From Disclosure to the Saturday Night Massacre
We have repeatedly stressed our deep disturbance at the President’s refusal to release the Oval Office tapes.
—Wall Street Journal editorial, August 9, 1973
President Nixon is impeaching himself in the minds and hearts of his countrymen.
—Dallas Times Herald editorial, October 22, 1973
In view of our years of support for the man and for many of his policies, it is with regret that we now find it necessary, for the good of the country, to call upon Richard M. Nixon to resign.
—Salt Lake Tribune editorial, October 22, 1973
The tapes held out the promise of a quick ending to the Watergate affair, at least as far as resolving the question of presidential involvement. From the beginning, the public overwhelmingly favored release of the tapes. The more the president resisted, the more his popularity declined and the more his supporters crossed over and became opponents. Nixon believed he could weather the storm of protests because he knew other presidents had refused to release documents to congressional committees. In such instances Congress’s only recourse was impeachment, a procedure it had used only once, and that was in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. To fend off the various demands for the tapes, Nixon resorted to more and more detailed, contorted explanations. Increasingly, public opinion found such explanations unsatisfactory. By late October the struggle for the tapes erupted into a crisis.
The day after Alexander Butterfield’s testimony, the Ervin Committee unanimously requested the president to “provide the Committee with all relevant documents and tapes . . . that relate to the matters the Select Committee is authorized to investigate.”1 Nixon refused on the constitutional principle of separation of powers but added that “the tapes would not finally settle the central issues before your Committee.” He explained that he had listened to some of the tapes and that they were “entirely consistent with what I know to be the truth and what I have stated to be the truth.” But “they contain comments that persons with different perspectives and motivations would inevitably interpret in different ways.” Ervin commented to the committee that the president claimed that the tapes “sustain his position. But he says he’s not going to let anyone else hear them for fear they might draw a different conclusion.”2
In response, the committee voted, again unanimously, to issue two subpoenas to Nixon to turn over specific tapes and documents. This vote placed Nixon with Thomas Jefferson as the only presidents ever to be subpoenaed. In 1807 Jefferson had released the letter requested by the subpoena but refused to travel to Richmond, Virginia, to testify at a trial, stating that he would have testified if the trial were being held in Washington.
The same day that the Ervin Committee issued its subpoenas, Judge Sirica also issued Nixon a subpoena for certain tapes and documents on behalf of Special Prosecutor Cox. Three days later, on July 26, Ervin and Sirica received letters from the president with similar rejections. To Ervin, Nixon cited executive privilege. To Sirica, he claimed he followed the example of his predecessors, “who have consistently adhered to the position that the President is not subject to compulsory process from the courts.”3
Howard Baker, vice chair of the Ervin Committee, observed that “the issue was joined” and hoped for a compromise. He suggested that the president and the committee agree on “an informal panel of distinguished Americans not now holding a position in Government” to review the tapes and decide what was and was not relevant to the investigation.4 An editorial in the conservative National Review echoed Baker’s proposal: “It would be easy to devise a method of getting only the relevant data without invading either personal privacies or national security.”5 Nixon would not compromise.
Both the Ervin Committee and Cox turned to the U.S. District Court to seek enforcement of their subpoenas. Judge Sirica started with the Cox subpoena. To argue his claim of executive privilege, the president obtained the services of Professor Charles Alan Wright of the University of Texas Law School, a specialist in constitutional law. Wright submitted a brief of thirty-four legal-sized pages. Cox’s reply brief totaled sixty-seven legal-size pages plus an eighty-five-page appendix. Sirica then heard Wright and Cox present oral arguments, after which he announced he would render a decision within a week.
While the court, the special prosecutor, the Ervin Committee, and the president concerned themselves with the subpoenas, politicians, newspapers, and polls voiced their opinions about the tapes and Nixon’s refusals to release them. James L. Buckley, the only member of the Senate elected on a Conservative Party ballot, declared that Nixon “has painted himself into a very tight corner, unnecessarily and foolishly. I think clearly in the instant case the consensus of the American people will be that the President, while he has the right to exercise the privilege, ought not to be exercising it.”6 Senator Barry M. Goldwater, the 1964 Republican nominee for president and the author of the best-seller The Conscience of a Conservative, called Nixon’s separation of powers claim “a smoke screen.” Goldwater went further: “I think the President must release these tapes and he must come before the Senate Watergate Committee and the television cameras and tell the truth.”7 Nixon, of course, had his defenders. Senator Jesse A. Helms of North Carolina concluded, “The people think it’s much to do about nothing, that it’s a political vendetta.”8
The assessments in newspaper editorials varied. In Vermont the Burlington Free Press called “the entire Watergate affair . . . nothing but one big political stunt,”9 while the Fort Worth Star–Telegram called Nixon’s response to the subpoenas “proper and appropriate.”10 The Wichita Beacon recommended destruction of the tapes “forthwith.”11 In Mississippi the Biloxi Daily Herald, on the other hand, termed Nixon’s response “a disappointment,”12 and the Washington Evening Star believed that “for everybody’s sake, we urge the President to settle out of court.”13 In three editorials, the Wall Street Journal counseled compromise, pointing out that “we have repeatedly stressed our deep disturbance at the President’s refusal to release the Oval Office tapes.”14
Among Republican conservatives, Buckley and Goldwater commanded more respect than any other senators. In the esteem of corporate America no newspaper rivaled the Wall Street Journal. On August 3, the voice of intellectual conservatism, the National Review, joined the honored conservative chorus calling for Nixon to release the tapes. Watergate, the editorial declared, “has drained his political sinew, his moral authority, and his credibility.”15
Public opinion polls paralleled the views of Goldwater and the National Review rather than those of Helms and the Burlington Free Press. In its August 1973 poll, the Harris Survey found that only 32 percent of Americans awarded Nixon a “positive” overall job rating. The Gallup Poll conducted the first week in August registered a 31 percent overall approval rate and a 67 percent disapproval of his decision to keep the tapes. The fall in the president’s popularity from January to August was the sharpest decline ever recorded for a president.
The decline in Nixon’s support did not stem entirely from Watergate. The same day the public learned of the White House taping system from Butterfield, Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger admitted that the United States had secretly bombed Cambodia during 1969 and 1970 and that senior civilian and military officials had falsified reports, thereby withholding information from Congress to prevent public disclosure. During the next ten days Americans learned that the president had personally authorized the raids, totaling more than 3,600 flights; that the United States had secretly bombed neutral Cambodia; and that Secretary of State William P. Rogers had repeatedly lied about the bombing in classified testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Nixon had told the nation on April 30, 1970, that since 1954 U.S. policy “has been to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people.”16
Disclosure of the secret bombing precipitated a flurry of bills to limit presidential powers to order military forces into combat without congressional approval. On July 18, the House passed its bill by a 244 to 170 vote. Two days later the Senate voted 71 to 18 for a bill similar in intent but different in detail. Nixon warned Congress that he would veto any bill that incorporated the essence of the House and Senate proposals.
During late July and early August, witnesses continued to testify before the Ervin Committee. After Butterfield, Herbert Kalmbach explained how he had raised and distributed $220,000 to the seven men arrested in the Watergate break-in. He maintained that Ehrlichman approved the operation and stressed the need for secrecy while Dean issued specific instructions. The former White House secret agent Anthony T. Ulasewicz told how he transferred the money to burglars and their lawyers. Gordon C. Strachan reported that his boss, Haldeman, knew about G. Gordon Liddy’s intelligence-gathering project two months before the break-in and that after the break-in Haldeman wanted Strachan to destroy Liddy’s files.
Ehrlichman took the witness chair on July 24. In his prepared statement, the former chief domestic adviser to the president said he welcomed “this opportunity to lay out the facts” as he already had done before three grand juries, other House and Senate committees, and FBI investigations. He praised Nixon’s ability and policies, accused Dean of repeated “falsehoods,” and explained that Nixon “made a very deliberate effort to detach himself from the day-to-day strategic and tactical problems” of the 1972 campaign. Concluding his statement, Ehrlichman stressed, “I did not cover up anything to do with Watergate.”17
During the five days of questioning that followed, Ehrlichman remained confident and disputed the testimonies of Dean, Patrick Gray, and Mitchell. Chief counsel Sam Dash later wrote that Ehrlichman “used the witness chair as a platform to challenge the committee and to justify his conduct and that of Richard Nixon and Bob Haldeman.”18 Most of the spectators reacted negatively to Ehrlichman’s arrogance and testimony, which the minority counsel Fred Thompson later noted contained “glaring weaknesses.”19 Thompson also found the “moans and groans from the audience, hisses, applause, sustained applause on some occasions and other demonstrations” regrettable, embarrassing, and unfair.20 When Senator Inouye finished questioning Ehrlichman, he muttered, “What a liar,” an opinion he had not intended the microphone to pick up and broadcast. Ehrlichman proved to be a difficult witness for the committee.
Haldeman followed Ehrlichman in the witness chair and, with a cooperative, respectful manner, offered a striking contrast to his pugnacious predecessor. In a long, prepared opening statement, Haldeman asserted that “President Nixon had no knowledge of or involvement in either the Watergate affair itself or the subsequent efforts of a cover-up.” The former chief of staff to the president also claimed complete innocence and reported that the atmosphere in the White House during Nixon’s first term was “not one of fear or repression, but one of excitement, extremely hard work, dedication, and accomplishment.” Like Ehrlichman, Haldeman accused Dean of masterminding the cover-up because he was “sort of the Watergate project officer in the White House.” Haldeman added that Dean “apparently did not keep us fully posted.” At one point Haldeman exclaimed, “I don’t know now whom to believe. I may add that until the recent period both John Mitchell and Jeb Magruder denied any Watergate involvement.”21 Dash later wrote that during Haldeman’s three days before the committee, he “appeared as an absent-minded witness who could not recall any details of practically anything that had happened during the relevant periods about which he was questioned. The Haldeman testimony was very much like a replay of Mitchell’s testimony, but without the pipe.”22
The most startling information to surface during Haldeman’s appearance came when he said he had listened to the tapes of the Nixon-Dean conversations of September 15, 1972, and March 21, 1973. At the time Haldeman listened, he no longer worked at the White House. Senator Talmadge asked, “Why would a private citizen be more entitled to listen to those tapes than a Senate committee of the Congress of the United States?”23
The nastiest comment regarding Haldeman’s testimony came during a recess on the third day when a reporter asked Haldeman’s lawyer, John J. Wilson, if he thought Senator Weicker had questioned Haldeman fairly. Wilson replied that he didn’t mind Weicker, “What I mind is that little Jap.” The reference to Senator Inouye, a native-born American of Japanese ancestry, troubled Ervin, who pointed out that Inouye had lost an arm fighting bravely for the country in World War II and had won the Distinguished Service Cross for heroism. Baker added, “I have a great affection for him as well as a great admiration for him.”24 Subsequently, Wilson sent Inouye a letter of apology.
Six witnesses testified in the next four days of hearings. Their testimonies further damaged Nixon’s credibility and undermined his cover-up story. The former FBI director Patrick Gray, the former attorney general Richard Kleindienst, and Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen swore that between March 21 and April 15, 1973, the president never asked them anything about the Watergate investigations taking place. Yet on April 30, 1973, Nixon had informed Americans that “on March 21, I personally assumed the responsibility for coordinating intensive new inquiries into the matter and I personally ordered those conducting the investigations to get all the facts and report them directly to me, right here in this office.”25
The next three witnesses continued to contradict Nixon’s public statements and the testimonies of Haldeman and Ehrlichman. The former CIA director Richard Helms and Deputy Director Vernon Walters told of being pressured by the White House to use the CIA to block the FBI investigation of Watergate. Helms said that Dean had asked the CIA to post bail for the burglars and to put them on the CIA payroll so that they would have incomes. The former deputy director Robert E. Cushman Jr. reinforced the statements of Helms and Walters.
Damning as these testimonies were, and dramatic as the Ehrlichman and Haldeman testimonies had been, the hearings proved anticlimactic after Butterfield’s revelation about the taping system. On August 7, therefore, when the committee declared a month’s recess, most of those who followed the affair breathed a sigh of relief. Thirty-three witnesses had filled thirty-seven days of hearings and 3,573 pages of testimony.
The hearings, however, had a monumental impact. They caught and sustained the nation’s interest. Dean’s testimony focused attention on Nixon’s role in the cover-up, and a sufficient number of the president’s aides had detailed their involvement to convince the majority of Americans, 73 percent according to the Gallup Poll, that Nixon was involved. Senator Baker had reduced Watergate to eleven words: “What did the President know and when did he know it?” Initially, the question pleased Nixon’s supporters because few persons believed that his active role in the cover-up could be documented; the question stopped the Watergate affair at the door to the Oval Office. Once the nation learned of the tapes, this perception changed. Nixon’s refusal to release tapes underscored the centrality of Baker’s question and increased Dean’s believability. The public began to consider whether Nixon had something to hide, and the Congress, the special prosecutor, and the courts demanded the tapes to learn the answer. At stake was Nixon’s presidency.
On the evening of August 15, 1973, with the hearings in recess, the president addressed the nation “to speak out about the charges made and to provide a perspective on the issue for the American people.” He repeated his statement of May 22 that he “had no prior knowledge of the Watergate breakin,” that he “neither took part in nor knew about any of the subsequent cover-up activities,” and that he “neither authorized nor encouraged . . . illegal or improper campaign tactics.” Nixon reminded his audience that Dean had failed to corroborate his accusations. The president emphasized that because he “trusted the agencies conducting the investigations,” he “did not believe the newspaper accounts that suggested a cover-up.” He again explained why “the principle of confidentiality of Presidential conversations “ prevented his release of the tapes to the court. Finally, he warned of “a continued, backward-looking obsession with Watergate” and of “those who would exploit Watergate in order to keep us from doing what we were elected to do.”26
Two incidents during the following week document the toll of Watergate on Nixon’s patience. Five days after his national address, as the president was entering the convention hall in New Orleans to address the annual national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he turned abruptly, grabbed his press secretary Ron Ziegler by the shoulders, and shoved him toward the White House press corps that followed the president, saying, “I don’t want any press with me. You take care of it.”
The second incident occurred two days later, this time in San Clemente at the president’s first news conference in five months. The CBS reporter Dan Rather prefaced his question with “Mr. President, I want to state this question with due respect to your office, but also as direct as possible.” Nixon retorted, “That would be unusual.” Rather responded, “I would like to think not, sir. It concerns—.” The president interrupted, “You are always respectful, Mr. Rather. You know that.”27
The questions at the press conference exemplified how Watergate dominated the news in August 1973. Of the twenty questions reporters asked, seventeen dealt with subjects that touched the Watergate investigations. Two questions concerned Vice President Agnew, then under federal investigation on charges of extortion, tax fraud, and bribery. On August 6 the Wall Street Journal published the first major story about the Agnew investigation. An inquiry about Cambodia was the only other question not tied to Watergate. All the questions put the president on the defensive. The Associated Press reporter Frances Lewine, for example, asked, “If disclosure carries such a risk, why did you make the tapes in the first place?” Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News stated, “Mr. President, you have said repeatedly that you tried to get all the facts. . . . Yet former Attorney General John Mitchell said that if you had ever asked him at any time about the Watergate matter, he would have told you the whole story, chapter and verse.” Lisagor followed with his question, “Was Mr. Mitchell not speaking the truth when he said that before the Committee?” Clark R. Mollenhoff of the Des Moines Register and Tribune and a former Nixon aide, asked, “Where is the check on authoritarianism by the executive if the President is to be the sole judge of what the executive branch makes available and suppresses?” Even the question about Cambodia carried a barb. After reminding Nixon of his April 30 statement that the United States had respected Cambodian neutrality, a reporter inquired, “If you in light of what we now know, that there were fifteen months of bombing Cambodia previous to your statement, whether you owe an apology to the American people?”
Nixon’s replies added nothing to the positions and explanations he had offered in the past. He reiterated that he had always supported a thorough investigation, that he could not breach the principle of presidential confidentiality, that the court would exonerate Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and that “people who did not accept the mandate of ’72” exploited Watergate “in order to keep the President from doing his job.”28
The next issue of Time revealed the inadequacy of Nixon’s explanations and the seriousness of the problem he faced. In its cover story, the mainstream news weekly concluded that the president “made no real effort to answer the damaging charges and questions that have emerged from three months of testimony before the Ervin Committee,” including
•why he did not respond to acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray’s astonishing assertion to him on July 6, 1972, that certain White House aides were trying to “mortally wound” the president by interfering with the FBI and CIA;
•why he did not know about “the illegal disbursement of huge sums by his aides to the original seven Watergate defendants”;
•why, when he launched his own investigation last March 21, he did not immediately solicit the aid of the FBI or the CIA;
•how he and his administration could have been misled for nine months by only one man, Dean.
The article also reported that “the Scripps-Howard papers, which customarily support Nixon, dismissed the President’s speech as ‘regrettable, not to say disappointing,’ branded his policy on the tapes ‘a grave mistake,’ and added that ‘people with nothing to hide do not hide things.’” Moreover, the article described the results of the Oliver Quayle Poll, which found “that if the 1972 election were to be repeated today, Senator George McGovern (who received only 38 percent of the popular vote) would win with 51 percent.”29 The poll confirmed John Mitchell’s belief that if the voters knew about the background of the Watergate break-in and “the White House Horrors,” they would have rejected Nixon and elected McGovern. For Nixon, more bad news followed.
On August 29, Sirica ordered the president to turn over the tapes and documents to the judge himself for first inspection. Sirica believed he had taken a middle course between his belief that “no privilege existed for matters of a criminal nature” and Nixon’s legitimate concern for protection of confidentiality. After examining the tapes, Sirica planned to give the relevant, unprivileged portions to Cox. Nixon immediately announced that he would not comply with the court order. The following day, after conferring with his lawyers, the president reported that he would appeal the ruling to the court of appeals. Cox also appealed the ruling because he opposed judicial censorship and wanted the president to give the tapes directly to the grand jury.
The next week the president held another news conference, his second in the space of two weeks. By way of contrast, he had held thirty-one news conferences during his first fifty-five months in office, considerably fewer than once a month. Six of the fourteen questions concerned Watergate; a seventh dealt with governmental expenditures at the two Nixon houses; and an eighth inquired about Agnew. Once again Nixon revealed hostility toward the press when he replied to a question about “rebuilding confidence” in his leadership. He admitted that it was “a problem, it is true.” He continued: “But for four months to have the President of the United States by innuendo, by leak, by, frankly, leers and sneers of commentators, which is their perfect right, attacked in every way” led to a wearing away of public confidence.
Nixon’s two news conferences soon after his August 15 speech indicated his strategy, as Time emphasized, to avoid a response to any specific charge, to discredit reporters who kept asking questions, and to tie up the tapes in an endless legal contest. He hoped that the public would eventually tire of Watergate and as interest diminished that reporters and politicians would turn to other subjects and issues. Nixon had no other choice—except to tell the truth, ask forgiveness, and hope to escape impeachment.
September brought little relief for the embattled president. On September 4 a Los Angeles grand jury indicted Ehrlichman, Liddy, Egil Krogh Jr., and David R. Young Jr. for the 1971 burglary of the office of Lewis Fielding, Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. The defendants, except for Ehrlichman, were members of the Plumbers and had operated from an office in the White House; Ehrlichman had organized the group. Four days later the Harris Poll reported that 66 percent of Americans agreed with the statement, “If it had not been for the press exposés, the whole Watergate mess would never have been found out.” On September 10 the House of Representatives voted 334 to 11 to cite Liddy for contempt of Congress because he refused to testify before the House Armed Services Special Subcommittee on Intelligence, which was investigating possible CIA participation in the Watergate affair. Three days after the House vote, the seven judges who constituted the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued a unanimous statement urging Special Prosecutor Cox and President Nixon to settle out of court their disagreement over the tapes.
In September two prominent politicians also made news by speaking about Watergate. At a reception for members of the Republican National Committee, former Texas governor John B. Connally told reporters, “There are times when the President of the United States would be right in not obeying a decision of the Supreme Court.” In a speech on the Senate floor, Democratic senator Ted Kennedy countered, “If President Nixon defied a Supreme Court order to turn over the tapes, a responsible Congress would be left with no recourse but to exercise its power of impeachment.”30
On September 14, four of the seven Watergate burglars requested Judge Sirica to allow them to change their pleas to not guilty and to grant them a new trial on the grounds that Hunt and “high officials of the executive branch” had pressured them into pleading guilty to protect national security. They told the judge they had taken part in the break-in on the understanding that it was an authorized government operation. Three days later Hunt petitioned Sirica to permit him to withdraw his guilty plea; he also asked Sirica to dismiss the charges against him on the grounds that the prosecution had not observed due process. Sirica denied the requests.
The same day that Hunt petitioned Sirica, Donald H. Segretti pleaded guilty to four counts of campaign law violations. Appearing before a U.S. magistrate in Washington, Segretti agreed to cooperate with the special prosecutor. He also arranged to testify before the Ervin Committee under an immunity grant. The former White House special counsel Charles W. Colson then made news by invoking the Fifth Amendment and refusing to testify on the grounds that his answers might incriminate him.
On September 20, Nixon’s attorney Charles A. Wright and Special Prosecutor Cox both advised the court of appeals that they had failed to reach a compromise on the tapes. Wright repeatedly maintained that no court could order the president to release private presidential papers against his will. Whichever way the appeals court ruled, the other party intended to appeal to the Supreme Court. A constitutional crisis loomed.
A Harris Survey released the tabulations of the answers to its questions, “If you had to do it over again, who would you vote for for President in 1972—McGovern or Nixon?” As in the Oliver Quayle Poll, McGovern won the hypothetical election. The initial phase of the cover-up, therefore, had fulfilled its primary objective of impeding investigation and withholding information regarding the illegal activities that Nixon’s aides had taken to ensure his reelection. The Harris Survey also found that 60 percent of Americans believed Nixon “knew about the cover-up,” 24 percent believed he “did not know,” and 16 percent were “not sure.”31 The Gallup Poll of early September 1973 recorded that only 35 percent of Americans approved of the president’s handling of his job.
After a seven-week recess the Ervin Committee resumed its hearings on September 24, with E. Howard Hunt as its first witness. The previous March, when Sirica provisionally sentenced Hunt to more than thirty years in prison, he told the convicted conspirator that he might reduce the final sentence if Hunt cooperated with the grand jury and Senate investigations. With little likelihood of a presidential pardon, with no hope of financial support from secret Republican funds, and with the cover-up story exposed, Hunt decided that cooperation best served his self-interest.
Hunt testified that Colson knew about Liddy’s espionage operation in January 1972, that Colson urged him to falsify diplomatic cables to implicate President Kennedy in the assassination of South Vietnam’s president, and that Colson sent him to burglarize the apartment of Arthur Bremer immediately after Bremer shot Alabama’s governor George C. Wallace during the 1972 primary campaign. Hunt also told of White House aides destroying materials relating to espionage activities. At the end of his prepared opening statement, he emphasized that he considered his various assignments “as a duty to my country.”32
A combative Patrick J. Buchanan followed Hunt. The presidential speechwriter criticized the committee for failure to extend to him “elementary courtesy” regarding notification of his appearance and accused the committee staff of “character assassination.” He dismissed as “utter fraud” and “altogether untrue” the assertion that the clandestine activities of Liddy, McCord, Hunt, Ulasewicz, Segretti, and others contributed to the failure of Muskie to win the Democratic presidential nomination. In his answers to questions, Buchanan followed the traditional maxim that the best defense is a good offense. He admitted no wrongdoing and left an image of a confident, articulate, defender of Nixon.33
A repentant Segretti followed the sparring Buchanan and described the dirty tricks he had conducted to deny Muskie the nomination. The thirty-two-year-old lawyer admitted, among many other things, that he stole Muskie’s stationery and wrote and mailed spurious letters on which he forged Muskie’s signature. Segretti also told how he disrupted political meetings by placing stink bombs and by paying persons to act in “an unruly manner.” He considered such actions “similar to college pranks” and “nothing improper or illegal.” According to Segretti, Dwight L. Chapin, Nixon’s press secretary, hired him, and Nixon’s personal attorney Herbert Kalmbach paid him. The committee canceled Chapin’s appearance when he said he would plead the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions.
The Hunt, Buchanan, and Segretti testimonies, as well as those of Martin D. Kelly and Robert M. Benz, who worked for Segretti, generated little interest. Nixon’s culpability, which the tapes presumably would reveal, remained the focus of attention. The public, moreover, already knew the contours and much of the detail of campaign sabotage and campaign contributions. Hence, American Airlines, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, Braniff, Phillips Petroleum, and Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company also generated only a modest shock when they pleaded guilty to making illegal contributions to Nixon’s 1972 campaign. Suddenly, however, news about Vice President Spiro Agnew jolted the country.
Throughout August, September, and early October, the disclosures of Agnew’s graft slowly unfolded in public and provided a front-page diversion from the Watergate story. A year earlier the Internal Revenue Service, following up anonymous tips, started an investigation into the relationship of Baltimore County officials and the army of contractors, real estate agents, architects, consultants, and engineers who helped build Baltimore’s suburban sprawl. The IRS uncovered substantial evidence of regular kickbacks of fees to public officials in exchange for contracts, and then called U.S. attorney George Beall. A member of a prominent Republican family, Beall was the younger brother of Maryland’s U.S. senator J. Glenn Beall Jr. In December 1972, a Baltimore grand jury was convened to investigate these activities. A month later, one contractor told of payoffs to Agnew going back a decade, when he had served as Baltimore County Executive, but continuing after he became vice president. Agnew quickly retained a lawyer. By summer 1973 the grand jury had gathered what it believed was irrefutable evidence to convict Agnew of bribery, extortion, and tax evasion.
During June and July Beall kept Attorney General Elliot Richardson informed of the Agnew case. On August 6 Richardson told Nixon. Later that day Agnew met the president to proclaim his innocence. At a news conference two days later, Agnew denounced the charges against him as “damned lies, false and scurrilous and malicious.” He also promised full cooperation because he had nothing to hide.
Nixon faced a dilemma. The previous spring he had considered Agnew as insurance for his presidency because Nixon believed Congress would hesitate to impeach him if it meant moving Agnew to the White House. Fully briefed by the Justice Department, however, Nixon knew Agnew was guilty and consequently wanted the vice president to resign. Conservatives, on the other hand, considered Agnew their champion. Needing their support in his Watergate battles, Nixon did not want to antagonize them by failing to stand by Agnew. On August 22, 1973, when a reporter asked, “What is the state of your confidence in your Vice President at this point in time?” Nixon replied that his “confidence in his integrity has not been shaken.” Two weeks later Nixon again expressed his “confidence in the Vice President’s integrity.”34
On September 13 Agnew’s lawyers and Justice Department officials started plea bargaining in earnest. Agnew wanted to resign with honor and avoid prison. The prosecutors who had worked long and hard to build a case wanted to go to trial. Attorney General Richardson feared that Nixon’s position was tenuous; believing Agnew unfit to assume the presidency should anything happen to Nixon, he wanted Agnew gone, the quicker the better. Richardson nursed presidential ambitions himself. On September 15 the prosecutors offered their final proposal. They would accept Agnew’s resignation, combined with a plea of no contest to the charges. In return, Agnew would avoid prison. Agnew told his lawyers to break off negotiations.
Agnew attempted to save himself by asking the House of Representatives to investigate the charges against him because only that body could initiate impeachment proceedings and because impeachment was the only method to remove a vice president from office. After the House leadership rejected Agnew’s request and the Baltimore grand jury called its first witness, the vice president filed a motion in federal district court to prohibit the Justice Department from giving additional evidence to the grand jury. Agnew contended that no criminal court could indict or convict a vice president. Implicitly, Agnew raised the question whether a court could indict a president. On September 29, before the National Federation of Republican Women, Agnew delivered a polemical defense of himself, criticized officials within the Justice Department, and announced, “I will not resign if indicted.”35
Nixon countered. He sent word to Agnew that if he again attacked the Justice Department, Nixon would block any plea bargain. The Justice Department then published its legal judgment that although a criminal court could not indict a president, it could indict a vice president. On October 7 Agnew capitulated and agreed to resume negotiations. He accepted the essence of the deal he had rejected when terminating the earlier bargaining.
At 2:05 p.m. on October 10 a messenger delivered Agnew’s resignation to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. A few minutes later the former vice president appeared in Baltimore District Court and pleaded no contest to a single charge of federal income tax evasion. The judge fined Agnew $10,000 and sentenced him to three years of unsupervised probation. Two days later Nixon nominated the Republican leader of the House of Representatives Gerald Ford as vice president. Senate Republicans and the Republican National Committee had favored New York’s governor Nelson Rockefeller, and the conservative wing of the party had supported California’s governor Ronald Reagan. Nixon rejected both as having personalities too strong. His first choice was John Connally, but Nixon believed the Senate would refuse to confirm him. Nixon did not view Ford as presidential, but he knew both houses of Congress would confirm him; he also thought Ford’s nonpresidential bearing might cause Congress to pause before moving to impeach Nixon himself. In his speech nominating Ford, Nixon never mentioned Agnew’s name or the reason for the vacancy.
The Agnew case raised angry voices across the country. In its first issue after the vice president’s resignation, Time pointed out that the Justice Department’s leniency “was no shining example of equality under law” and characterized Agnew as “a man morally and intellectually unfit for national leadership.”36 The Charleston (W. Va.) Gazette called the Agnew story “a sorry chronicle of immorality, deceit, and hypocrisy” and repeated the obvious—that “the nation’s best known critic of ‘soft’ judges gratefully accepted a token sentence from a lenient court.”37 Agnew never acknowledged wrongdoing. The court and the nation viewed his plea as an admission of guilt, but the former vice president interpreted his plea as an unselfish act in the national interest to spare the country a trial.
The Agnew scandal clearly damaged Nixon. The Miami News remarked that “George McGovern was rightly responsible for his poor judgment in choosing Tom Eagleton as a running mate. Likewise, Nixon must accept responsibility for creating this unprecedented national disgrace.” The Wall Street Journal hoped that “Agnew’s turnabout would be an inspiration for others in government. . . . Our fondest hope is that President Nixon would set aside his own confrontation-prone constitutional battle and agree to release key Watergate tape recordings.”38
The steady erosion of public confidence may have been personally unpleasant for Nixon, but the real threat to his presidency remained the possibility that the court might order him to turn over the tapes. Two days after Agnew resigned, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, by a five to two vote, upheld Judge Sirica’s August 29 ruling that the president give him the tapes for inspection before transfer to the special prosecutor. The appeals court allowed the president a week to file an appeal to the Supreme Court.
Four days later, Melvin R. Laird, Nixon’s chief domestic affairs adviser and secretary of defense during Nixon’s first term, became the first high-ranking White House official to discuss with reporters the possibility that the House of Representatives might start impeachment proceedings if the president defied a Supreme Court ruling. The next day Judge Sirica ruled that he lacked jurisdiction to force the president to release the tapes to the Ervin Committee. Sirica’s ruling had no impact because Nixon already faced a court-ordered deadline related to the special prosecutor’s original subpoena. Tensions mounted.
On Friday evening, October 19, Nixon announced his “decisive actions . . . that would avoid the necessity of Supreme Court review.” Rather than transfer the tapes to Sirica, as the court ordered, Nixon planned to submit “a statement prepared by me personally from the subpoenaed tapes.” To authenticate the accuracy of the summaries, he would permit Senator John Stennis (D-Miss.) “unlimited access to the tapes.” The president said he was breaching the principle of confidentiality “with the greatest reluctance,” but by giving a senator, rather than a judge, access he avoided the establishment of “a precedent that would be available to four hundred district judges.” In return for the concession, Nixon wanted an end to “the constitutional tensions of Watergate”; he wanted the special prosecutor never again to subpoena tapes or papers. The president announced further that both Chairman Ervin and Vice Chairman Baker of the Senate committee had agreed to the proposal, as did Senator Stennis. Cox, however, rejected the plan. Accordingly, Nixon directed the special prosecutor, “as an employee of the executive branch, to make no further attempts by judicial process to obtain tapes, notes, or memoranda of Presidential conversations.” Nixon also made it clear that in the future he would give nothing to the special prosecutor. This position, combined with Sirica’s ruling that he could not compel the president to give material to the Ervin Committee, meant that Nixon intended to keep his files locked. More important, the announcement meant that he would not obey the court and would not appeal the court’s ruling. Nixon’s strategy would fail, however, without Cox’s acquiescence.
Behind the scenes that Friday evening and all day Saturday, Nixon’s chief of staff, Alexander Haig, and other White House aides negotiated with Attorney General Richardson and other Justice Department officials to overcome Cox’s strenuous objection. Twice, Cox argued, courts upheld his subpoenas, and he would accept nothing less than compliance. He reminded Haig and Richardson that when he accepted appointment, he did so with the promise of complete independence.
Nixon broke the impasse by ordering Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused and resigned, with regret. When nominating Richardson as attorney general on April 30, Nixon had stated, “I have given him absolute authority to make all decisions bearing upon the prosecution of the Watergate case and related matters.” In his resignation letter, Richardson reminded Nixon that at the time of his confirmation as attorney general he had pledged publicly that he would “not countermand or interfere with the Special Prosecutor’s decisions or actions.” At the time Richardson gave that pledge, Nixon declared that Richardson had his “full support.” When Richardson personally submitted his resignation, Nixon asked him to place national interest above his personal pledge and remain on the job. Richardson replied that he thought honoring his pledge was in the national interest.
Shortly thereafter, Haig telephoned Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus and told him the president ordered him to fire Cox. Ruckelshaus refused and also resigned. Haig next telephoned Solicitor General Robert H. Bork, who agreed to come to the White House. There the former Yale professor, as designated acting attorney general, drafted a letter of dismissal and sent it to Cox by messenger. In 1987, when President Reagan nominated Bork for a seat on the Supreme Court, the opposition of those who viewed him as an accomplice in this chain of events successfully blocked the appointment.
At 8:25 p.m. that Saturday evening, Press Secretary Ron Ziegler announced that the president had accepted the resignations of Richardson and Ruckelshaus, had fired Cox, had abolished the Office of the Watergate Special Prosecutor Force, and had returned the Watergate case to the Department of Justice. Forty minutes later FBI agents arrived at Cox’s office and placed it under guard. The agents refused to let staff members remove anything, even pictures of their wives and children. The press immediately labeled this series of events the Saturday Night Massacre.
Nixon had seriously misjudged the national mood. The Salt Lake Tribune, which had endorsed him for president in 1960, 1968, and 1972, observed that Nixon “considered himself above the rule of law” and concluded that “in view of our years of support for the man and for many of his policies, it is with regret that we now find it necessary, for the good of the country, to call upon Richard M. Nixon to resign.” If he failed to do so, the editorial continued, “Congress should move with alacrity to impeach him.”39 The Honolulu Star–Bulletin reminded its readers that it twice had endorsed Nixon for president but now believed he “should resign.” The New Orleans States–Item accused the president of “acting in open defiance of Congress and the Courts” and of having “gone back on his word to Mr. Cox, Mr. Richardson, Congress, and the American people. . . . We have reached a point where we no longer can believe our President.” In Florida, the St. Petersburg Times called for Nixon’s resignation. The Dallas Times Herald judged Nixon’s actions since “last spring” as an “arrogant disregard for the courts and the Congress” and concluded that “President Nixon is impeaching himself in the minds and hearts of his countrymen.” The Louisville Courier–Journal agreed: “Here is a President who says he wants no stone left unturned in discovering the whole truth about the Watergate scandals, but refuses to obey court orders for production of his tapes.”40
Nixon was criticized in other quarters as well. The Monday following the Saturday Night Massacre, delegates to the AFL–CIO biennial convention approved a resolution calling for Nixon to resign. A year earlier, by contrast, during the presidential campaign, the AFL–CIO endorsed no candidate but supported Nixon’s Vietnam policy. Also on Monday, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Carl Albert, met with party leaders to begin a preliminary study on the possible impeachment of the president. The next morning Republican leaders in Congress warned Nixon’s emissaries that the House would vote for impeachment unless the president surrendered the tapes. Judge Sirica, meanwhile, contemplated whether or not to hold Nixon in contempt of court for refusing to comply with the court order.
The fire storm of criticism forced Nixon to retreat, regarding both the tapes and the special prosecutor. On October 23 he sent the White House attorney Charles Alan Wright to Sirica with the news that the president would obey the court and turn over the subpoenaed documents and tapes. At a news conference three days later, the president promised “total cooperation from the executive branch.” By the time Nixon made this promise, fifty-three senators had cosponsored a resolution authorizing Sirica to appoint a special prosecutor independent of the executive branch of government.
The president’s answers to questions at his next news conference indicated the severe limits of his conception of “total cooperation.” He stated that in the future he would “not provide Presidential documents to a Special Prosecutor” but would provide “information that is needed from such documents.” Repeatedly, Nixon explained he had “a constitutional responsibility to defend the Office of the Presidency from any encroachment on confidentiality.”
Once again Watergate dominated a presidential news conference. Of the seventeen questions reporters asked, fourteen dealt with Watergate, despite the announcement the day before that Nixon had placed U.S. armed forces on worldwide alert because of Soviet threats in the Middle East. Indeed, when Secretary of State Kissinger made this announcement at a press conference, distrust of Nixon immediately surfaced. Reporters questioned whether the president had alerted the military to rally support following the negative reaction to the Saturday Night Massacre. Nixon returned the media’s distrust with antagonism. He opened his news conference with a statement about the situation in the Middle East, explaining the procedure by which the United States had helped to produce a cease-fire in the sixteen-day Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War. He considered the potential Soviet intervention as a Cold War crisis second only to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ironically, during this crisis Nixon, occupied by Watergate, did not participate in any of the White House deliberations. Then the president said, “Turning now to the subject of our attempts to get a cease-fire on the home front, that is a bit more difficult.” At one point during the news conference, Nixon commented on recent news coverage of his actions. He maintained that he had “never heard or seen such outrageous, vicious, distorted reporting in twenty-seven years of public life.” Another time he accused newspapers and television networks of reporting information, “knowing it was untrue.” When asked what specific coverage had “so aroused [his] anger,” Nixon replied he was not angry. “You see,” he continued, “one can only be angry with those he respects.”41
Once again a Nixon news conference did little to stop the negative slide of his presidency. The Wall Street Journal characterized the president as “a pitiful, helpless giant” at the mercy of his critics. The editorial reminded its readers that for his plight, Nixon “has no one to blame but himself.” The same day, October 29, Time ran its cover story, “Richard Nixon Stumbles to the Brink,” and concluded that the Saturday Night Massacre left Nixon’s “survival in the Oval Office in grave doubt.” Time described the situation as one of the nation’s “gravest constitutional crises.”
On October 30, the New York Times reported yet another story that gave Americans reason for distrusting the Nixon administration. Richard Kleindienst admitted that in 1971, while he was serving as an assistant attorney general, he had been ordered by President Nixon to halt Justice Department action against the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT). Yet at his confirmation hearings for attorney general, Kleindienst testified under oath that the White House had made no attempt to influence the case. (Subsequently, on November 4 Kleindienst confessed to committing perjury during his confirmation hearings.)
Also on October 30, the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence issued its report on CIA involvement in Watergate. Top White House officials, the report concluded, had attempted to use the CIA to block the FBI investigation of the June 1972 break-in. The story, of course, was familiar, but the report certified its credibility.
The next day brought still more negative Watergate news. The White House attorney J. Fred Buzhardt Jr. notified Judge Sirica that two of the nine tapes the court had ordered did not exist. Buzhardt explained that one four-minute conversation on June 20, 1972, had taken place on a White House family telephone that was not part of the taping system. The special prosecutor wanted this particular segment because it recorded the first conversation between Nixon and Mitchell following the burglary. As for the second one, the machine had run out of tape; it would have covered the fifty-five-minute conversation between Nixon and Dean on April 15, 1973. According to Dean, Nixon commented during their meeting that he never should have discussed with Colson the possibility of clemency for Howard Hunt. Dean also claimed that he and Nixon discussed hush money for the defendants and that he told the president that he had briefed Ehrlichman and Haldeman on every detail of Watergate. Buzhardt never explained why the White House waited so long to notify the court that these two crucial conversations were never taped.
As reaction set in to the announcement about the nonexistent tapes, the president nominated William B. Saxbe as attorney general. The respected Republican senator from Ohio had criticized the president for his December 1972 bombing in southeast Asia and for his handling of Watergate. Robert H. Bork thereupon named Leon Jaworski special prosecutor. A conservative “Democrat for Nixon” from Texas and a former president of the American Bar Association, Jaworski had served in the Justice Department under Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and had sat on four presidential commissions during the Johnson administration. Jaworski also had amassed a small fortune as a corporate lawyer in Houston. Before accepting the position, the Texan received guarantees that he would have total independence and that the president could not discharge him without the consent of the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House, the Senate, the House Judiciary Committee, and the Senate Judiciary Committee. Jaworski made it clear that he would bring the president to court, if necessary. Initially, Cox’s staff of young lawyers viewed with suspicion the law-and-order but soft-spoken Jaworski. Saxbe and Jaworski were solid appointees, but respectability could not offset the impact of the Saturday Night Massacre and the belated news that two of the nine subpoenaed tapes did not exist. Still, Nixon, at least, had taken a noticeable positive step.
The events of autumn continued to erode support for Nixon. In September the Harris Survey found that 31 percent of Americans believed Nixon should resign; by November the figure had jumped to 43 percent. The survey also revealed that between September and November the percentage of Americans who disapproved of the president’s handling of the Watergate tapes had increased from 71 percent to 83 percent.42
Equally graphic and threatening to the Nixon presidency was the steady increase among Nixon supporters who no longer found him credible. Their criticism was specific and expressed a common sense difficult to refute. From Kansas, the Emporia Gazette asked, “How much more does the President expect his supporters to endure? . . . Many of us out in the far-flung parts of the nation have had enough. If he is innocent, he should reverse his course and cooperate wholeheartedly with all the people who are investigating the Watergate mess—the Senate Committee, the Special Prosecutor, the grand jury—everybody.”43 From Columbia, South Carolina, the State asked, “Will the incredible series of events involving the President and the Watergate affair never end? We devoutly want to believe in the President and in what he says and does. But at every turn, after yielding to him the benefit of doubt, a subsequent event surfaces to wring out his credibility again.”44 The Wall Street Journal commented that “in general, though, the press coverage of Watergate has been repeatedly and massively vindicated by events. The press did not invent the burglary, nor did it imagine the cover-up.”45
Nixon’s refusal to release the tapes placed him in defiance of the positions of a growing number of Republican newspapers and politicians, the majority of Americans, and the unanimous membership of the Senate Watergate Committee. The country already had heard Republican calls for impeachment, were Nixon to defy a court order to release the tapes. The president could delay the court order with various stratagems, but the reaction to the Saturday Night Massacre demonstrated beyond any doubt that he eventually would have to obey the court and relinquish the tapes.