Chapter 7

THE TITANIC BOILER ROOM

“As you look back now at that period of 1973 and 1974, and realize how remarkably unscathed George Bush has come out of all that [Watergate], that’s as high a tribute as I think you can give any man or woman.”

—Bill Steiger (speaking in 1978)

In November 1972, shortly after President Nixon was reelected in a landslide victory over George McGovern, he summoned Dad to Camp David to discuss “the future.” Dad had served as ambassador to the United Nations for nearly two years by then, but President Nixon had a new idea for making use of my father’s talents and party loyalty: the president had asked for the resignation of Kansas Senator Bob Dole as chairman of the Republican National Committee and wanted Dad to replace him. (In fact, President Nixon had requested the resignations of every member of his cabinet as well as of Senator Dole, at the start of his second administration.)

Dad wasn’t sure he wanted the job. He clearly loved the U.N. posting and was not ready to leave; but given his instinctive deference to the office of the president, he also knew it might not be his decision. “I always felt that one should do what the president asked of him, unless he was certain he could not do the job,” Dad explained to me. (An old friend and colleague from the House, Congressman Bill Steiger of Wisconsin, said years later that he wished Dad would have said no to a president just once.)

Mom was sure he shouldn’t take the job because of all the travel involved—the chairman of the RNC spends his time constantly helping candidates in all fifty states—and because she had seen how vicious party politics could be. Interestingly, many of his diplomatic friends thought it was not only a great job but a step up. (After all, the Chinese communists pointed out, Chairman Mao’s title was “chairman of the party.”) Despite his doubts, and those of my mother, Dad felt he really couldn’t turn the president down.

Dad never felt close to President Nixon, but he respected many of his achievements, particularly in the realm of foreign affairs. They had an affable relationship and, before Watergate, one of mutual respect. So in January 1973, just as President Nixon was beginning his second term in office, Dad made the move to the Republican National Committee. We left the Waldorf and returned to Washington, and I, thirteen years old by then, returned to National Cathedral School.

It wasn’t until after Dad arrived on the job in January that the Watergate story broke; and, of course, he never would have taken the job had he known what was to come. Barely a month later, in February 1973, the Senate Watergate Committee was established. By April, President Nixon denied he was involved in the break-in and cover-up, and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst had resigned—along with White House aides John Ehrlichman and H. R. “Bob” Haldeman. Then White House counsel John Dean III was fired.

In May, a special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, was named. During the summer that followed, John Dean testified before the Senate Watergate Committee, and Judge John Sirica ordered the White House to turn over the tapes President Nixon had been recording in the Oval Office dating back to 1971.

My father was under enormous strain. Leading a political party whose president was sinking deeper and deeper into a legal, political, and ethical quagmire with each passing day must have been more than most people could have endured.

During his twenty months leading the RNC, Dad kept a diary that reveals the depths of his anguish over what was happening. Reading the entries in order, and knowing the end result, is like watching a car drive off a cliff in slow motion. For example, an early diary entry involves Nixon’s conversation with my father about Spiro Agnew’s impending resignation on tax evasion charges unrelated to Watergate:

September 16, 1973

He [President Nixon] pointedly asked if John Connally [treasury secretary] could be involved in this matter. It occurred to me immediately that he was considering Connally for Vice-President . . . I get the feeling that within a week or ten days the Vice President will resign. I get the distinct feeling the President is giving top consideration to appointing Connally, who I am sure he feels he can get through both Houses of Congress.

Former Texas governor John Connally—Ralph Yarborough’s nemesis who had edged him out of Kennedy’s car in Dallas that day—was now the only Democrat appointed to Nixon’s cabinet, serving as secretary of the treasury. He had spearheaded the “Democrats for Nixon” effort in Texas, which helped Nixon win Texas as part of the GOP landslide in the 1972 presidential race. After the election—and three months after LBJ’s death—Connally became a Republican.

When word of Nixon’s leaning toward Connally got to both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate, however, the idea went down in flames. Afterward, Congressman William Whitehurst of Virginia remembered that President Nixon asked every Republican member of the House and the Senate to submit up to three names to him, as possible candidates for the vice presidency. Whitehurst submitted Dad’s name (so we know Dad got at least one vote). Nixon ended up naming Gerald Ford as his vice president—but also made it clear he’d support Connally for the 1976 Republican nomination.

At about the same time, Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s secretary of state and national security adviser, won the Nobel Peace Prize. On October 13, 1973, Dad wrote:

I also couldn’t help but think of the irony when Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize. Here was Nixon taking all the flack on the war, Kissinger executing his policies, and Henry walking away with a coveted honor. Of course I have great respect for the job Kissinger did—his imagination, his grasp of the situation—but it is also a little ironic.

A week later, on Saturday, October 20, the “Saturday Night Massacre” took place. That night, Attorney General Elliot Richardson refused to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had sided with the Senate Watergate Committee in demanding that the White House turn over Nixon’s tapes. Because the special prosecutor was appointed by the Department of Justice, he answered to the attorney general and could be fired by him—but both Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus refused to fire him and resigned in protest. Nixon then named Solicitor General Robert H. Bork as acting attorney general, and Bork went ahead and fired Cox—all this in one night.

Dad, for the most part, didn’t let the pressure show. He seemed the same at family dinners and Sunday barbecues, happy at his place manning the grill, making sure everyone had a drink, joking around with his guests. As always, family and friends came first to Dad.

My childhood friend Liz Grundy, who later went on to work for Dad, recalled a time when she was fourteen, at the height of Watergate, when she came to our house for a weekend barbecue with her parents.

“Throughout the afternoon, we noticed that your father was constantly having to interrupt his hamburger grilling to go inside to take telephone calls,” she recalled. Liz stayed on to have a sleepover, and the next morning Liz’s mom offered to come pick her up.

“Oh no,” Dad said. “I have to go downtown, I’ll be happy to bring her in.”

As it turned out, the barbecue was the same night as the Saturday Night Massacre. “Thus, all the phone calls and the trip downtown to the White House on a Sunday,” Liz noted. “In the midst of all this, George Bush still made time to drop off his daughter’s friend on the way.”

In November, Dad discussed with President Nixon what had happened after Vice President Agnew’s resignation in October. Although Nixon had nominated Gerald Ford to replace him, Ford would not be confirmed by both houses of Congress and sworn in until early December:

November 14, 1973

We talked about the Agnew matter. I told him that Barbara and I had supported Agnew and told him about my personal letter from Agnew . . . I told him I was going to call on him. I said I might be criticized for this but I felt an affection for the man. The President indicated I did just the right thing and he told me he himself had bought Agnew his Cabinet chair (which cost $600).

While he wanted to pursue his own political career, Dad told Nixon that he would stay with the RNC job—which he didn’t much care for—because he felt the party needed the consistency of his leadership during the beginning of what would become a protracted period of difficulty for the Republicans:

I told him that I had been urged by Connally, Anne Armstrong and others to run for Governor of Texas but that I had decided not to do it now. I felt there was a chance for a Republican to win and it would be important, but I felt that my leaving might inadvertently increase the speculation that I had no confidence in the Administration—it might add to an air of instability. I mentioned that I was not trying to equate myself with Ruckelshaus or Richardson. The President agreed that it would be good to stay on the job. I believe he said “through the elections.” He then said, “You could go into foreign service which we could arrange very easily, but I think you ought to come into the Cabinet at that point.”

By this point, I am beginning to feel that as RNC chairman my father, like Atlas, was keeping the weight of the world on his shoulders, but just barely:

November 30, 1973

This job is like walking a tightrope. You want to be fair to the President—you want to accentuate the positive accomplishments of the President, you want to take credit for them for the Party, but you want to be darn sure that the people know the Party does not approve of Watergate or its handling . . . Right now after the November elections there are a wide number of comments that the Republican Party has had it—that we are in for a disaster . . .

On December 3, 1973, the president publicly disclosed his personal finances, under pressure from the press. (Nixon had given a speech to a group of newspaper editors, and during the question-and-answer session had promised to release his financial record, famously declaring, “I am not a crook.”) As Dad listened to the lawyers present the figures, he thought of his own father’s opinion about Nixon’s financial situation:

December 3, 1973

. . . I could not help but feel what a difficult thing for a President to have to lay all this out. I also had the feeling, frankly, that the President would have been well advised given his net worth not to have bought Key Biscayne and San Clemente. It was too big a bite for a man with that kind of limited resources. I remember Dad telling me that he worried about this, and I thought, “Oh, how old-fashioned.” But I think now in retrospect, he was right. I also think about Bar telling me that the President ought to let go of one of the houses because of the energy crisis.

In the midst of all this, my brother Jeb came to Dad to announce that he wanted to marry Maria Columba “Colu” Garnica of Leon, Mexico. They had met in Mexico when he was on a high school program teaching English to schoolchildren. It would be the first wedding in our family. Dad really wanted Jeb to finish college first—and almost to prove his love for Columba, Jeb not only finished a year early but graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Texas.

So on February 23, 1974, Jeb and Columba were married in Austin, Texas. The wedding was very small, just family members. The ceremony was at the University of Texas in the chapel on campus. They seemed so young—Jeb, with long hair and a mustache, was only twenty-one years old. “Colu,” at age nineteen, spoke little English at the time, and my main impression of her was that she was tiny and very beautiful. Dad hadn’t met Columba until the rehearsal dinner at a restaurant called the Green Turtle, the night before their wedding.

When I asked Jeb recently whether Watergate and the stress it was placing on Dad in any way cast a pall over his wedding, he answered, “He was gracious and accepting even though I placed this burden on him—of not even knowing the love of my life until the night before the wedding . . . No talk of Watergate.”

My brother Marvin was the photographer for the wedding, because he was the right price (meaning free) and because, in his own words, he considered himself “a younger version of Ansel Adams, armed with my new Minolta camera and a burning desire to leave my mark on the world as we knew it in 1974.”

Here is Marv’s recollection of that day:

It was with that sense of heightened self-importance that I volunteered to be the photographer for Jeb and Columba’s wedding. Nobody really protested because the ceremony was small and relatively informal and Jeb and Columba were practically kids. So, if they were responsible enough to get married, then maybe I was responsible enough to memorialize the event for both families. Sounds good, right?

The cool thing with my fellow high school photographers was to roll your own film from spools that held hundreds of frames. It appealed to the “starving artist” mentality and was a sign of being a purist. So, in anticipation of Jeb and Columba’s wedding, I rolled a few canisters of film and packed them for Austin. I was an “in your face” brand of photographer, snapping pictures at every possible angle and at annoying distances from the subjects. My mom claims that I was snapping photos from the ground (sometimes through someone’s legs) at people who were trying to have regular conversation. I think she’s exaggerating, but it is probably a fair description to say that I was early in the paparazzi movement. So, for the better part of two days I snapped away, naively imagining that Jeb would forever be grateful to his little brother for the beautiful photo album that would memorialize his special day.

The first moment of panic came when I was in the darkroom, reviewing the negatives from the wedding rolls. The frames seemed too congested with conflicting images. I was hoping that my eyesight was playing games with me, so I printed out one of the frames. That’s when the real queasiness hit. As the paper settled into the chemicals in the tray, I began to see the image of a guitar over a picture of my grandmother and my parents. Uh-oh! It hit me like a ton of bricks. I had rerolled previously used film that had been taken at a Frank Zappa concert at the Mosque in Richmond, Virginia. Every single photo of the Bush and Garnica families had either a photo of Frank Zappa and/or members of his band, the Mothers of Invention, superimposed onto their own images. I remember thinking to myself that a Frank Sinatra photo may have been acceptable—not Frank Zappa!

Anyway, I chose the coward’s way out—silence. Deafening silence. Radio silence. Aside from a few questions to the effect of, “How did your pictures turn out?” I heard very little about my embarrassing attempt to help my brother out. For the next thirty years, practically nothing was said about the incident. The wedding marked the end of my photography career. Luckily, my mother thought to take one picture of Jeb and Columba with her Kodak pocket Instamatic, and that photo, copied a few times over, is in scrapbooks and on coffee tables in Texas, Maine, and Florida.

The epilogue to the story, never previously revealed to any family members, is that I submitted a picture of the bride and groom (yes, with Zappa) in an art show at school. I called the picture something clever like “Zappa’s Bride” and won third prize in the photography category.

About a week after Jeb’s wedding, seven Nixon aides were indicted for conspiring to obstruct justice—among them Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and former attorney general John Mitchell—and President Nixon was named as an unindicted coconspirator. Within two weeks of that, Dad wrote in his diary about a difficult meeting with the White House chief of staff, Al Haig:

March 13, 1974

He [Haig] started off by being fairly tough and firm with me, telling me that it was getting down to the wire, that if the President was going to survive there had to be an all-out offense, that they were preparing papers and they wanted me to give it full range support. I asked what it was . . . he wanted me to say that I would support it. I thought for a minute—low keyed it and said that in my opinion the President was entitled to advocacy and that if in good conscience I couldn’t support what it was that he was talking about then I would resign. I said I felt I probably could but I didn’t want to say without seeing in advance what it was.

The White House was putting Dad in a very difficult position, and Dad began to sense an us-versus-them mentality in this discussion with Haig:

There was too much, for my thinking, of the feeling that everyone that wasn’t supportive was totally against, in other words—turning against the whole Judiciary Committee, the House, we don’t have any friends on the Hill—nobody is standing up for us. This went through the whole theme . . . I did get the feeling that Haig goes through a lot of inner turmoil in his own mind. He must have some difficult times with the President though he would never say this to me . . .

Dad concluded this entry with a statement about the political pressure he was experiencing, in terms of agreeing to the administration’s public relations offensive:

At this moment I haven’t even seen the papers that [speechwriter] Pat Buchanan is putting together—his talking points. They are talking about an all-out offensive—whatever the hell that means. I have called them as I see them so far. Bending, stretching a little here or there, insisting that things that I don’t want to put my name on have the White House name on them, not mine. And I am not going to change that, I’m simply not going to do it.

There were several principles at stake in Dad’s mind throughout this time. First, of course, was his integrity and his wanting to do the right thing in this difficult, complicated, and unprecedented time. Second, there was his extreme loyalty—his aversion to “piling on.” Third, there was his essential optimism that Watergate would resolve itself and the Nixon presidency would survive. For example, a month later—on April 18, 1974—he wrote of being “heartsick” and of things being “massively fouled up,” but then he added that he’s “still believing that the evidence on the tapes will vindicate the President but not totally, not clearly, not to get this whole matter behind us. Resignation seems wrong to me still; impeachment, though possible, does not even seem likely right now . . .”

Within a few weeks, he realized he supported resignation, mostly in defense of the presidency as an institution—another principle that was very important to him then, and certainly after he himself went on to serve in the Oval Office. On the night before the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings began, Dad wrote:

May 8, 1974

My own gut reactions are really mixed up. I believe this thing about resignation being bad for the system; and yet for the first time it seems like it might be the only answer. I am not talking about short term politics. I am talking about the Presidency and what has happened to it because of these ugly revelations. Probably they went on before but that no longer seems to be the point.

That summer, in a letter dated July 23, 1974, Dad wrote to my brothers (he thought I was too young to be included) and shared his private thoughts about Watergate as it was nearing its inevitable conclusion. He talked about what a great country America is and how lucky they were to be citizens—but that Watergate was the worst of times, that it reflected “abysmal amorality.” He went on for many pages talking about the president and the men who worked in the White House. But it is in the final page of the letter that he draws lessons from Watergate:

Listen to your conscience. Don’t be afraid not to join the mob—if you feel inside it’s wrong. Don’t confuse being “soft” with seeing the other guy’s point of view. In judging your President give him the enormous credit he’s due for substantive achievements. Try to understand the “why” of the National Security concern; but understand too that the power accompanied by arrogance is very dangerous. It’s particularly dangerous when men with no real experience have it—for they can abuse our great institutions. Avoid self-righteously turning on a friend, but have your friendship mean enough that you would be willing to share with your friend your judgment. Don’t assign away your judgment to achieve power.

As RNC chairman, Dad was caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Charged with promoting and supporting the Republican Party, he found himself being forced to defend a situation that he eventually found to be sickening. Toward the end of the letter to my brothers, he expressed the toll it had taken on him:

These have been a tough 18 months. I feel battered and disillusioned. I feel betrayed in a sense by those who did wrong and tracked corruption and institutional subversion into that beautiful White House. In trying to build the Party, I feel like the guy in charge of the Titanic boiler room—one damn shock after another.

The same day he wrote to my brothers, Dad reflected on Watergate’s effects on the Republican Party. He wrote in his diary:

July 23, 1974

These are complicated times. I can’t imagine a set of circumstances in terms of Party that are more complicated. I feel frustrated that our programs and our philosophy and the President’s magnificent record on war and peace would normally have us riding high even in spite of the problems of inflation. This Watergate thing dominates all the news. It doesn’t dominate the concern of the voters. The concern of the voters is still on inflation where of course we have a tremendous problem.

Dad had a difficult job outside of Washington as well, traveling to state party events and having to deal with irate Republicans. Arthur Fletcher, who had been a delegate to the United Nations and then a consultant to the RNC, remembers, “That was not a tenderfoot’s assignment, holding the Republican Party together. But George did not apologize, did not back off from the assignment, and I thought he stood the test superbly well. I know of no other national chairman that had to ride out the tide the way he did. And in spite of it—to still get out and raise money, go across the country and talk to a lot of mad, bitter, disgruntled Republicans, and face a hostile press that was asking him some very tough questions—through it all he handled himself very well.”

Dad told me he had two stacks of mail. One said, “Why do you keep the party close to Nixon when you know the party per se had nothing to do with Watergate?” The other stack said, “Why are you not doing more to help President Nixon?” Dad continued, “In my speeches to the Republican faithful, I made the point over and over again that the party was in no way involved in the Watergate scandal, but that we should not pull away from Nixon without concrete evidence of wrong-doing.”

On July 24, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Nixon must turn over the Watergate tapes to the special prosecutor. Over the next several days, the House Judiciary Committee voted to approve articles of impeachment. Dad had a “big picture” conversation with Al Haig, in which he conveyed his concerns as party chairman:

July 31, 1974

Haig stopped short of being critical of me, although I will readily concede the White House probably feels I have not done enough to partisanize it . . . I told him the adverse effects on the Party in terms of money, morale, deterioration of support, of real strong support. I told him that I did not love the President, I respected his achievements . . .

Dad’s diary entry on Monday night, August 5, 1974, strikes me as increasingly emotional:

As I dictate this memo at 10:10 p.m. on August 5 I do not feel the President can survive . . . I have decided not to issue a statement, to simply sit and let the storms swirl around, although give some leadership to the committee by telling them not to get too far out front. I am torn between wanting to express my own agony and my own emotion, and get out front and cry resignation and this is too much . . .

Dad also wrote of a conversation with Al Haig, who made a sweeping prediction: “He [Haig] predicted the President would not survive, but that we would look back when were both 80 and say he had been one of the great presidents of our time . . .”

Now that Dad is over eighty years old, it’s time to address whether General Haig’s prediction was on the mark. I asked Dad how he felt about Nixon and his presidency in retrospect. Here’s what he said:

“I got to know him pretty well, and I admired much of what he was doing and went on to accomplish as a two-term president. I felt he was very, very smart, but he had a lot of hang-ups. One was that his disdain for ‘Ivy Leaguers’ came through loud and clear. He would single out Ivy Leaguers at cabinet meetings and one could look around the room and see several Ivy Leaguers at the cabinet table. As the tapes revealed, he had a rather ugly side in which he was hypercritical of some groups.”

He had a few things to say about the president’s men as well:

“I liked Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and I think it was reciprocal. [Charles] Colson back then was a tough guy. He has gone on to really do wonderful things in his prison ministry. I respect him, but back then did not feel very close.

“John Dean always struck me as an arrogant little creep. He became a big shot. He turned on Nixon, and, of course, much to the delight of the Nixon-haters, he put a negative spin on a lot of things about Nixon. He became a hero when he testified before Congress. He was as guilty as Nixon ever was, but somehow managed to escape a lot of the public disapproval.” Then, after further reflection, he added, “Perhaps some of this visceral anti-Dean feeling I have is because of the way he has attacked your brother.”

And as for how he thinks Nixon felt about him:

“I always felt Nixon thought I wasn’t tough enough. I lacked the kind of bulldoze-’em approach that some of his lieutenants had. Nixon liked the tough guy. He encouraged toughness and not taking any guff.”

My take: Dad stuck to his principles and refused to use his position at the RNC as a bully pulpit to defend and excuse a corrupt president—if Nixon interpreted that as weakness, so be it. We’ll leave it up to history to decide whose perception is more accurate.

Dad was very fond of Nixon’s family, particularly his daughter Julie, and to this day, the sadness he felt about their suffering is still evident.

“I recall Julie Nixon coming to see me at the RNC headquarters. I was chairman at the time. Julie was desperately trying to rally support for her dad. She asked me if I couldn’t help more. At that time, Nixon was sinking fast. Julie obviously felt we could do more. She was very, very nice and she had been terribly hurt by the attacks on her dad, not from the RNC but from the press and many political people, some in our own party. I respected Julie then. I could see she was hurting badly. I ached for her, but there was nothing we could do. I had gone around the country encouraging support for Nixon until it became clear he was going down because of his own false statements.”

The toll that political scandals take on family members, particularly the children, is immeasurable. A strange image I remember from that time is of Ann Haldeman, a teenage schoolmate of mine whose dad, H. R. Haldeman, was on the White House staff. I remember her opening her jacket and having all kinds of Nixon-Agnew buttons on the inside of her blazer.

As I look back on it, that incident makes me sad. I can understand how Ann wanted to support her dad. Whatever you might think about President Nixon and his inner circle, the children should be unassailable—yet, in some ways, they bore the same brunt of the pain and the shame as did their parents.

When Dad spoke with Al Haig on August 5, Haig had just returned from a weekend at Camp David with the president, along with his speechwriters Pat Buchanan and Ray Price and White House press secretary Ron Ziegler. The Supreme Court had just ordered President Nixon to turn over the White House tapes, and so Nixon had played the tapes for them over the weekend. At the Monday morning staff meeting afterward, Haig asked Pat Buchanan to brief Dean Burch, who was political director at the White House—and, therefore, liaison to the RNC—as to what was on the tapes. “That was about 10:00 or 11:00 in the morning and we just heard it and almost unanimously—nobody really thought much about it, we just went to the bar—and opened up the bar and had a drink and toasted the president and that’s it, you know, we fold her up now, it’s over,” said Dean Burch.

From there, Burch took the transcripts of the tape with him to brief Dad and John Rhodes, the House minority leader. Rhodes recalled afterward: “Etched on my memory until I die will be that morning—it was the Monday before Nixon resigned—when George Bush and Dean Burch and [White House counsel] Fred Buzhardt came out to my house. I had a bad case of laryngitis and wasn’t going to the office that day. So they came out to the house to brief me on the contents of the June 23 tape, the one in which the president told Bob Haldeman to make sure that the CIA told the FBI to call off the Watergate investigation for national security reasons. And George Bush hadn’t been briefed either on that, so we were briefed together. And we both came to the same conclusion, that this was a smoking gun, a clear case of an impeachable offense. Not only an impeachable offense, but an offense so grave that you almost had to impeach. So we came to the conclusion that the end of the road had been reached for Mr. Nixon at exactly the same time.” (John Rhodes died in 2003.)

The next day, Tuesday, August 6, 1974, was “a traumatic day,” Dad wrote, as he sat in on a “grueling” cabinet meeting just two days before Nixon announced he would resign from office:

The President sat there, strong, determined, announcing his decision to remain in office and yet unreality prevailed. Jerry Ford reiterated his position that because of his peculiar situation he was not going to involve himself in the President’s defense . . . It kind of cast a pall over the meeting. Haig later told me he thought it was wrong, the President was clearly shook up. Ford later told me that he wondered if it had offended the President and how it had gone over. I told him I thought that he had done the right thing and that I had told Haig, which I did, that Ford was simply reiterating a position he expressed the day before, so that the President would be sure to know it. Because the President indeed at that meeting was saying we should go all out, be together, be unified, go forward, etc. . . . His explanation of this awful lie was not convincing. It simply was unreal, but everybody just sat there.

Later on in the same meeting, Dad felt pulled in two directions, as he thought of the evidence on the president’s tape:

The President looked uncomfortable, once he smiled over to me and with his lips said, “George,” smiled and looked warm and my heart went totally out to him even though I felt deeply betrayed by his lie of the day before. The man is amoral. He has a different sense than the rest of the people. He came up the hard way. He hung tough. He hunkered down, he stonewalled. He became President of the United States and a damn good one in many ways, but now it had all caught up with him. All the people he hated—Ivy League, press, establishment, Democrats, privileged—all of this ended up biting him and bringing him down.

In the same entry—they got longer as resignation neared—he wrote that he’d made it clear to the president (through Haig) that Nixon must resign. “This era of tawdry, shabby lack of morality has got to end,” he wrote, and called Vice President Ford a “latter-day Eisenhower”:

He is an Ike without the heroics but he has that decency the country is crying out for right now. I will take Ford’s decency over Nixon’s toughness because what we need at this juncture in our history is a certain sense of morality and a certain sense of decency. Nixon can no longer present it. My own views are that the President should get out and get out now . . .

Dad also lashed out at the press and the Washington “meat-grinder”:

The incivility of the press had been a paralyzing kind of thing over the last few months. And now it continues, that blood lust, the talons are sharpened and clutched, ready to charge in there and grab the carrion of this President. I am sick at heart. Sick about the President’s betrayal and sick about the fact that the major Nixon enemies can now gloat because they have proved he is what they said he is. No credit, no compassion, no healing, simply the meat-grinder at work. I suppose when it is written one can establish that perhaps I should have done more, but I am not made up to walk on the body of a man whom I don’t love but whom I respect for his accomplishments.

He closed this entry wondering about Rose Mary Woods, the president’s secretary:

I have not seen Rose Woods and I wonder how she feels. The gloom in the White House is unimaginable, difficult to describe. It is brought dramatically home that this President is a liar, a total liar and we cannot face up to it in fairness, in the nation’s interest, in any other way . . .

Dad’s close friend Dean Burch was also in that final cabinet meeting, which he said had to be the most “surrealistic” cabinet meeting he’d ever seen:

The whole goddamn world was crashing in on us. The White House was collapsing. And President Nixon came in and just had a regular cabinet meeting. He was saying we were going to do this and we’re going to strike that program, we’re going to do something else. George had a letter addressed to President Nixon in which he said he felt that he had to resign. And he wanted to bring it up at the cabinet meeting. I felt that he should bring it up, but I didn’t think he should bring it up at the cabinet meeting. I just didn’t think that was an appropriate place to face a man down and say, I want to read a letter demanding your resignation.

I’ve never seen such an unhappy man as George was during this period, because now all of us had come to the conclusion that we’d all been lied to for many, many months . . . But George then went in to see the president after that meeting and gave him the letter. He told him that there just wasn’t anything left, wasn’t any support left, and that he, George, as chairman of the party, sided with those who felt the president had to go.

It was not, in George’s case, the idea of jumping on after the man was down. He had stayed with him to the bitter, bitter end. Maybe too long. Maybe George should’ve bailed out earlier, although frankly, I would have thought a great deal less of him had he done that. Not because of any personal loyalty to Nixon, but I just think that the party chairman, appointed by the president, sticks with him until he himself has made up his mind. George contributed, certainly, to the decision that President Nixon had to make. And he contributed to it well.

Much has been written about that “surrealistic” cabinet meeting, with others present at it each remembering it a bit differently. My dad’s diaries note that he spoke up at the meeting—a suggestion had been made for the president to meet with congressional leaders, which Dad strongly advised against because of the confrontational mood on Capitol Hill—and as a result, his asking how expedient a congressional trial of the president would be, should it come to that. Here’s what then-Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Caspar “Cap” Weinberger wrote to me, shortly before he died:

In the faltering days of the Nixon Presidency, we were having a rather desultory Cabinet meeting. The agenda item concerned a new anti-inflation campaign. President Nixon wanted to support a large scale anti-inflation meeting scheduled for the next week. Your father finally said, “Look, this is quite ridiculous, talking about matters of this kind when the only thing on everyone’s mind is whether this Presidency is going to survive.” President Nixon glowered and then said, “One thing is certain—I will never resign the Presidency.” End of meeting. Your father had again demonstrated firmness and decisiveness and candor. He literally spoke for the whole Cabinet.

The day after that bizarre cabinet meeting, Dad presented President Nixon with the following letter:

August 7, 1974

The Honorable Richard M. Nixon

President of the United States

The White House

Washington, D.C.

Dear Mr. President:

It is my considered judgment that you should now resign. I expect in your lonely embattled position this would seem to you as an act of disloyalty from one you have supported and helped in so many ways.

My own view is that I would now ill serve a President, whose massive accomplishments I will always respect and whose family I love, if I did not now give you my judgment.

Until this moment resignation has been no answer at all, but given the impact of the latest development, and it will be a lasting one, I now firmly feel resignation is best for this country, best for this President. I believe this view is held by most Republican leaders across the country.

This letter is made much more difficult because of the gratitude I will always have for you.

If you do leave office history will properly record your achievements with a lasting respect.

Very sincerely,

George Bush

Dad went to the White House to see Rose Mary Woods. It was Thursday, August 8, 1974, the day the president had announced he was going to resign:

I went over and saw Rose Woods. There was a pall over the entire White House. I debated about seeing her, but I felt it was a kind thing to do. I felt she would probably be sore about my resignation request letter and she was strained at first. Eddie Cox was there the whole time. Rose had some tears. I told her you’ll probably differ with me, but I am convinced that this is much the best thing for the President as well as the country. She said, “Yes, I do differ with you.” She was sore with [Senator Bob] Griffin and [Congressman John] Rhodes and others who have been close friends with the President. She was apparently blind to the enormity of what he had done. Faithful to the end . . .

Then, finally, on Friday, August 9, 1974, President Nixon announced his resignation:

There is no way to really describe the emotion of the day. Bar and I went down and had breakfast at the White House. Dean and Pat Burch and the Buchanans were there in the Conference Mess. There was an aura of sadness, like someone died. Grief. Saw Tricia and Eddie Cox in the Rose Garden—talked to them on the way into the ceremony. President Nixon looked just awful. He used glasses—the first time I ever saw them. Close to breaking down—understandably. Everyone in the room was in tears. The speech was vintage Nixon—a kick or two at the press—enormous strains. One couldn’t help but look at the family and the whole thing and think of his accomplishments and then think of the shame and wonder what kind of a man is this really. No morality—kicking his friends in those tapes—all of them. Gratuitous abuse. Caring for no one and yet doing so much . . .

I went back to the National Committee and addressed them. I tried to identify with the feelings I am sure they all felt—of betrayal and distrust and yet pride. I told them we had been through the toughest year and a half in history and yet I now felt we were coming on an optimistic period. I told them that the President [Ford] asked me to stay on. All in all it was a pretty good meeting although I felt drained emotionally and physically tired.

Having read the diary entries penned during the Watergate era, I was fascinated on the one hand and saddened on the other, to revisit the angst my dad had endured. It amazes me now that when he was with our family, Dad managed to keep his compass as a father throughout it all.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to work hard and put yourself on the line for a man who ultimately lies to you. It’s ironic because Dad bends over backward to be ethical—anything that even smells of borderline is out of the question with him. So defending Nixon for that time period must have been an enormous disappointment when he found out he was guilty as charged.

Dean Burch talked about whether, in hindsight, Dad should have resigned in protest: “During it all, he was able to keep up the front that everything is working and the system will take care of itself, and yet I know damn well that he must have gone home and thrown up after giving some of those speeches that he had to give to hold the thing together. He was placed in an absolutely impossible position, of course. We all were. We were all stuck in a situation that we just couldn’t control. But George had to be up in the front lines all the time, and that was a very difficult place to be.

“George might have done himself some momentary good by bailing out two or three weeks before the end, but the hell of it is I think that would have simply cheapened him, rather than having added to his stature in the long run. That was just not an option that some of us had. We were in too far to make a big pretext of resignation and stomping off in a huff. We were there and we just simply had to play out the hand—and we had no cards. And George was not an elected official and he didn’t have a constituency that he had to report back to, so he didn’t have that sort of an excuse . . . But I think George played it the hard way, which was to stay.”

It wasn’t until years later that Dad could look back at the whole episode and find the humor. In the late 1990s, he told an interviewer about a phone call he received at the height of Watergate from Bob Strauss, the head of the Democratic National Committee. Strauss said, “George, your job reminds me of making love to a gorilla.” Dad said, “How so?” And Strauss said, “Well, you can’t stop till the gorilla wants to.”

“And that’s the way it was,” said Dad. “You had no control over these things. Just happened on and on, and finally, the gorilla stopped and Nixon resigned.”

So it doesn’t surprise me that Dad would stay in the game, move forward, and take on the next challenge—despite such a profound disappointment. “It never occurred to me to get out of public life because of Richard Nixon’s transgressions,” Dad said to me. “Even then, I felt I could continue to serve in some way, somewhere.”