished Six Crises after losing in 1960, I observed that writing the book was my seventh crisis, and I vowed that I would never write another one. But my memoirs served several purposes. It provided part of the income that I needed for my legal and other extraordinary expenses. It was an enormous mental challenge requiring the full use of all my creative abilities. Writing a book is the most intensive exercise anyone can give to his brain. Most important, it provided the therapy that was needed for a full spiritual recovery by enabling me to put Watergate behind me.
Reliving those days in cold print was not easy. But once I had done so, I tried to close the book on that episode. In the three years I spent writing my memoirs, I addressed every facet of the crisis my excellent editorial staff, Frank Gannon, Ken Khachigian, and Diane Sawyer, could uncover. I learned a number of things I had not known at the time as the events of Watergate unfolded. I was able to put all the events of that time in perspective—to learn not only what happened but why it happened, and to provide some guidance so that others could avoid a repetition of those problems.
As I wrote my memoirs, I was able to look back at Watergate and separate myth from fact. At the core of the scandal was the fact that individuals associated with my reelection campaign were caught breaking into and installing telephone wiretaps at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel. After their arrest, others in my campaign and in my administration attempted to cover up this connection in order to minimize the political damage. I failed to take matters firmly into my own hands and discover the facts and to fire any and all people involved or implicated in the break-in. I was also accused of taking part in the cover-up by trying to obstruct the FBI’s criminal investigation.
Alone, that would probably not have been enough to bring down my administration. But the term “Watergate” has come to include a wide range of other charges that my adversaries used to try to paint my administration as, in their words, “the most corrupt in American history.” Together, these accusations represented the myths of Watergate, the smoke screen of false charges that ultimately undercut my administration’s ability to govern effectively.
The most blatantly false myth was that I ordered the break-in at the Democratic headquarters. Millions of dollars were spent by the executive branch, the Congress, and the office of the special prosecutor to investigate Watergate. Not one piece of evidence was discovered indicating that I ordered the break-in, knew about the plans for the wiretapping, or received any information from it.
The most politically damaging myth was that I personally ordered the payment of money to Howard Hunt and the other original Watergate defendants to keep them silent. I did discuss this possibility during a meeting with John Dean and Bob Haldeman on March 21, 1973. In the tape recording of this meeting, it is clear that I considered paying the money. I should not have even considered this option, but the key facts were that I rejected offering clemency to the defendants as “wrong” and at the end of the conversation ruled out any White House payment of money to the defendants. Moreover, those who made this accusation ignored the even more crucial fact that no payments were made as a result of that conversation.
The most serious myth—and the one that ultimately forced me to resign—was that, on my specific orders, the CIA obstructed the FBI from pursuing its criminal investigation of the Watergate break-in. I discussed this possible course of action with Bob Haldeman in the famous “smoking gun” tape of June 23, 1972. At that time, I thought that in view of the fact that some former CIA operatives had participated in the Watergate break-in, the CIA would be concerned that their exposure would, in turn, reveal other legitimate operations and operatives, and that the agency would therefore welcome a chance to avoid that outcome. I thought that would also serve our political interests because it would prevent the FBI from going into areas that would be politically embarrassing to us. In my conversation with Haldeman, I made the inexcusable error of following the recommendation from some members of my staff—some of whom, I later learned, had a personal stake in covering up the facts—and requesting that the CIA intervene. But that mistake was mitigated by two facts. First, because of the good judgment of the Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, and his deputy, Vernon Walters, they ignored the White House request and refused to intervene with the FBI, despite the pressure from members of my staff. Second, when FBI Director Pat Gray complained to me in a telephone call three weeks later on July 12 about attempts to suppress his investigation, I told him emphatically to go forward with it, and I instructed Haldeman and John Ehrlichman to make sure the campaign and the administration cooperated with the investigation “all the way down the line.” No obstruction of justice took place as a result of the June 23 conversation.
The most preposterous myth was that I or members of the White House staff erased eighteen and one-half minutes of incriminating conversation from one of the White House tapes. My adversaries went to great lengths to try to make this accusation stick. They ignored the perfectly plausible explanation that, given the design of the tape recorder used by my secretary, Rose Mary Woods, it was possible to erase a tape accidentally. They overlooked the fact that Haldeman’s complete notes of the meeting, which were turned over to the courts, contained nothing out of the ordinary. Moreover, it begs credulity to believe that I or my staff would erase this one segment of tape and yet leave untouched dozens of hours of other frank and earthy conversations that I clearly would have preferred not to see made public.
The most one-sided myth was that I used government agencies illegally by asking Secretary of the Treasury George Shultz to order Internal Revenue Service audits of a political adversary, Larry O’Brien. I have no regrets for that action. In the 1960s, when the Democrats controlled the White House, I was routinely subject to politically instigated IRS audits. Moreover, the IRS bureaucracy—long dominated by Democratic appointees and civil servants—was engaged in wide-ranging field audits of many of my close personal and political friends, including Billy Graham. I was simply trying to level the playing field, and everything I did was totally legal. In any case, I see nothing wrong with getting wealthy people to pay their taxes.
The most hypocritical myth was that the Nixon administration “sold” ambassadorships to major political contributors. It has been a standard, and continuing, practice to appoint a handful of principal contributors to choice embassies. Given the financial requirements of the social circuit in Paris and London, only a wealthy person could afford to serve as ambassador. That is one of the reasons why FDR appointed Joseph Kennedy ambassador to Britain. In the Nixon administration, some qualified contributors received such appointments, though others did not. In fact, while campaign laws in 1972 placed no restrictions on the size of individual donations, we consciously limited, or even refused, money from wealthy supporters whom we wanted to appoint as ambassadors simply to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Walter Annenberg, who made no campaign contribution, was chosen for London, and no one who donated over a million dollars was ever appointed to any ambassadorship.
The most personally disturbing myth was that I deliberately lied throughout the Watergate period in my press conferences and in my speeches. While I did some stupid things during the Watergate period, I was not that stupid. Given the multiple investigations of the scandal, both by the government and the media, I knew the facts ultimately would come out. It would therefore have been suicidal to lie. The problem was that as the events were unfolding I was never able to get the whole truth. I would hear one set of facts from one staff member and another set of facts from others, partly because many knew only bits and pieces of the whole and partly because many were simply looking after themselves. I made no statements that I did not think were true at the time I made them. As far as the June 23 conversation was concerned, it was an error of recollection, not a deliberate falsehood. I recalled telling Gray on July 12 to go ahead with his investigation. In fact, it is in the diary notes I dictated right after the telephone call. My fatal mistake was that I simply did not recall the details of the earlier conversation on June 23.
The most widely believed myth was that I ordered massive illegal wiretapping and surveillance of political opponents, members of the House and Senate, and news media reporters. Among the more bizarre accusations that appeared in newspapers and on the networks were that the White House:
• put Senators Muskie, Percy, Proxmire. and Javits under surveillance;
• wiretapped the telephones of Democratic Presidential candidates;
• conspired with the Justice Department to wiretap Senator McGovern’s telephones to gather information for my reelection campaign;
• wiretapped the telephones of friends of Mary Jo Kopechne, who had drowned in Senator Ted Kennedy’s car after he drove it off a bridge at Chappaquiddick, Martha’s Vineyard;
• placed electronic listening devices in the offices of Senators Mansfield and Fulbright;
• obtained copies of Senator Eagleton’s medical records before they appeared in the press;
• orchestrated undercover political activities conducted by so-called FBI suicide squads against opponents of the administration;
• operated a secret police force to conduct illegal wiretaps and burglaries against left-wing radicals.
All of these charges were false, and no evidence was presented to substantiate them. None was ever retracted by those who made them.
My administration did have a carefully limited and totally legal policy of conducting wiretapping for reasons of national security. I do not at all regret having that policy. We were at war in Vietnam. We were conducting a broad array of sensitive secret initiatives with the Soviet Union and China and were involved in secret negotiations to achieve peace with honor in Indochina. At the same time, we were subject to a series of catastrophic leaks of top-secret information to the press, which led, in one case, to the publication of our fallback position in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviet Union. We were concerned that leaks might abort our secret China initiative and our Vietnam peace negotiations. I believed then, and continue to believe now, that some wiretapping was necessary, proper, and justifiable to discover the source of the leaks and thereby prevent further damage to our national security initiatives. Moreover these wiretaps, which were conducted without a court order, were not illegal at the time I ordered them. Only after a Supreme Court ruling in June 1972 did such wiretaps require warrants. My administration discontinued this policy after the decision.
I was particularly outraged by the double standard my adversaries used in accusing me of conducting a massive wiretapping campaign. In fact, it was during the tenure of Attorney General Robert Kennedy that the greatest number of wiretaps without warrants were ordered. In addition, those taps were not restricted to cases involving leaks of national security information. In one case, the Kennedy administration placed a wiretap on the telephone of a newspaper reporter who was writing a book on Marilyn Monroe. In another case, it wiretapped the telephones and bugged the rooms of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet, during the Watergate period, my administration’s justifiable legal national security wiretaps were treated as unprecedented transgressions of the law.
A related accusation was that I ordered members of the White House staff to arrange the break-in to the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in September 1971. In fact, I did not know anything about the plan or approve it. I received no information from the break-in. No evidence has ever been presented to the contrary. Moreover, on the White House tapes, I clearly expressed shock and condemned the break-in when my aides finally informed me about it in March 1973.
The most ridiculous myth was that I was the first President to tape some of my conversations. In fact, FDR was the first to do so. Scores of tapes are kept in the Eisenhower Library. Several thousand hours of tapes are stored in the Johnson Library, none of which will even be examined until the year 2022—fifty years after his death. Of the several hundred hours of tapes in the Kennedy Library, only 12 percent have so far been made public. The rest, according to the Kennedy Library officials, will be kept secret indefinitely.
The most unfair myth—and the one that most angered me—was that I profited from my service as President. After the 1968 election, I voluntarily declined to accept $176,000 owed me as severance pay from my law firm. It would have been perfectly proper to take such payment, as other lawyers who joined the administration did, because this was compensation for services rendered before we joined the government. But because a President has jurisdiction over the whole range of government activities, I wanted to be absolutely sure that no question would be raised on a possible conflict of interest, no matter how remote. For the same reason, I owned no stocks or bonds while I served as President. My entire net worth was in real estate and government certificates of deposit. Today, I am the only living former President who has never taken honoraria for speeches. I am also the only one who has voluntarily given up my Secret Service protection, an action I took in 1985 that has already saved the taxpayers over $12 million.
The most damaging charge in this respect was that the government spent $17 million on my homes in San Clemente and Key Biscayne for my benefit. In fact, all of those expenditures were for security and for staff. When a President maintains a private residence outside Washington—which has been a standard practice throughout this century—the Secret Service, understandably, must build facilities for their agents and install surveillance and other equipment to secure the premises. The government must also install the facilities for secure communications with Washington. I neither requested nor supervised any of these alterations to my homes. All of the facilities were removed upon my resignation. As it turned out, the work done on my home in San Clemente actually reduced its value because grounds that had been torn up to install secure telephone cables could not be restored to their former pristine condition. In addition, I was accused in the media of using $1 million in campaign funds to buy my San Clemente home, of maintaining $1 million in corporate campaign contributions siphoned off into a secret investment portfolio, and of stashing away piles of cash in Swiss bank accounts. All of these charges were false, and no evidence was presented to substantiate them. None was retracted by those who made it.
The most vicious myth was that I tried to cheat on my income taxes. After I returned to San Clemente in 1974, I looked into my tax situation personally for the first time. I was shocked. I found that I had paid over $300,000 more in taxes than the law required. When the controversy over my taxes arose while I was in office, I said I would abide by the findings of the joint congressional committee looking into the matter. Given the fact that the committee was dominated by Democrats, my naive belief in its willingness to be fair and objective turned out to be expensive indeed.
The critical issue involved a gift of some of my Vice-Presidential papers to the National Archives. Lyndon Johnson had urged me to donate those papers and to take the tax deduction, just as he, Hubert Humphrey, and other Democratic officeholders had done previously. On March 27, 1969, my papers—600,000 documents appraised at $576,000—were delivered to the archives. Congress later passed and I signed a law that would disallow deductions for such gifts after July 25, 1969. After the law became effective, a member of my staff signed a deed of gift for the papers and predated his signature before the law was to take effect. In 1974, the congressional committee ruled against the deduction. After I resigned, Dean Butler, an expert California tax attorney, urged me to reopen the case. The key point, he vigorously argued, was that the deed was irrelevant because I had delivered the papers four months before the deadline and therefore the gift had been consummated for tax purposes. I told Butler that I could not reopen the issue, given my promise to the committee. Ironically, while the joint committee held that I had not made a legal gift, the archives held that I had done so and refused to return the papers. I therefore lost both the deduction and the papers.
Where the joint congressional committee left off, the IRS picked up in auditing my past tax returns. In one case, I had deducted the cost of six hundred fifty corsages I had personally bought for the wives and mothers of the returning Vietnam POWs when we gave a state dinner for them in May 1973. My tax accountant, properly, deducted this expense as a cost incurred as part of my official conduct. But the IRS disallowed the deduction on the ridiculous grounds that the government could have paid for the corsages. Ironically, if it had done so, it would have cost the government twice as much as the deduction would have. Some of the nitpicking was ludicrous. When I heard that some of my critics were demanding that I should pay for taking my dog on the airplane with me when I went to San Clemente or Key Biscayne, I recalled an incident that occurred when I visited President Johnson after the 1968 election at his home in Texas. As he escorted me to the helicopter that brought me to his ranch, his dog raced ahead, went up the steps, and got into the helicopter. Johnson carried him out and then jokingly scolded me, “Look here, you’ve got my job, you’ve got my house, you’ve got my helicopter, and now you are going to take my dog!” When Roosevelt’s dog Fala supposedly rode on a destroyer, it was a good laugh. When Johnson’s dog rode on a plane, it was what everyone—the dog included—expected. When Nixon’s dog rode on a plane, it was a crime for not reporting the airfare as income, even though the animal did not take up a seat.
What, then, was Watergate? When the break-in first hit the news, my press secretary, Ron Ziegler, aptly called it a third-rate burglary. To compare Watergate with Teapot Dome, the Truman five-percenter scandals, and the Grant whiskey scandals misses the point totally. No one in the Nixon administration profited from Watergate. No one ripped off the government, as was the case in previous scandals. Wrongdoing took place, but not for personal gain. All administrations have sought to protect themselves from the political fallout of scandals. I detailed my mistakes in this respect at length in my memoirs, a third of which dwelled on Watergate. In retrospect, I would say that Watergate was one part wrongdoing, one part blundering, and one part political vendetta.
The Watergate break-in and cover-up greatly damaged the American political process. While not unusual in political campaigns, these actions were clearly illegal. Over the years, I had been the victim of political dirty tricks and other kinds of vicious tactics in the cut-and-thrust of political warfare. What happened in Watergate—the facts, not the myths—was wrong. In retrospect, while I was not involved in the decision to conduct the break-in, I should have set a higher standard for the conduct of the people who participated in my campaign and administration. I should have established a moral tone that would have made such actions unthinkable. I did not. I played by the rules of politics as I found them. Not taking a higher road than my predecessors and my adversaries was my central mistake. For that reason, I long ago accepted overall responsibility for the Watergate affair. What’s more, I have paid, and am still paying, the price for it.
Apart from its illegality, Watergate was a tragedy of errors. Whoever ordered the break-in evidently knew little about politics. If the purpose was to gather political intelligence, the Democratic National Committee was a pathetic target. Strategy and tactics are set by the candidate and his staff, not the party bureaucracy. Moreover, in view of the 30 percent lead I had in the polls, it made no sense to take such a risk because the likely Democratic nominee, Senator George McGovern, stood virtually no chance of winning. I also contributed to the errors. As a student of history, I should have known that leaders who do big things well must be on guard against stumbling on the little things. To paraphrase Talleyrand, Watergate was worse than a crime—it was a blunder.
When I was first informed about the break-in, I did not give it sufficient attention, partly because I was preoccupied with my China and Soviet initiatives and with my efforts to end the war in Vietnam and partly because I feared that some of my close political colleagues might be somehow involved. Some have said that my major mistake was to protect my subordinates. They may be partly right. I believe that in any organization loyalty must run down, as well as up. I knew those who were involved acted not out of desire for personal gain but out of their deep belief in our cause. That knowledge may have contributed to my hesitation in tackling the question. In retrospect, it is clear that I should have focused on the issue immediately, dug out the truth on a top-priority basis, fired everyone involved, and taken the political heat.
But what we remember as the Watergate period was also a concerted political vendetta by my opponents. Anyone who knows the workings of hardball politics knows that the smoke screen of false accusations—the myths of Watergate—were not at all accidental. In this respect, Watergate was not a morality play—a battle between good guys in white and bad guys in black—but rather a political struggle. The baseless and highly sensationalistic charges, the blatant double standards, the party-line votes in congressional investigating committees, and the unwillingness of my adversaries and the media to look into parallel wrongdoing within Democratic campaigns, all should tip off even the casual observer that the opposition was pursuing not only justice but also political advantage.
Only in 1982 was it revealed how a small group of liberal Democrats tried to exploit this advantage during Watergate. For a brief period in 1973, after Vice President Agnew resigned in a personal scandal unrelated to Watergate and before Gerald Ford was confirmed by the Senate, Democrat Carl Albert, then Speaker of the House, stood next in line to the Presidency. Ted Sorensen, a former speechwriter for President Kennedy and a highly partisan critic of my policies, asked Albert for permission to write a secret “comprehensive contingency plan” so that the Democrats could take over the White House swiftly if I were to leave office. Albert agreed. The plan even included suggestions for the tone of the new President’s inaugural address and an agenda for his first week in office. Albert is a fine American who would not have been involved in anything improper. But the prospect of winning through Watergate what they had failed to win at the polls was evidently too much for some Democrats to resist. Albert himself quoted Bella Abzug, then a left-wing congresswoman from New York, as saying to him, “Get off your goddamned ass, and we can take this Presidency.” So it was without irony that in my memoirs I referred to the final struggle over Watergate as my final political campaign.
When a balanced historical appraisal emerges, the partisan political dimension of the investigation and prosecution will stand out as a prominent feature of the period. Honorable men like Maury Stans suffered far more than they would have had even-handed justice been at play. The smoke screen of false accusations magnified tenfold the public’s perception and outrage over the wrongdoing that actually occurred. In writing my memoirs, I came to accept Watergate and the resignation simply as one major defeat in a career that involved both victories and losses, both peaks and valleys.
What I found most frustrating—and most outrageous—about this vendetta was the brutal harassment of my friends. Bebe Rebozo was mercilessly investigated for eighteen months by the General Accounting Office, the Senate Watergate Committee, the IRS, and the special prosecutor. Among the charges that were leaked out of these investigations and publicized by major newspapers and television network commentators were that he had illegally laundered millions of dollars of gambling money in his bank in Key Biscayne; that he managed a million-dollar fund from unreported political contributions that might have been diverted to my personal use; and that he had converted part of a $100,000 contribution from Howard Hughes for his own use, despite the fact that the money was returned intact to the donor just as he had received it. Over $2 million of government money was spent on investigating him. In January 1975, the special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, finally issued a statement that there was no evidence against Rebozo on any of the charges that had been made. But Jaworski’s statement was not carried at all by The New York Times or by any of the three networks, all of whom had given broad coverage to the false charges.
After I completed my memoirs, the only time I addressed Watergate at any length was in the televised interviews conducted by David Frost. I agreed to make the broadcasts not by choice but by necessity. I faced a major financial crunch because of attorneys’ fees. The entire amount I received from the broadcasts of $540,000 went to my lawyers. The weeks of preparing for and the twenty-six hours of taping the broadcasts proved to be the major ordeal of my stay in San Clemente. Writing my memoirs required me to engage in detached analysis and intense concentration. The Frost interviews required me to gird for intellectual combat. I did not expect the telecasts to be positive or even balanced, and I was not surprised when they turned out to be highly negative. It was a commercial enterprise, and these do not pay off by producing enlightening discussion but by producing clashes between personalities. I vividly recall my first meeting with the British media magnate, Sir James Goldsmith, who visited me while I was taping one of the programs. He was a strong supporter and was shocked by what he considered to be the vicious anti-Nixon bias of Frost’s top researchers, James Reston, Jr., and Bob Zelnick, now Pentagon correspondent for ABC News. I knew he was right, and the choice of topics, the slant in the questions, and the editing of the final broadcasts reflected the bias. At the time, however, I had no choice in such matters.
• • •
Those first four years in San Clemente were profoundly difficult and painful. I succeeded in recovering physically, spiritually, and mentally from the cataclysmic defeat I suffered in 1974. As I look back over those years in the wilderness, I would say that I was sustained by always bearing in mind three principles:
• Put the past behind you. Analyze and understand the reasons for your defeat, but do not become obsessed with what was lost. Think instead about what is left to do.
• Do not let your critics get to you. Remember that they win only if they divert you into fighting them rather than driving toward your goals.
• Devote your time to a goal larger than yourself. Avoid the temptation of living simply for pleasure or striving only to leave a larger estate.
While few people will experience a loss as devastating as resigning the Presidency, these principles remain valid for the great defeats we all suffer, whether in business, in sports, or in personal life. The key is to live for something more important than your life. As Einstein said, “Only a life lived for others is worth living.”
On my sixty-fifth birthday, January 9, 1978, I made a major decision. I had completed my memoirs, and fortunately the book turned out to be a bestseller. I was in excellent condition physically and thought that I was now in a condition to tackle other projects. I had to decide what to do with the rest of my life. In a sense, this was a life-or-death decision. If a person quits after a defeat, he dies spiritually and will soon die physically.
While I profoundly believe this to be true, I had a difficult problem: What goal could I now set for myself? I could not seek office again. In any case, seeking office by itself is not a worthwhile goal. What separates the men from the boys in politics is that the boys seek office to be somebody and the men seek office to do something. Yet, so much still remained to be done in achieving the goals that led me to run for office in the first place. I reread a passage of a letter from Whittaker Chambers to me after my defeat in 1960: “I do not believe for a moment that because you have been cruelly checked in the employment of what is best in you, what is most yourself, that the check is final. It cannot be.” He went on to say that he recognized that the executive office had passed to the other party for a long time to come. Even so, he wrote, “That changes your routing and precise destination. It does not change the nature of your journey. You have years in which to serve. Service is your life. You must serve.”
After my resignation, my routing again changed, but my destination remained the same. Throughout my political life, I had dedicated myself to furthering the causes of peace, freedom, opportunity, and justice, not only for the people of the United States but also for all the people in the world. These causes are lofty and certainly unattainable by the efforts of any individual or even any single nation. I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to work for those causes while holding the greatest office in the free world and was therefore capable of achieving more than I would have otherwise. But meaning in life does not derive from the station in life you attain, and the depth of personal satisfaction you feel does not depend on the height to which you rise. Fulfillment comes from dedication and service to a worthy cause, whether as a foot soldier or as the commander-in-chief.
In 1978, I rededicated myself to the causes that had always inspired my actions. As I analyzed the world scene, I was profoundly troubled by the geopolitical momentum behind Moscow’s expansionism and by the paralysis of political will in the Western world. I therefore chose to devote myself to advocating a more energetic and assertive American role in leading the free world, a stronger and more skillful strategy for the continuing East-West conflict, and a more far-sighted geopolitical approach to managing global affairs in a world with new emerging power centers in Europe and East Asia.
I began writing my first book on foreign policy, The Real War, published in the spring of 1980. I knew that only a limited number of people read books or listen to speeches by a former President, but I wanted to set forth my ideas for those who were interested. The Real War turned out to be the right book at the right time. It not only became a worldwide bestseller but also made a difference in the foreign-policy debate at a crucial turning point both in American politics and in the East-West struggle. When I completed the book in January 1980, I knew the time had come to leave San Clemente and to return to the arenas in which I could more effectively serve the causes to which I had committed my life.