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The Long National Nightmare

August 8, 1974, Washington, D.C.

There was a palpable unease in our nation’s capital as the most talked about man on the planet prepared to address the American people for his final time from the Oval Office. A man who less than two years earlier had won re-election to the presidency in a forty-nine-state landslide was about to resign the presidency in disgrace.

For some time, no one was sure whether the combative Richard M. Nixon would, or even could, surrender the White House of his own volition. Only two days earlier, he had told some members of Congress that he would never quit regardless of the consequences. Then the bottom fell out. Republican stalwarts, including Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) and House Minority Leader John Rhodes (R-AZ), had traveled to the White House with the unhappy task of urging the President to come to terms with reality. He would have to resign in the public interest, they advised him, or suffer an even more demeaning exit. Senator Goldwater told President Nixon that he hadn’t counted more than a dozen U.S. Senators willing to fight against his impeachment, adding, in his refreshingly direct style, “I don’t know whether I’d be one of them.”¹

The scandal driving Richard M. Nixon from the presidency—a job he had sought for much of his political life—had taken a terrible toll on the country, on those he had selected to serve with him in his administration, on his family, and most certainly on the thirty-seventh President’s own health. He had reportedly slept two or three hours a night at most for weeks, even months.² Aides described him as “wretched and gray.”³ An hour earlier, in a meeting with friends from Congress, Nixon had had to leave the room abruptly as he began to break down in tears.⁴

Still, despite the dark bags under his eyes, he struggled not to show the stress he was enduring; certainly not to the outside team preparing the Oval Office for his address. Instead, in that tense, raw moment when he was about to abandon everything he had spent so many years working for, Richard Nixon, true to his nature, was both awkward and human.

“Hey, you’re better looking than I am. Why don’t you stay here?” President Nixon called out in jest to the television technician who was moving aside as Nixon strode into the Oval Office.⁵ The spectacled technician had been serving as a stand-in, helping to test the lighting for the television cameras while sitting in the President’s chair behind the Wilson desk. When Nixon approached, the young man jumped up and scurried over to the side of the room. Struggling to connect with someone, Nixon did not let the man escape so easily.

“Blondes, they say, photograph better than brunettes,” Nixon remarked to the fair-haired man. “That true or not?”⁶

Without waiting for an answer, he earnestly asked the TV crew: “Have you got an extra camera in case the lights go out?” A technical glitch that evening would make what for him was a gut-wrenching experience even worse.

Oliver F. Atkins, the President’s White House photographer, was on hand. “My friend Ollie always wants to take a lot of pictures,” Nixon joked. Yet, his emotions in flux, the President soon displayed a flash of annoyance, directing “Ollie” to cease taking photos altogether. He also sternly ordered members of the Secret Service to leave the Oval Office before he spoke. Told that wasn’t possible, Nixon claimed, with a grin, that he was “just kidding.”⁷

History was now only minutes away. Before an audience of 150 million Americans—a number that dwarfed that year’s record-breaking Super Bowl viewership—Nixon announced that he would resign the presidency at noon the next day. “Vice President Ford,” he said, “will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office.”

As he spoke of Gerald Ford in that evening’s televised address, Nixon was solemn. “In passing this office to the Vice President,” he told the American people, “I also do so with the profound sense of the weight of responsibility that will fall on his shoulders tomorrow and, therefore, of the understanding, the patience, the cooperation he will need from all Americans.”⁸

What Nixon was passing over to Ford was a government so rocked by turbulence and trauma that it was a very real question whether the American experiment might be wrecked. Not since the Civil War had the institutions created by our country’s Founders come into such doubt. Not since the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s had the American people’s confidence in its future been so eroded. Not ever in our nation’s history had a leader of the United States been such a likely candidate for prosecution and imprisonment.

There was, to be sure, little cheer in the national mood. For more than a decade, the country had been suffering divisions, deep disappointments, and, more recently, anguish. High-profile assassinations had rocked America. The most consequential took place on November 22, 1963, when the youthful and charismatic President, John F. Kennedy, in whom the hopes of many young Americans were invested, was shot and killed as he rode in his motorcade through downtown Dallas. Millions of Americans saw the entire traumatic episode unfold on their television screens—the stricken First Lady crawling onto the back of the convertible apparently to try to retrieve a piece of her husband’s skull; his alleged assassin gunned down by a local nightclub owner; the President’s young son memorably standing in salute as his father’s coffin passed down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Then in April 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., another beacon of hope and inspiration to millions, was killed on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Two months later, U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, a younger brother of President Kennedy, was gunned down in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California, just as he seemed to be gaining momentum in his bid for the Democratic nomination for President. On February 22, 1974, Samuel Byck, an unsuccessful small-business owner from Philadelphia, attempted to hijack a plane scheduled to fly out of Baltimore, with the intention of crashing it into the White House and killing President Nixon. (Byck committed suicide, shooting himself in the head, when police stormed the plane on the runway.) Just two months before Nixon’s stunning resignation, in June of 1974, Alberta King, mother of the slain civil rights leader, was killed during a service at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia.

Death and violence were constant companions in those difficult years, particularly as casualties mounted during the frustrating and painful stalemate in Vietnam. That long conflict had toppled the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, led to violent protests in our nation’s streets and on a number of college campuses, and seemed to provide endless displays of carnage on television sets in homes across America. Even in August of 1974, after direct U.S. military involvement had been declared officially over, the war in Southeast Asia dominated headlines. America’s long-suffering Vietnamese allies in the south of their country were losing to the Communists from the north, and partisans in the U.S. on both sides cast blame for the continuing difficulties and their consequences.

The U.S. economy was faltering. American workers were hurting. Unemployment was rising toward an unprecedented post–World War II record of 9 percent. In the aftermath of an OPEC oil embargo, Americans faced lengthy lines to fill up their vehicles’ gas tanks, with waits sometimes over three hours. In some areas of Florida, gas could not be purchased at a station without making a reservation.⁹ The U.S. inflation rate had soared from 3.3 percent in January 1972 to 10.9 percent by August 1974, the month Gerald R. Ford was sworn in as President.¹⁰

Of course, nothing contributed to the public’s weariness and anxiety more than the scandals of the Nixon administration. Ford’s predecessor as Vice President, Spiro T. Agnew, had had to resign in 1973 due to allegations involving bribery and kickbacks from when he had been governor of Maryland. Yet even the tawdry Agnew episode was dwarfed by the mother of all presidential political scandals.

The 1972 break-in at the Democratic Party’s Washington, D.C., headquarters in the Watergate Hotel by individuals, some of whom were linked to Nixon’s re-election campaign, and an attempted cover-up of the crime and of its links to the White House engrossed and angered the country. The string of misjudgments blew up in a spectacular fashion during nationally televised testimony in mid-July 1973, when Alexander Butterfield, who had been a senior White House aide, acknowledged that Nixon had maintained a tape-recording system in selected locations to document what he considered historic presidential conversations. The existence of the recording systems in the White House had been unknown to all but very few. After their existence became public, Nixon was implicated in one specific recording, the so-called smoking gun tape, which revealed that he had accepted advice to allow a cover-up of the break-in and to have the CIA slow an FBI inquiry. The multiple Watergate investigations eventually resulted in the indictments of more than sixty people, of whom forty-eight were eventually found guilty. Notably, that list included President Nixon’s powerful and influential White House Chief of Staff, H. R. Haldeman, and his senior domestic policy assistant, attorney John Ehrlichman, on charges of perjury, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice.

The protracted public drama and the widely watched nationally televised hearings eroded confidence in the federal government to perhaps the lowest level in our history. The American National Election Study, today the oldest continuous series of survey data reporting on American electoral behavior, first began asking about trust in government in 1958.¹¹ Trust had reached an all-time high in 1964, at 77 percent, as the new Johnson administration received bipartisan support in the difficult months immediately after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. By 1974 that number had been driven down to 36 percent.¹² President Nixon’s approval rating, at one point as high as 68 percent, had plummeted to 24 percent by the time of his resignation in August 1974, the lowest that has been recorded for a sitting president.¹³

Members of the media were openly hostile to President Nixon, with journalists engaging in heated exchanges with the President’s embattled Press Secretary, Ron Ziegler. The additional revelation that Nixon kept an “Enemies List,” and that some of those on the list were journalists, further increased the members of the media’s animosity. (Nixon was also reported to have apparently maintained a “Freeze List” of political adversaries and an “Opponents List” of people who, specifically, were to not set foot inside the White House.¹⁴) The Nixon administration and The Washington Post, which was breathlessly chronicling the scandals, seemed to be in all but open warfare.

Nixon’s White House was by various accounts in a state of constant siege, with the President veering into dark moods.¹⁵ Earlier in 1974, when Nixon had visited NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, while I was serving there as the U.S. Ambassador, I saw a glimpse of that mood. Thinking it would boost his morale in the midst of the Watergate scandal back in Washington, D.C., I had assembled the members of our U.S. NATO staff to greet the President upon his arrival at the Brussels airport. The President shook hands, took photos, and seemed friendly, courteous, and presidential. Immediately after, I followed the President and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who had accompanied the President, to the waiting limousine. There Mr. Nixon made an ill-informed and offensive remark about the members of the U.S. NATO staff. I pushed back hard, informing him that they were talented public servants, Defense Department officials, as well as seasoned Foreign Service officers, both military and civilian, serving our country well. As we stepped out of the President’s car, Kissinger pulled me aside to offer a telling piece of advice: “Rummy, we don’t argue with him anymore.”

Even amid the tenacious attacks on Nixon by his political opponents, there were steadfast supporters, perhaps most notably California Governor Ronald Reagan. “As the Watergate cover-up closed in on the President, no Republican officeholder in the country defended Nixon more staunchly than Reagan,” observed journalist Lou Cannon. In private, Reagan spoke of “a lynch mob” forming to get Nixon.¹⁶ Notwithstanding that strong support, the specter of a sensational criminal proceeding loomed, a “trial of the century” in which the President of the United States, Richard Nixon, would be the defendant and might well be indicted, tried, and, potentially, imprisoned.

On the night of August 8, 1974, in his televised resignation address, President Nixon made some effort—though not nearly enough for most of his critics—to atone for what had happened and to begin to heal the nation’s yawning divide. “I regret deeply any injuries that may have been done in the course of the event that led to this decision,” he said. “I would say only that if some of my judgments were wrong—and some were wrong—they were made in what I believed at the time to be the best interests of the nation.” He said he hoped his decision had “hastened the start of that process of healing which is so desperately needed in America.” He urged Americans to “join together” in “helping our new president succeed for the benefit of all Americans.”¹⁷ After years of suspicion, mistrust, and partisan hostility, this was an all but impossible task for any person to carry out. But Gerald R. Ford—assuming power over an angry, divided populace amid unprecedented distrust, concerned about a precarious economy trending in the wrong direction, girded against international turmoil and the Cold War, and trying not to be overcome by the shadows of a disgraced presidency—had no choice but to try.

Moments after Richard Nixon informed Vice President Ford of his decision to resign, Ford headed back to his office in the Old Executive Office Building—the grand nineteenth-century edifice located in the White House complex—and made a telephone call to one of the few people who was “in the know” about what was about to take place.

Dr. Henry Kissinger had become a prominent fixture in Washington’s social circles due in part to his close relationship with President Nixon, his charismatic persona, his memorable accent, and his proclivity—prior to his marriage to Nancy Maginnes—to be spotted with photogenic female movie stars. The son of German parents, Henry was born in the Bavarian region of Germany in 1923. He enjoyed a normal childhood—even playing soccer for one of the country’s best youth clubs—until, in 1938, when Henry was fifteen, his family fled the Nazi persecution of the Jews and landed in New York City. Reportedly shy as a boy, he was hesitant to speak, which, ironically, may have contributed to his distinctive accent remaining with him to this day.¹⁸

Kissinger launched his academic career, receiving multiple degrees from Harvard. Eventually he grew weary of the insularity and occasional pettiness of campus life and hungered to test his theories on international relations in the real world. He befriended New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, whom he advised on international affairs during Rockefeller’s several unsuccessful bids for the Republican nomination for president in the 1960s. He was then tapped by Nixon, the victor in the 1968 presidential contest, to serve as his National Security Advisor. Four years later, in an unprecedented step, Nixon nominated him to the additional position of Secretary of State.

Given his experiences in academia, and later in government, Henry knew his subject matter well. Tough and effective in steering a challenging bureaucracy, along with his brilliance he also had a splendidly wry sense of humor. Mao Zedong had ostensibly been briefed on Henry’s succession of public romances, which had reportedly included actresses Candice Bergen, Jill St. John, and Shirley MacLaine.¹⁹ “You know China is a very poor country,” Mao interjected during a meeting with Kissinger in Beijing in 1973. “What we have in excess is women.” Kissinger, without pause, asked, “There are no quotas for those, or tariffs?”²⁰

Ford would later write in his memoir, A Time to Heal, “It would be hard for me to overstate the admiration and affection I had for Henry.”²¹ In the aftermath of Nixon’s resignation, Ford came close.

In his phone call hours before Nixon’s resignation, Ford said to Henry, “I just finished talking with the President, and he gave me his decision, and we spent about an hour and twenty minutes over there. During the course of the conversation, he indicated that you were the only one in the Cabinet with whom he had shared his decision.”²²

“That is correct,” Kissinger replied. Henry’s reply had unambiguously given Ford a sense of Nixon’s pecking order. Kissinger after all had been told that Ford would soon become the President before even Ford himself.

“I would hope we would get together sometime this afternoon,” Ford suggested. In his recollection of the moment, Kissinger noted that Ford “in his modest unassuming way” had left the timing of this meeting up to him.

That same day, Ford tried getting in touch with the Chief Justice of the United States, Warren Burger, to discuss a swearing-in ceremony for the following day. Burger, he learned, was at a conference in the Netherlands. When they connected over the phone later in the day, Ford said, “I’d hate to interrupt your trip,” wishing not to bother the Chief Justice. Burger replied that he would return to Washington immediately.²³ In the coming months and years, Ford’s natural politeness would occasionally be misinterpreted as weakness. This was especially so in Washington, D.C., a city that had grown accustomed to a more muscular and imperial presidential style.

“I really want you to stay and stand with me in these difficult times,” Ford told Kissinger during their call.²⁴ At their meeting later that afternoon, Ford reiterated this sentiment in blunt terms. “Henry, I need you. The country needs you. I want you to stay. I’ll do everything I can to work with you.”²⁵ The Secretary of State later noted Ford “made it sound like I would be doing him a favor by staying.”²⁶

“Sir,” Kissinger somberly pointed out, “it is my job to get along with you and not yours to get along with me.”²⁷

Ford watched President Nixon’s seventeen-minute resignation address later that evening with his wife, Betty, and members of his family. As the gravity of the situation bore down upon him, Ford had prayed for guidance.²⁸ A verse from the Book of Proverbs was a favorite. He had recited it before bed each night since his high school days in Grand Rapids: “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, lean not on thine own understanding, in all thy ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths.”²⁹

Ford took care to avoid seeming presumptuous, even as Nixon’s fate started to become clear. Not wanting to give up on the President, whom he considered a friend, Ford had not even packed for his coming move to the White House. There was no vice presidential residence back in 1974, so Ford intended to spend the first days of his presidency in the same place he’d lived for nineteen years—his modest two-story home on a quiet street in Alexandria, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. As Nixon’s speech ended, a cluster of reporters had gathered outside in the drizzle to await the first statement from the nation’s incoming President.

Stepping out that evening into his small front yard, carrying neither notes nor a prepared text, Ford spoke from his heart. He called Nixon’s resignation speech “one of the very saddest incidents that I’ve ever witnessed.” Yet Nixon, Ford added, had made “one of the greatest personal sacrifices for the country and one of the finest personal decisions on behalf of all of us as Americans.”³⁰ Ford pledged his best efforts to work with the Democrat-controlled Congress for “what’s good for America and good for the world.”³¹ Very much sounding like the legislator I had first met more than a decade earlier, Ford explained that he had “a good many adversaries” on Capitol Hill, but could not name, or think of, a single enemy.

Not for a moment seeking to distance himself from the scandal-plagued White House, or pretending he had not been a part of the administration, as some politicians in his position might have been tempted to do, Ford instead expressed his respect for one of Nixon’s most recognizable cabinet officials, Henry Kissinger. He announced there and then that Secretary Kissinger would stay on in his unprecedented dual roles of Secretary of State and National Security Advisor.³²

“We’ve been fortunate in the last five years to have a very great man in Henry Kissinger, who has had to build the blocks of peace under President Nixon,” Ford added.³³

Such praise was not unwarranted. Henry was a highly skilled public servant who, along with White House Chief of Staff Al Haig, had played a crucial role in keeping the White House and the Nixon administration functioning throughout the months of turbulence during the Watergate scandal. He was also by then a seasoned diplomat who had been instrumental in helping to craft the Nixon administration’s foreign policies: the opening to China and the so-called détente policy toward the Soviet Union, which despite its shortcomings had helped to stabilize East-West relations. President Ford undoubtedly also believed it made sense for him to identify his presidency with a figure considerably better known to foreign leaders across the globe than he was at the time, to project stability during what promised to be a challenging transition period.

Though Henry deserved considerable credit for his contributions to the Nixon administration, it was Richard Nixon who steered foreign policy. Normalizing U.S. relations with China, for example, had been one of Nixon’s goals even before he had been elected President. Kissinger’s role in that piece of historic diplomacy was important, but Nixon had brainstormed the strategy some time before and together they choreographed the moves. “Henry is a genius,” Nixon had said to Ford on August 8, appending, “but you don’t have to accept everything he recommends. . . . You can’t let him have a totally free hand.”³⁴

Ford’s strong desire to keep Kissinger on board created for some, including a number of Ford’s friends, a worrisome perception of dependency that would linger. Coupled with his self-effacing nature, this occasionally led him to be underestimated.

Nixon, for one, had some reservations. He confided to Kissinger, and probably to others, that Ford would do an “adequate” job as Commander in Chief. As endorsements go, that was hardly resounding. The embattled President was also said to have believed Ford’s confirmation as Vice President made it less likely that he—Nixon—would be impeached. “On several occasions,” Kissinger recalled, thinking of Watergate, “the President mused that Congress would not dare to assume responsibility for replacing him with a man who had so little background in international affairs.”³⁵

Ford had not had any inkling that his life would move in this trajectory. To the contrary, he had agreed with Betty that he would run for one more term in the House of Representatives in 1974 and then retire from public life.³⁶ History of course had other plans, though sometimes those plans were far from obvious. Ford, in fact, had not been Nixon’s first choice to replace Spiro T. Agnew as Vice President—a point Nixon made clear to Ford and to others. In 1973, Nixon had urged Presidential Counselor Bryce Harlow and Defense Secretary Mel Laird to try to carve a path through the Congress for John Connally, who was then the subject of an ethics investigation.³⁷ Enormously charismatic, Connally, the Texas Democrat-turned-Republican, had served as Secretary of the Navy in 1961 in the Kennedy administration, Governor of Texas from 1963 to 1969, and then Secretary of the Treasury in Nixon’s first term. He was probably best known for having been wounded while riding in the President’s limousine in Dallas in November 1963, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.³⁸

Anyone in close proximity to Nixon quickly saw he was unusually enamored of Connally, a man Kissinger pointedly observed was “the only person about whom I never heard Nixon make a denigrating comment.”³⁹ The former Governor of Texas was so impressive to President Nixon that in Cabinet meetings I attended Nixon actually cheered him on. On occasion, when Connally said something Nixon particularly liked, the President would turn to others in the meeting with a look of pride.

Though Nixon was confident that the various controversies surrounding Connally would subside, which they in fact did, close aides managed to ease him toward the solid, well-liked, and easily confirmable Gerald R. Ford. Still, even after picking Ford, Nixon forthrightly told his new Vice President that Connally would be his choice for the White House in 1976.

In short, Gerald R. Ford entered the White House underestimated by a number of important people, including, quite possibly, himself.

Two days before Ford took office as the nation’s thirty-eighth president, a surreal incident in New York City provided a distraction in an already surreal time. During the early morning hours of August 7, as President Nixon likely lay awake contemplating his dwindling future, a thin young man dressed in black slipped into a Manhattan skyscraper, made his way to the top floor, and with the help of some accomplices, slung a cable across to the neighboring building. Then, using a pole for balance, the man in black stepped out onto the cable and began to walk.

He was Philippe Petit, a twenty-five-year-old French acrobat. He was traversing the roughly 131-foot space between the newly completed twin towers of the World Trade Center. At the time, the towers were sitting unfinished and largely unrented. They just happened to be a project of David Rockefeller and his brother Nelson, who had recently resigned as Governor of New York and was soon to be nominated by President Ford to become Vice President.⁴⁰

Suspended between the towers, 1,350 feet above the street for forty-five unnerving minutes, the thrill seeker walked the wire, stopping periodically to do knee bends and other stunts. Rush-hour traffic was snarled in the streets below as people craned their necks to watch. The acrobat eventually came down and was arrested, but charges were dropped on the condition that he perform a free show in Central Park. After an eventful morning, New Yorkers went back to their lives. But the story made headlines, a sideshow amid the Watergate circus to which the entire nation had tickets.

Nobody could have seen it at the time, but the French acrobat’s stunt could be taken as merely the opener for an even more difficult balancing act of enormous importance to the world: holding our country together in the tempestuous wake of Watergate. That event opened two days later, and its star was Gerald R. Ford. When the gentleman from Michigan took office as president on August 9, 1974, he stepped out onto his own high wire. All eyes were trained on his every move. If he put a wrong foot forward, it could mean disaster, not just for him but for our country.