November 1973 to May 1974
The President Should Resign.
—Time editorial, November 12, 1973
Does anyone believe anything any more?
—Kansas City Times editorial, November 28, 1973
There can no longer be a charge that he was railroaded out of office by vengeful Democrats or a hostile press.
—Chicago Tribune editorial, May 9, 1974
On November 12, 1973, Time, a symbol of Richard Nixon’s middle America, published the first editorial of its fifty-year history, “The President Should Resign.” It opened with the assertion that Nixon “has irredeemably lost his moral authority, the confidence of most of the country, and therefore his ability to govern effectively.” Because Time had “endorsed Nixon for President three times,” its editors had reached their conclusions “with deep reluctance.”
The editorial summarized the pattern of corruption that included the resignation of the vice president, the indictment of two former cabinet members, and the indictment, convictions, or confessions of seven close presidential aides. It then cataloged Nixon’s involvement in the Huston Plan, the Plumbers, the misuse of the FBI and the CIA, the job offer to the presiding judge at the Ellsberg trial, and the withholding of wiretap information from that judge. Finally, “as a staggering climax to all that went before,” the editorial recounted Nixon’s initial refusal to obey the court and release the White House tapes, his firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, and his “sudden claim that two crucial tapes do not exist.”1 The editorial ended by stating that the president’s resignation “would show the true power of popular government.”
Time’s editorial confirms that Nixon had lost mainstream Republican support, and it gave legitimacy to calls for the president to resign. Nixon launched a public relations campaign to counter the pressure. The pressure, however, continued, fueled in part by a steady stream of news stories of actions that further damaged the president’s credibility. Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski and Judge John Sirica demanded that Nixon honor the court order to release the tapes while the House Judiciary Committee took initial steps on the road to impeachment. Media attention to these events, in turn, contributed to an atmosphere of tension, revelations, and animosities.
In May the president desperately attempted to blunt the demand for the tapes. Instead of releasing them, he published an edited transcript of them. The coarse language and content of the transcripts appalled most Americans and failed to lessen the demand for the tapes themselves. Rather than resolving the problem, Nixon’s ploy produced a crisis equal to the Saturday Night Massacre.
On the political spectrum, William F. Buckley’s conservative National Review represented the right, just as Time stood in the political mainstream. In its reaction to the Saturday Night Massacre, the National Review stopped short of calling for the president’s resignation, but it maintained that Nixon had been “in direct defiance of the courts” and concluded that “if Mr. Nixon becomes convinced . . . that he has irretrievably lost the support and trust of a solid majority of the people, it will then be his duty to resign.” Because all the polls indicated that Nixon had lost the “support and trust of a solid majority,” the only question was whether the loss was retrievable. The National Review believed the answer would be evident within “a few more months at most.”2
An increasing number of Republican politicians echoed the National Review and Time. Senator James L. Buckley (C-N.Y.) maintained that the missing tapes “dramatically shifted the burden of the proof” to Nixon. On ABC’s Issues and Answers, Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass.) stated that the president had lost the country’s confidence and should resign. On CBS’s Face the Nation, Senator Charles McC. Mathias, Jr. (R-Md.) called for Nixon to release everything Cox had requested. Senator Peter H. Dominick (R-Colo.) pronounced, “There can be no more deals and no more technical arguments about evidence.” Instead, he argued that Nixon “should permit complete access to all tapes, papers, files, documents, and memoranda” that Cox and the Senate Watergate Committee requested. Senator Barry Goldwater repeated his August 1973 advice that the president “show up some morning at the Ervin Committee and say, ‘Here I am, Sam. What do you want to know?’” Robert Ray, the Republican governor of Iowa, agreed: “Perhaps the only alternative left is an appearance by the president before the Senate Watergate Committee.” Ray’s Massachusetts counterpart, Francis W. Sargent, voiced even less optimism: “I don’t see how Mr. Nixon could recover.” Nixon’s former attorney general Elliot L. Richardson observed, “Behind the layers of secrecy successively peeled back by persistent investigations, we caught an ugly glimpse of the abuse of power. It has been a frightening glimpse.”3
The editorials, the evaluations and suggestions of Republican politicians, and the laments of newspapers in places as varied as Charleston, South Carolina, and Emporia, Kansas, combined to undermine the charge that criticism of the president stemmed from partisanship. Criminal convictions, moreover, made news on a regular basis and proved that the charges rested on fact, not on wishful partisanship. Early in November, for example, Donald Segretti received a prison sentence for his participation in the dirty tricks against the candidates in the 1972 Democratic Party primaries. Four days later Judge Sirica sentenced six of the Watergate burglars to prison terms. At the sentencing, James W. McCord offered no excuses: “My participation in Watergate was in error and wrong.” He then added, “I believed then as I believe now” that the president had authorized the burglary.4 The next day an editorial in the Nashville Tennessean declared, “The crisis is very real. It has not been manufactured by the media, or the opposition Democrats, or the ‘Nixon haters.’ It is the product of men in government he selected and trusted.”5
The willingness to corrupt democratic processes involved more than Nixon’s assistants, cabinet members, and vice president. Three days after Sirica sentenced McCord and the others, Orin E. Atkins, chairman of the board of Ashland Oil, and Claude C. Wild Jr., vice president of Gulf Oil, pleaded guilty to having made illegal campaign contributions, using corporate funds, to Nixon’s reelection campaign. They joined the long list of corporations guilty of similar crimes.
In the midst of this torrent of evidence of illegal activity, increasing criticism from former supporters, and calls for resignation, Nixon launched what he and the press called “Operation Candor.” He intended to explain his actions and policies to the public and to Republicans. The appointments of Leon Jaworski and William Saxbe, Nixon hoped, had signaled a departure from previous positions. Then, on November 7, the president closed an address to the nation about energy shortages “with a personal note,” in which he called Watergate “deplorable” but declared he had “no intention whatever of walking away from the job I was elected to do.” He promised to do everything possible to remove “any doubts as to the integrity of the man who occupies the highest office in this land.” Five days later he released a detailed statement concerning the two conversations the taping system had missed. To help the court determine the subjects on his mind on the days of those conversations, Nixon announced he would voluntarily submit portions of tapes and diary notes he had made for postpresidential use in writing his memoirs. On November 15, at the conclusion of a speech before the annual convention of the National Association of Realtors, Nixon again closed with a reference to Watergate. He acknowledged “overzealous” persons had made mistakes, “mistakes that I would never have tolerated.” But he insisted again, “I am not going to walk away” from “the job I was elected to do.”6
Another part of Operation Candor consisted of a series of six meetings with the 234 Republicans in Congress to provide them the opportunity to question the president about Watergate. After one meeting with fifteen senators, which lasted more than two hours, the minority leader Hugh Scott stated that “everyone in the room—everyone—agreed on the need for full disclosure.” Howard Baker urged Nixon to testify before the Ervin Committee. Tennessee’s other senator, William E. Brock, later remarked, “It was more comments than questions.”7 The meetings with House Republicans proved equally lacking in results. Nixon actually held eight, rather than the planned six, meetings, all within a week, and forty-six Democrats were included among those who were invited.
On November 17, while on a five-day southern trip with stops in Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee, Nixon held a press conference in Orlando at the annual convention of the Associated Press Managing Editors Association. Watergate dominated once again, and once again the president reiterated that he had no intention of resigning. He explained the two missing tapes by saying that his setup was “no Apollo system,” that President Johnson had “much better equipment.” When asked if it were true that he had paid $792 in federal income tax in 1970 and $878 in 1971, he replied yes, because he had benefited from a large tax deduction when he donated his vice presidential papers to the government. He had made the transaction, he added, on the advice of Johnson early in 1969. A few minutes later, Nixon postponed a question and volunteered additional information about his personal finances. He said he welcomed “this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I am not a crook.”
In answering a question regarding executive privilege, Nixon recognized that privilege had limits and reminded his audience that he had waived the “privilege with regard to all members of my staff who have any knowledge of or who have had any charges made against them in the Watergate matter.” Nixon added that he also had “voluntarily waived privilege with regard to turning over the tapes.” Above all, he wanted “to avoid a precedent that might destroy the principle of confidentiality for future Presidents.” He identified “the Jefferson rule” as his guide, because in that case, according to Nixon, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled for Thomas Jefferson when that president turned over a summary of correspondence to the Court rather than the letters themselves. Nixon said he had followed Jefferson’s precedent to guarantee a “very free flow of conversation, and that means confidentiality—I have a responsibility to protect the Presidency.”8 During the other three stops on his southern trip, Nixon avoided in his speeches any mention of Watergate. A few days after his return to Washington, a Library of Congress study cited errors of interpretation and fact in Nixon’s version of the Jefferson case.
What little credibility Nixon may have gained by mid-November with his Operation Candor quickly dissipated when the White House counsel, J. Fred Buzhardt Jr., informed Judge Sirica that an eighteen-and-a-half-minute segment of the subpoenaed June 20, 1972, tape carried a buzz tone but no conversation. The tape recorded a conversation between the president and Haldeman the day after Nixon’s return to Washington from Florida, where he had been at the time of the break-in on June 17. Before the two men met, Haldeman had spent ninety minutes with Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Dean, and Kleindienst.
On November 26, a troubled Sirica conducted a hearing at which the president’s personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, testified to having apparently erased five minutes of the tape when she interrupted transcribing it to answer the telephone. The National Review commented: “Believers in the accidental theory could gather for lunch in a phone booth.”9 No one on the president’s staff offered an explanation to account for the remaining thirteen and a half minutes. Sirica demanded an answer and appointed a six-person panel of electronic experts, jointly selected by Jaworski and the White House, to examine “the authenticity and integrity” of the tapes. Two days later Buzhardt testified that each of the subpoenaed tapes contained blank gaps lasting several minutes.
Similar editorials in the New York Times, symbol of the liberal northeastern establishment that Nixon and his staff so disliked, and the Akron Beacon Journal, a representative of middle America, quickly revealed the broad consensus against the president. On November 29 the New York Times argued that “since Mr. Nixon refuses either to resign or to clarify his own role in Watergate, the only alternative, it seems to us, is impeachment itself.” Three days later the Beacon Journal lamented that “the Richard Nixon we endorsed and the Richard Nixon most Americans voted for, is not the Richard Nixon we now know.” In recommending impeachment, the editorial maintained that “the continuing scandal is at least as divisive as an impeachment proceeding would be, and impeachment would have an end in sight.” Like its New York counterpart, the Ohio newspaper reminded its readers that an impeachment was “not a conviction”; impeachment, however, would force Nixon “to submit evidence that he would not, for whatever reason, submit voluntarily.” Impeachment, moreover, “is a process approved by our founding fathers in the Constitution.” The disclosure of the erased eighteen minutes had shaken most interested Americans. The Kansas City Times ended its editorial on the subject with the question, “Does anyone believe anything any more?”10
Events not directly associated with Watergate, meanwhile, continued to tarnish the administration and to reflect poorly on Nixon’s judgment. On November 30, Egil Krogh, an Ehrlichman assistant but since the previous February the undersecretary of the Department of Transportation, pleaded guilty in federal district court to the violation of the civil rights of Dr. Lewis Fielding, Daniel Ellsberg’s former psychiatrist. Describing his role in the burglary of Fielding’s office, Krogh stated that Nixon personally told him to have the Plumbers learn all they could about Ellsberg’s motives and those of his associates and that the assignment involved national security. Krogh then declared that his conscience no longer permitted him to “assert national security as a defense” for the burglary.11
The next week Gerald R. Ford took the oath of office as vice president. The sixty-year-old Grand Rapids, Michigan, resident, a congressman since 1948, enjoyed widespread support as the nation’s first vice president to assume office under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. Although Ford was a staunch partisan, Democrats and Republicans respected him for his candor, honesty, and decency. The confirmation vote in the Senate (92 to 3) and in the House (387 to 35) indicated the noncontroversial character of Nixon’s choice. Politicians and the public, on the other hand, remained keenly aware that the necessity for a new vice president stemmed from Nixon’s unfortunate selection of Spiro Agnew as his running mate.
Two days after Ford took office, the president released the most comprehensive record of “assets and liabilities, expenses and income” in presidential history. He did so “to remove doubts that have been raised, and to correct misinformation that currently exists about what I have earned and what I own.” Furthermore, he asked the Joint Congressional Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation to examine the record and to determine whether “my tax returns should have shown different results.” Finally, he announced his intentions to give his San Clemente house “to the people of the United States.”12 Some of the records Nixon released revealed a 1970 income of $262,942 and a tax payment of $792, a 1971 income of $262,384 and a tax payment of $878, and a 1972 income of $268,777 and a tax payment of $4,298.
Once again, newspapers that previously supported the president voiced strong criticism. The Cincinnati Post scolded Nixon for not “setting a good example” and pointed out that “in the past four and a half years, his net worth rose from $307,000 to close to a million, yet his tax payments have tended to go down instead of up.”13 Editorially, the Wall Street Journal commented that Nixon’s “marginal deductions” were “a mistake in judgment and an insensitivity to the standards a President ought to follow.”14
Two days later the first tapes that Nixon surrendered arrived at the special prosecutor’s office. Six persons crowded into the office and listened to the March 21, 1973, tape. Silent, they heard the president coaching Haldeman about the need to offer evasive answers: “If you’re asked, you just say, ‘I don’t remember, I can’t recall. I can’t give an answer to that that I can recall.’” Two of the listeners, Assistant Special Prosecutors Richard Ben-Veniste and George Frampton Jr., later wrote that “we knew that we had turned the corner of Watergate.” Nixon had obstructed justice, and the tape proved it. Jaworski listened to the tape and advised the president’s chief of staff, Alexander Haig, to hire “the finest criminal lawyer you can find . . . and let him study the tapes.”15 From that day, the special prosecutor and his key assistants were convinced of the president’s guilt and hypocrisy. For Nixon, the future held impeachment or resignation and a possible prison sentence.
In an end-of-the year interview, the news commentator Walter Cronkite placed Nixon’s problems in perspective, self-inflicted and otherwise. “Watergate just happened to come,” Cronkite observed, “at the same time as the demand for honesty in relations between the sexes, in advertising, in ecology, in almost everything. . . . That’s what is forcing the President’s hand right now.”16
By January 1974, 25 percent of Republican voters and 40 percent of independent voters believed the country probably would benefit if the president resigned. The Harris Survey also found that the majority of Republicans and 75 percent of all Americans believed it was wrong that a person with an annual income of $8,000 paid more taxes than Nixon had paid. Only 26 percent of Americans believed the president had told the truth about the financing of his two houses.
Still, Nixon retained a seemingly irreducible core of support that offered a simple explanation for the president’s problems. The Portland Oregonian insisted, “The Democratic Congress, without a formal declaration of war, has launched a full-scale attack of unmitigated ferocity on the executive branch and its Republican head, Richard M. Nixon.”17 The Arizona Republic in Phoenix maintained that “the liberal Democratic bloc, with the full support of the Eastern seaboard mass media, has determined the President must resign.”18
Relentlessly, week after week, investigations, indictments, confessions, trials, charges, and countercharges were reported, whether by the print media or by radio and television. The legal processes in a democracy are complex and time-consuming, and with the president involved, the public had a right to know about each procedural step. And the public seemed interested. Early in the new year, for example, the IRS announced that it would reexamine the president’s tax returns because of questions voiced by the press. E. Howard Hunt won release from prison, pending consideration of his appeal. Attorney General William Saxbe condemned the Ervin Committee for issuing subpoenas for more than 500 White House documents and tapes. The White House announced that the Boston attorney James D. St. Clair would replace Fred Buzhardt as the head of the president’s Watergate legal team, with Buzhardt remaining as counsel to Nixon.
In a broad sense Nixon kept Watergate in the news by refusing to release the tapes and by employing every stratagem possible to delay the investigation. In his fight, moreover, he courted public opinion by cloaking his actions as being in the interest of the office of the presidency. On January 8, 1974, for instance, Nixon released two “white papers,” one of seventeen and one of eight pages, detailing his involvement in two 1971 decisions concerning an increase in the federal subsidy for milk and an antitrust suit against ITT. Neither case, of course, related to Watergate, but both reflected on the Nixon administration. These two white papers concluded Operation Candor, which had started in November with the series of meetings with members of Congress and continued with his press conference, with his five-day southern trip, and with his release of his financial records. Both the milk subsidy increase and the ITT case were controversial and had been in the news off and on for almost two years. The ITT case first broke in February 1972 during the Senate’s confirmation hearings on Richard Kleindienst for attorney general.
The president’s two white papers rebutted the charges that in exchange for campaign contributions he had ordered an increase in the subsidy for milk and that the Justice Department drop its case against ITT. In Iowa, the Des Moines Register concluded that the white papers provided “more background than had been told before, but they add up to reiteration of the Presidents’s previous statements that at no time was he influenced by political campaign contributions.” The editorial pointed out that the white papers included no documents and tapes bearing on the case. The Lincoln (Nebr.) Star agreed: “Without the evidence, the white papers represent nothing more than a holding action.” The Albuquerque Journal observed, “Like many of President Nixon’s recent public addresses, the white papers . . . are adequate for those who need not be convinced, but they served no useful purpose for those who do.” Even some of the newspapers that believed Nixon found little to celebrate. The Salt Lake City Desert News pointed out, “The President’s plea that he could not veto the price increase because it would alienate dairy farmers, makes one wonder why he wasn’t more concerned about alienating milk consumers who foot the bill.” In both the milk and the ITT cases, the editorial continued, “the government took what seems to have been the path of least resistance. Brave and bold the administration’s decisions weren’t.” From Phoenix, the Arizona Republic lamented that Operation Candor had been “something less than a success.” The Chicago Sun–Times decided that “Mr. Nixon by and large deserves good marks for his statements. . . . But he cannot expect now to have undocumented narratives accepted on faith.”19
On January 15 yet another Watergate story filled most newspapers’ front pages. The panel of experts appointed by Judge Sirica to examine the eighteen-minute gap on the June 20, 1972, tape submitted its unanimous findings. At least five and possibly as many as nine separate hand-manipulations of the Uher 5000 recorder produced the erasure. Rose Mary Woods’s claim that she erased five minutes of the tape when she accidentally pressed the wrong button lost credibility. Between October 1 and November 21, only five persons had access to both the tape and the Uher 5000 machine: Woods; Nixon; Stephen Bull, the presidential assistant who had storage responsibility for the tapes; Fred Buzhardt; and Major General John C. Bennett, deputy to Chief of Staff Haig. Sirica held several days of hearings and recommended a grand jury investigation into the possibility that one or more persons intentionally destroyed evidence.
Newspaper editorials across the country reacted to the report. In West Virginia, the Charleston Gazette concluded that “no one in his right mind could be made to believe that a person could push the record and erase buttons five to nine times by hand accidentally. It had to be deliberate.” The Toledo Blade declared, “The only logical inference any reasonable person could draw is that it was done because the evidence recorded would have been extremely damaging to the President’s case.” The Detroit News asked, “How much is the public supposed to swallow without getting completely sick to its stomach?” The Dallas Times Herald maintained, “It is beyond belief that an ‘accident’ could have been repeated in one segment of a tape five times in a row” and called the report “a damaging blow to President Nixon.” In South Carolina the Greenville News was more cautious but ended its editorial commenting that “even the President’s strongest and most faithful supporters cannot stand another year of multiple controversies without more positive aid from the White House.” The Arizona Republic, perhaps Nixon’s most loyal supporter, admitted “the damage to President Nixon’s image is immense.”20
The Republican Party’s two most visible officials, aside from the president, quickly tried to counter this latest criticism. On January 20, Senate Republican leader Hugh Scott appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation and revealed he had the “information available . . . which would indicate that on specific items the President would be exculpated entirely.”21 Scott refused to describe what he meant by information. He commented, however, that he did not believe the campaign to impeach the president was a political movement. At a press conference two days later Vice President Ford disclosed that the day before he had spent an hour and a half with Nixon and that the president had volunteered to show material relating to Watergate. Ford asserted that this “information will exonerate the President. It will totally undercut the testimony of John Dean.” But Ford added, “I haven’t had time to read the information” and because “this information has been turned over to Jaworski, it would be improper for the White House to release it now.”22 Ford and Scott did not advance Nixon’s credibility because they offered no evidence that would exonerate him. An Associated Press story soon reported that Jaworski had uncovered no evidence that contradicted Dean’s testimony. The Chicago Tribune, which had endorsed Nixon in 1972, called Ford’s explanation that he lacked time to read the material “lame” and dismissed equally “as lame” his claim that the White House could not release the information. The editorial reasoned that “the only conceivable justification for withholding proof that Mr. Nixon is innocent would be that it pins the blame on somebody else who, presumably, is under investigation.” If this were true, the “informed source in the prosecutor’s office is lying and every moment’s delay in making the information public amounts to a national disgrace.”23
The same week Barry Goldwater offered a grim assessment; he predicted “that Watergate would cost every Republican candidate a ‘disastrous’ ten percent of the total vote this year.” He added, “I can sense a strong feeling right here on the Hill . . . that many Republican members of Congress would like to run this year without Mr. Nixon.”24
The last week in January 1974 brought three more front-page stories. First, Egil Krogh Jr., once the head of the White House Plumbers, received a prison sentence for his role in the office burglary of Dr. Lewis J. Fielding. Nixon’s supporters, however, found encouragement in that Krogh never implicated the president in the burglary. Second, the Ervin Committee announced that it would postpone indefinitely the last two items on its schedule: the dairy industry contributions to Nixon’s 1972 campaign and the $100,000 that the industrialist Howard R. Hughes had transferred to Bebe Rebozo, Nixon’s close personal friend. The third important story appeared when California state judge Gordon Ringer reported he would summon the president as a defense witness in the trial of John D. Ehrlichman, G. Gordon Liddy, and David R. Young Jr., three more of Nixon’s aides charged with the Fielding burglary. The next day the president announced he would not appear as a witness, citing constitutional grounds.
Nixon devoted the last part of his State of the Union message on January 30, about one-ninth of the total length, to “the so-called Watergate affair.” He told the nation he had given the special prosecutor “all the material that he needs to conclude his investigations. . . . The time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations of this matter to an end.” The president promised to cooperate with the House Judiciary Committee in its investigation but warned he would never do “anything that weakens the Office of the President of the United States or impairs the ability of the Presidents of the future to make the great decisions.” Finally, Nixon reaffirmed that he had “no intention whatever of ever walking away from the job that the people elected me to do.”25
Nothing had changed. Once again Nixon courted public support by expressing his willingness to cooperate, subject only to limitations he would determine. He wanted to end the affair, and he would not resign. Unless he reversed his position on the tapes, however, the Watergate affair would continue until the Supreme Court rendered a decision. Not certain how the Court would rule, Nixon would use every means possible to impede the progress of the case. He still hoped that the public would tire of the issue, that the Court would rule in his favor, and, if it ruled against him, that the House would fail to impeach him.
By the time Nixon gave his State of the Union message, Leon Jaworski had been special prosecutor for three months. On his second day on the job, he sent his first request to the president for files concerning the ITT case. Other requests quickly followed. Within two weeks Jaworski met with Chief of Staff Alexander Haig and Nixon’s lawyer, Fred Buzhardt, and wanted to know why the materials had not arrived. Six days later Jaworski sent a letter listing all the tapes and documents he and his predecessor had requested and the president had not sent. On December 6 Jaworski informed Nixon that if certain tapes and documents did not arrive within a few days, he would subpoena them. The president had fired Cox for similar action. Jaworski demanded a timetable of when to expect the materials. By this time his actions had convinced his initially suspicious staff that he had every intention of directing the investigation independently, wherever it led.26
On December 12 Jaworski received from Judge Sirica seven of the nine tapes that Cox had subpoenaed. Sirica had reviewed the tapes and ruled, case by case, on the president’s claims that portions were unrelated to Watergate and, therefore, outside the jurisdiction of the special prosecutor. Six of Jaworski’s closest assistants listened first to the tape of the March 21, 1973, meeting between Nixon and Dean. Since April 1973 Nixon had insisted that he first learned from Dean about the cover-up on March 21. Dean, however, had dated Nixon’s knowledge as months earlier. The tape corroborated Dean’s testimony, and more. By the time Jaworski listened to all the tapes, he “believed the President to be criminally involved in the Watergate cover-up.” By January 7 Jaworski’s office had prepared a 128-page document “outlining Nixon’s apparent complicity.”27 Two days later Jaworski requested more tapes.
Haig replied to Jaworski that the president probably would not turn over any additional tapes, stating that “it’s a calculated risk he’s prepared to take.”28 A week later Jaworski played the first tape for the grand jury. Nixon’s new Watergate lawyer, James St. Clair, informed Jaworski that he had all the tapes he needed. Through St. Clair the president achieved delay but also avoided an unequivocal refusal; Nixon did not want Jaworski to report to Congress that the president had stopped cooperating. From Jaworski, Nixon faced a threat that could end his presidency.
The House Judiciary Committee posed an equally formidable threat to the president. Immediately following the Saturday Night Massacre, Democratic House leaders agreed to have that committee start an inquiry into whether these actions were sufficient grounds for impeachment. Just before Christmas, committee chairman Peter Rodino appointed John M. Doar as majority counsel for the inquiry. A native of Wisconsin, the fifty-two-year-old Doar had earned his law degree from the University of California at Berkeley. After practicing law for ten years with his father in New Richmond, Wisconsin, Doar spent eight years in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department before moving in 1968 to a private practice in New York City. Later that year he won election as president of the New York City Board of Education. As majority counsel for the Judiciary Committee, he managed to avoid publicity and partisanship, for he was a Republican. The Republican members of the committee named Albert E. Jenner Jr., a widely respected Chicago trial lawyer, as chief minority counsel.
Doar and Rodino proceeded deliberately. Doar built his case essentially from documents rather than from witnesses. Some Democrats criticized him for moving too cautiously. Many Republicans also found the pace too slow because they wanted an impeachment vote as soon as possible, to distance it from the November elections.
Rodino, a native of Newark, New Jersey, had represented that district in Congress since 1948. Critics could not stereotype him. Although an ardent supporter of civil rights legislation, he opposed government aid for abortions and once voted in favor of a “no-knock” provision in a District of Columbia crime bill. Until President Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia in spring 1970, Rodino, a World War II veteran, supported the Vietnam War. Above all, Rodino, himself an attorney, intended to lay the procedural groundwork for impeachment without a trace of partisanship. The Doar-Rodino approach eventually won overwhelming endorsement. On February 6, the House, by a vote of 410 to 4, authorized the Judiciary Committee to subpoena anything and any person, the president included, in its investigation. Doar soon asked St. Clair for a long list of tapes and documents, especially those covering the period between February 20 and April 18, 1973.
Doar and his staff, quickly numbering over 100 and including a recent Yale Law School graduate named Hillary Rodham, spent much of January and February on the question of the definition of an impeachable offense. The constitutional provision covering impeachment offered little guidance: “The President, Vice President, and all Civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Charges against Nixon obviously fell under this last, vague category. On February 21, Doar presented to Rodino a report, “Constitutional Grounds for Presidential Impeachment.”
The Doar report concluded that “impeachment is a constitutional remedy addressed to serious offenses against the system of government.” These offenses, the report stated, need not be traditionally criminal because the original intent of those who wrote the Constitution “quite clearly” included “some ultimate check on the conduct of the executive.” The punishment stipulated “removal from office and possible disqualification from future office,” implied that “high crimes” referred not to statutory abuses but to offenses “that subvert the structure of government, or undermine the integrity of office and even the Constitution itself.” After reviewing the British practice of impeachment, as well as several cases of American impeachment, the report pointed out that in those, “the criminality issue was not raised at all.” Although stressing that the abuse of power, not criminality, justified impeachment, the report concluded that “not all presidential misconduct is sufficient to constitute grounds for impeachment. There is a further requirement—substantiality.” Finally, the Doar report argued that scrutiny of a president “must be considered as a whole in the context of the office, not in terms of separate or isolated events.”29
Not all Republicans, including many of those serving as members of the Judiciary Committee, accepted Doar’s systematic reasoning. Nixon’s lawyers issued their own interpretation that the impeachment process must demonstrate criminality. Then, on February 25, at his first news conference in four months, Nixon declared, “You don’t have to be a constitutional lawyer to know that the Constitution is very precise in defining what is an impeachable offense. . . . That a criminal offense on the part of the President is the requirement for impeachment.” In response to the fourth question regarding impeachment, the president replied, “I do not expect to be impeached.”30 To defend himself from impeachment, Nixon employed a staff that included twelve full-time and four part-time attorneys. He then requested from Congress an additional $1.5 million appropriation to hire another twenty attorneys.
The Wall Street Journal offered its interpretation. The newspaper agreed with Doar “that an impeachment need not be based on a violation of criminal law” but added that such a conclusion “is a point without much relevance to the current proceedings.” The editors reasoned that the grounds on which the House might impeach the president were also criminal violations. Moderates, who hold the decisive votes, the editorial continued, would want solid evidence. In closing, the editors suggested that “the Judiciary Committee would be wise to concentrate on the alleged criminal offense. . . . In this case, if there were no criminal offenses there are no high political grounds.”31
The seriousness with which the Wall Street Journal approached the impeachment issue reflected a widespread public belief that the Watergate investigation might well lead to the nation’s first presidential impeachment conviction. Increasingly, Republicans realized that this possible outcome threatened their own political careers. The result of a special election in Michigan’s Fifth Congressional District on February 19 strongly suggested that voters had turned against Republicans. In the election to fill the seat Gerald Ford vacated when he became vice president, a Democrat won for the first time in sixty-four years. Ford personally had campaigned for the Republican candidate, Robert VanderLaan, a politician who had never lost an election and who served as majority leader in the Michigan State Senate. The Democrat who won, Richard VanderVeen, by contrast, had never won a previous election, despite several attempts. VanderVeen had labeled his campaign “a referendum on President Nixon” and had called for Nixon’s resignation. The Saginaw News believed the election outcome lent “credence to the harpings of Senator Barry Goldwater who has been saying all along that the Republican party was going to pay a heavy price at the polls this year because of Watergate and the President’s failure to clear himself of its ugly shadows.” The Nashville Tennessean concluded the election could not help but bring “qualms of fear to Republicans in other parts of the nation—such as Tennessee.” The editorial conjectured that the Republican Party “could be facing one of the most disastrous off-year election defeats in its history if Mr. Nixon is still in the White House in November.”32
For the Nixon administration, the negative news seemed endless. On February 25, the day the president expressed his interpretation of grounds for impeachment, Herbert Kalmbach pleaded guilty to a charge of accepting on behalf of the president’s reelection campaign a $100,000 contribution in exchange for a promise of an ambassadorship. The former associate chairman of the Finance Committee to Re-elect the President also pleaded guilty to raising secret campaign funds for congressional campaigns. Nixon’s assertion “that ambassadorships have not been for sale, to my knowledge,” provoked the Louisville Courier–Journal to comment that “like so many of the stands the White House has taken during the Watergate scandals, the latest presidential statements . . . again prompt the question: If the President really didn’t know, who was running the things at the White House?”33 Kalmbach’s promise may have been crude and direct, but the political practice of rewarding financial supporters with ambassadorships was nothing new. Kalmbach’s guilty plea, however, when added to guilty pleas by other Nixon staff—Dean, Magruder, Segretti, LaRue, Krogh, and Porter—indicated a pattern of criminality that crowded, at least, at the door of the Oval Office.
Four days after Kalmbach pleaded guilty, the federal grand jury investigating the Watergate cover-up submitted its report to Judge Sirica. The jury indicted seven former Nixon assistants, including the four with whom Nixon had worked most closely: Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Colson. No previous president had ever had his four closest advisers indicted. Those indicted also included Mitchell’s former assistant attorney general, Robert C. Mardian; Haldeman’s chief assistant, Gordon C. Strachan; and the chief attorney for CREEP, Kenneth W. Parkinson. All but Haldeman were lawyers. The charges against the seven were conspiracy, false declaration, obstruction of justice, and perjury. By not indicting Dean, the grand jury indicated it believed his testimony, a testimony that directly contradicted the Haldeman-Nixon version of events. The tape of March 21, 1973, had corroborated Dean’s testimony.
The grand jury in addition submitted a sealed report to Sirica that contained information about Nixon’s involvement in the cover-up, supported by reference to specific testimony of witnesses and tapes. The released report did not contain any analysis of or comments about the material. The jury requested that Sirica transmit the sealed report to the House Judiciary Committee. Jaworski left immediately for a weekend at his Texas home while his staff planned a few days of rest after nine months of investigations and two months of drafting the final two reports. Almost at once, editors from Newsweek and the Washington Post telephoned the special prosecutors’s office to confirm whether the grand jury had wanted to indict the president along with the other seven. The special prosecutor’s staff could not contain the rumors. Within a few days, the news routinely included the story, based on unnamed sources, that in a straw vote the grand jury had voted unanimously to indict Nixon.
During the discussions between the grand jury and the staff in the Office of the Special Prosecutor, Jaworski had argued against indicting the president. The second week in March, to answer the steady stream of inquiries that flooded his office, Jaworski drafted and released a formal statement regarding presidential indictment. He explained that in a situation of “legal doubt,” he opposed an indictment even if the evidence might justify one. Moreover, he pointed out that “in the first instance,” the House Judiciary Committee was a more “appropriate body” to evaluate evidence regarding possible criminal activity of a president. The special prosecutor’s inclusion of the phrase “in the first instance” highlighted the grand jury’s point in the preamble to its indictment report, that should Congress, “in the first instance” not act, the grand jury reserved the right to consider, in the second instance, indictment at a later time.34
Nixon did not challenge the special prosecutor’s request for Sirica to deliver the sealed report of evidence to the House Judiciary Committee, but Haldeman and Strachan filed a writ of mandamus against transmission. Sirica ruled against the two former Nixon aides, who then appealed. The U.S. Court of Appeals denied the appeal, and subsequently, on March 25 the committee received the sealed report.
On March 5, just after the submission of the grand jury report, voters in Ohio’s First Congressional District elected only the fourth Democrat in the twentieth century. The three previous Democratic victories had been in years of Republican disasters: 1912, when the Republican Party split into two parties; 1936, when Franklin D. Roosevelt won by his greatest margin; and 1964, when Goldwater led his party to a resounding defeat. In 1972 the Republican House candidate had won 70 percent of the vote in the Cincinnati district; in the March 1974 election, the Republican candidate’s percentage dropped to 48 percent. Ohio voters, when combined with those in Vice President Ford’s former Michigan congressional district, indicated that the longer Watergate continued, the more voters would vent their scorn on all Republican politicians.
The day after the Ohio special election, the president held his second press conference within ten days. Of the eighteen questions asked by reporters, fourteen related to Watergate. Three journalists inquired about the tape of the March 21, 1973, meeting with Haldeman and Dean. Nixon replied that on that date Dean had told him for the first time “that payments had been made to defendants for the purpose of keeping them quiet, not simply for their defense.” The president also maintained that “when individuals read the entire transcript of the twenty-first meeting, or hear the entire tape, where we discussed all these options, they may reach different interpretations, but I know what I meant, and I know also what I did.” Nixon responded to a question about impeachment, saying that “the crime of obstruction of justice is a serious crime and would be an impeachable offense” but added he did not expect the House Judiciary Committee to find him guilty of such a crime. He emphasized again his desire for a speedy conclusion to the Watergate investigation, reaffirmed his policy of “full disclosure,” and reiterated that he would “do nothing to weaken the Office of the Presidency.” Finally, he twice said that he would answer written questions from the House Judiciary Committee and was willing to meet with its two ranking members.35
The president’s statement at this March 6, 1974, press conference of having first learned on March 21, 1973, that his staff had paid hush money to the Watergate burglars contradicted his public statement of August 15, 1973. On that date Nixon claimed to have learned on March 21, 1973, that “the money had been used for attorneys’ fees and family support, not that it had been paid to procure silence from the recipients.” Nixon’s new statement brought his public position into agreement with the tapes but revealed a disregard for the law. The payment of money to induce silence of indicted persons constituted an obstruction of justice. Title 18, section 1510 of the U.S. Code, moreover, further criminalized the delay of reporting information about an obstruction of justice.
Nixon’s press conference remarks predictably drew negative and positive editorial reactions. Some editorials observed the president “moving toward a greater openness and accessibility.”36 Yet these editorials held that Nixon still had stopped short of candor. The Los Angeles Times summarized this broad perspective: “From the very beginning of the Watergate scandal, he has fought to limit the scope of every inquiry into his own possible involvement.” The editorial reminded its readers that the president had not honored “his pledge of full cooperation with Archibald Cox,” had not honored “his pledge of full cooperation with Leon Jaworski,” had fought the Senate Watergate Committee “every step of the way for evidence material,” and had indicated that he “may pursue the same contentious tactics in his relations with the House Judiciary Committee.”37 Nixon believed he had no other option than resistance, evasion, and delay. He continued to hope the public would become so annoyed with the slow process of the investigation that the House Judiciary Committee and the special prosecutor would be forced to complete their work as quickly as possible, without obtaining all the material they had subpoenaed. Such public displeasure certainly existed. The Seattle Times remarked, “People are weary of the everlasting Watergate controversy” and have little interest “in the details of the daily jousting between Capitol Hill and White House lawyers.” America wanted, the editorial concluded, the truth about Watergate, but they did not “want it to be the center of government attention for month after month after month.” The Wall Street Journal similarly observed that “the last thing we need is another round in the historic but ultimately petty battle about the prerogatives of the branches of government.”38 Whatever the frustrations, however, the investigatory process continued at its slow pace.
Hardly a day passed without a Watergate story. The same day as Nixon’s press conference, the president’s lawyer, St. Clair, told the House Judiciary Committee that Nixon would refuse any future requests for materials relating to Watergate; the documents the Watergate grand jury turned over to the House committee were “more than sufficient.” March 7, the day after Nixon’s press conference, a second Watergate grand jury indicted six men involved in the September 1971 burglary of the office of Dr. Lewis J. Fielding. In addition to Ehrlichman and Colson, the jury indicted three who already were sentenced to prison terms for their roles in the Watergate break-in: G. Gordon Liddy, Bernard Barker, and Eugenio Martinez. Attorney General William Saxbe made news when he stated that a president had the same responsibility as other citizens to report to law-enforcing officials any information regarding a crime. And then Nixon created more news.
On March 15 the president traveled to Chicago for public appearances in hopes of reducing the overwhelmingly negative image of Watergate. Before that city’s Executives Club, Nixon skipped the traditional speech and immediately opened the floor to a fifty-minute question and answer session. The friendly audience focused only five of their fifteen questions on Watergate and asked a sixth about his personal taxes. Once again Nixon repeated his familiar positions. He wanted “the full story out,” he wanted “a prompt and just conclusion,” and he promised to “cooperate as fully as I possibly can.” But he again vowed to “do nothing to weaken the Office of the Presidency” and reiterated “the necessity of protecting the confidentiality of the Presidential conversations.” The charges against him Nixon dismissed as “all totally false.” He declared that “from a personal standpoint, resignation is an easy cop-out,” but it would “lead to weak and unstable Presidencies in the future,” and, therefore, he would not take the easy course. Then he declared that “while I leave the podium, I don’t expect to leave the Presidency until January 20, 1977.”39 Nixon’s explanations and positions, so often stated, pitted the word of the president against the charges that politicians, media representatives, and investigators levied. Conscientious followers of the Watergate investigations realized that circumstantial evidence totally supported those aligned against the president. The struggle would continue until the investigations produced what observers called “a smoking gun” in the president’s hands.
The day after his Chicago appearance, Nixon gave a short speech when he arrived at the Nashville Metropolitan Airport. Later that evening he offered some informal comments before a friendly audience at the opening of the new home of the Grand Ole Opry House. In honor of his wife’s birthday, he played “Happy Birthday” on the piano, followed by “My Wild Irish Rose.” He then lauded country music because “it comes from the heart of America, because this is the heart of America,” because “it talks about family, it talks about religion,” and because it “radiates a love of this Nation, patriotism.” He capped his appearance by playing “God Bless America.”40
Three days later Senator James L. Buckley (C-N.Y.) pointed to “the widespread conviction that Watergate and all that it has brought in its wake has done unique and perhaps irrevocable damage to our entire system of government.” To resolve the crisis, he declared, “Richard Nixon must resign as President.”41 The war of words continued; a few hours after Buckley issued his ominous call, Nixon answered questions in Houston before the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters.
Despite the president’s opening statement, reporting his decisions about oil-producing countries lifting the oil embargo they had placed against the United States as a result of its support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War, ten of the eighteen questions reporters asked him pertained to Watergate, presidential accessibility, and media coverage. The first question concerned Buckley’s recommendation. Nixon replied, “It would be bad statesmanship” for a president to resign if the charges against him were false, regardless of polls. Paul McGonigle from KOY Radio in Phoenix commented favorably on the president’s accessibility of late. Nixon responded that “the press conference is a very useful medium through which a President can convey his views to the American people.” Because he stood before broadcasters, several questions focused on the press. Once Nixon paraphrased his “friend,” Jack Horner, who served for many years as senior White House correspondent for the Washington Star: “There is always an adversary relationship between the President and the press. That is healthy, that is good.” Nixon continued, “The President should treat the press just as fairly as the press treats him.” He also said he realized “that bad news is news, and good news is not news. . . . I am not obsessed by how the press reports me. . . . I am not going to be diverted by any criticism from the press.”
Yet the media’s questions regarding Watergate rankled the president. Like a stuck tape, Nixon repeated before the broadcasters all his previous positions. He defended “the confidentiality of Presidential conversations and communications,” explained that the House Judiciary Committee had sufficient information to complete its investigation, and insisted he wanted to bring Watergate “to a conclusion as quickly as we can.” The break-in, he believed, “should not have been covered up, and I have done the very best that I can over the past year to see that it is uncovered. I have cooperated completely with not only the grand jury but also with other investigative agencies.” The problem developed, he reiterated, because “I frankly paid too little attention to the campaign.” Both Dan Rather of CBS News and Tom Brokaw of NBC News challenged Nixon on his claim of complete cooperation. In response, the president refined his position to mean cooperation that did not violate the principle of confidentiality. He closed the press conference by saying, “I will not participate in the destruction of the Office of the Presidency of the United States while I am in this office.”42
The bad news for the president did not stop with the delivery that March of the sealed grand jury report to the Judiciary Committee. On April 3 the Internal Revenue Service announced that its audit revealed Nixon owed $432,787 in back taxes, plus $33,000 in interest penalties. The assessment rested primarily on the finding that Nixon had donated his prepresidential records to the National Archives after the date the law permitted such tax-deductible contributions. Although unrelated to Watergate, the tax affair further diminished the public’s perception of Nixon’s personal conduct.
Two days after the tax report, the president flew to Paris to attend a memorial service for the French president Georges Pompidou. That same day a jury found Dwight Chapin guilty on two counts of perjury. While he served as Nixon’s appointments secretary, Chapin also helped instruct Donald Segretti in his dirty tricks campaign. A few days later a judge sentenced Herbert L. Porter for perjury before the grand jury. As Magruder’s deputy at CREEP, Porter had helped devise the cover-up by testifying that Liddy alone had planned and approved the break-in. Neither the Chapin nor the Porter case directly touched Nixon, except to contribute to a general impression of an administration lacking morality.
More threatening to Nixon than the convictions of his former aides was the second tape crisis, then nearing a climax. Both Doar and Jaworski were determined to obtain the tapes, and Nixon had less public support than he had had during the first crisis the previous October. For a month the House Judiciary Committee and St. Clair remained deadlocked over Nixon’s refusal to submit additional tapes. On April 11 the committee voted thirty-three to three to subpoena forty-two tapes it originally had requested late in February. The subpoena, the first a House committee ever issued to a president, called for Nixon to comply by April 25. At St. Clair’s request, the committee extended the deadline to April 30.
Jaworski confronted the president in much the same manner. Throughout the winter, Nixon, through St. Clair, had parried Jaworski’s requests. Twice St. Clair informed Jaworski that Nixon would consider requests for materials on a case-to-case basis. On April 16 a frustrated Jaworski applied to Judge Sirica for a subpoena to obtain tapes to use in preparation for the trials of Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and four other Nixon aides whom the grand jury had indicted. Among the tapes Jaworski sought was the June 23, 1972, tape of the conversation between Haldeman and Nixon. The president now faced two subpoenas and a crisis.
In a national television and radio address on April 30 Nixon explained his response to the Judiciary Committee’s subpoena. Rather than send the subpoenaed tapes, the president announced that he would send the committee transcripts of the tapes plus transcripts of other conversations not subpoenaed but that dealt with Watergate. Nixon pointed to a pile of notebooks, “more than 1,200 pages,” and proclaimed “everything that is relevant is included—the rough as well as the smooth.” Nixon invited the Democratic chairman and the most senior Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee to listen to the tapes and evaluate the authenticity and completeness of the transcripts. Once again, Nixon repeated that “the President has nothing to hide in this matter.” He also explained that parts of the transcript “will seem to be contradictory with one another, and parts will be in conflict with some of the testimony given in the Senate Watergate Committee hearings.” He recognized the tapes contained “ambiguities” and that “different people with different perspectives might interpret [them] in drastically different ways.” But he insisted the transcripts would show that “I had no knowledge of the cover-up until I was informed of it by John Dean on March 21.”43
Although the immediate reaction among the Republican members of the committee was favorable, the Judiciary Committee voted the next day to send the president a letter informing him that he had not complied with its April 11 subpoena. Only one Republican, William S. Cohen of Maine, joined the Democrats in the vote. The released transcripts fascinated the public as they were published by nearly fifty newspapers, some with weekend supplements and others with daily installments. National Public Radio read the transcript over its 164 stations. CBS Television compared passages with clips of previous, contradictory testimonies. Dell and Bantam Publishers rushed the transcripts into paperback editions; within a week some 3 million copies were in print.
As an attempt to win public support, Nixon’s release of the transcripts proved an unqualified disaster. The negative impact rivaled that following the Saturday Night Massacre. The Senate Republican leader, Hugh Scott, characterized the transcripts as “deplorable, disgusting, shabby, immoral.” Senator Robert W. Packwood (R-Oreg.) characterized Nixon’s concept of government as “rather frightening.” Emmet Hughes, speechwriter for President Eisenhower, argued that his former boss never would have tolerated such conversations as the transcript revealed: “Anybody who would have engaged in even a sixty-second exchange like those would have been thrown out.” The House Republican leader, John J. Rhodes, suggested that Nixon reconsider resignation.44 William Randolph Hearst Jr., editor in chief of the Hearst newspaper chain, concluded in his editorial that “President Richard M. Nixon has made it impossible for me to continue believing what he claims about himself in the Watergate mess.” Regarding the tapes, Hearst wrote, “I have never heard anything as ruthless, deplorable and ethically indefensible as the talk on those White House tapes.”45
The transcripts convinced many newspapers to withdraw their support of the president and to join the campaign to remove him from office. From Montana, the editors of the Billings Gazette declared that they had changed their position and wanted to add their “voice to those calling for President Nixon to resign.” Reminding their readers that they had endorsed Nixon for president and had “credentials as being a newspaper which could in no sense be labeled anti-Nixon,” the Fort Worth Star–Telegram concluded that “there are now reasons for the House to vote a bill of impeachment.” The Topeka Daily Capital observed, “It’s time to hand President Nixon his hat. Having voted twice for the President we confess to a certain heart sickness when we read [the transcripts].” The Omaha World–Herald opened its long editorial: “The World–Herald three times endorsed Richard Nixon as a candidate for the presidency”; the editors ended with: “The President should resign.”
One of the nation’s most important conservative newspapers also changed its position. The editors of the Chicago Tribune wrote, “We are appalled.” They then pointed out that “two roads are open. One is resignation. The other is impeachment. Both are legitimate.” Equally significant to the recommendation was their conclusion that “there can no longer be a charge that he was railroaded out of office by vengeful Democrats or a hostile press.” One of the few newspapers that remained supportive of the president, the Manchester Union Leader, asserted that “in its back-stabbing of Nixon, the Tribune, along with a number of other papers, forfeits any pretext to speak for conservatives.”46
The only prominent Republican to offer a favorable interpretation of the transcript was Vice President Ford, who claimed that they “without a qualification, in my judgment—[prove] the President innocent and [exonerate] him” of complicity in the break-in and cover-up. Ford called Dean “an admitted felon” and insisted that in conversation with him Nixon always spoke as “devil’s advocate.” Two days later, after the avalanche of negative reaction to the transcripts, Ford tempered his assessment and admitted he was “a little disappointed” by them and that “some of the language was pretty harsh.”47 Given that Ford would benefit most from Nixon’s possible premature departure from office, the public would have understood if he had maintained a discreet silence.
The reasons for such a damning critique of the transcripts went beyond Nixon’s foul language. In its editorial, the Chicago Tribune concluded that “he is preoccupied with appearance rather than substance. . . . He displays dismaying gaps in knowledge.” The Roanoke Times pointed out that the “transcripts show the President of the United States involved in obstruction of justice.” William Randolph Hearst Jr. wrote that the transcripts portrayed “a gang whose main concern is the maintenance of personal power—at any cost.” The Fort Worth Star–Telegram expressed its concern as a question: “If the law enforcement agencies of this country can be used to punish political enemies, how can we then hold ourselves superior to lands where mere political opposition is a crime?” The Topeka Daily Capital accused Nixon of displaying “contempt for law.” These assessments appeared in newspapers that had endorsed Nixon for reelection in 1972 and had stayed with him as late as the transcript crisis; they indicated again the extent to which Nixon continued to lose his political base.
Nixon’s substitution of the transcripts for the tapes themselves won little support. The Los Angeles Times observed, “This raises, inevitably, the suspicion that the evidence he is withholding may be even more incriminating than the evidence he has been willing to release.”48 Hearst commented further that Nixon “released them only because he had to, finally, and because he somehow thought the censored versions would do him some good with the public. God knows what the unexpurgated tapes would show.”49 The Gallup Poll found Americans favored release of the tapes, rather than the transcripts, by 62 to 24 percent.
Closer analyses of the transcripts damaged Nixon even more. Honeycombed throughout them were at least 1,787 passages marked “unintelligible” and “inaudible.” Careful scrutiny revealed a curious pattern. During one nine-minute conversation with Ehrlichman and Haldeman, for example, the transcript contained 54 inaudibles, 29 of them by Nixon. Immediately following that meeting, Nixon spent forty minutes with Dean and asked for his resignation. The transcript of that meeting contained only 5 Nixon inaudibles.
In addition to the unintelligible and inaudible spots, the transcripts contained thirty-five sections labeled “material unrelated to Presidential action.” Suspicious about the validity of the transcripts, the House Judiciary Committee checked them against the actual tapes of eight conversations Nixon had previously submitted. Discrepancies existed, and in most instances the transcripts presented a version less damaging to Nixon than the original tapes. The committee also found that the transcripts omitted segments of the tapes without identifying where the gaps occurred or offering reasons for the omissions. From the taped conversation of March 22, 1973, for example, the transcript skipped a 2,500-word section that included a passage in which Nixon said, “I don’t give a shit what happens. I want you to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up, or anything else, if it’ll save it—save the plan.” Jaworski and his staff compared copies of their eight tapes with the transcripts and concluded the submitted transcripts were unreliable.
Time observed, “The transcripts showed a President creating an environment of deceit and dishonesty, of evasion and cover-up.” Newspapers and news magazines highlighted excerpts from Nixon’s comments, including “March 13, 1973, ‘Is it too late to go the hang out road?’; March 21, 1973, ‘The problem that you have are these mine fields down the road’; and April 14, 1973, ‘I thank you both for arranging it that way and it does show the isolation of the President.’” Interspersed throughout the transcripts were numerous notations of “expletive deleted” that replaced “hell,” “damn,” and stronger profanities. Cartoonists, comedians, and talk-show hosts and participants made great fun of the term and the number of times it appeared.
Nixon’s transcript gamble failed completely. Because of the transcripts, former supporters in the press, especially the Chicago Tribune, joined the ever lengthening list of newspapers that called for his resignation or impeachment. The gaps and discrepancies reinforced the determination of the House Judiciary Committee and the special prosecutor to require Nixon to honor their subpoenas. In mid-May the Roper Poll found the number of Americans who favored impeachment had climbed to 58 percent, compared to 53 percent before Nixon released the transcripts. This release was simply a version of his October offer of transcripts of subpoenaed tapes that Senator John Stennis could verify as accurate. In response to Cox’s rejection of that offer, Nixon launched what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre, after which public opinion forced him to retreat, to appoint a new special prosecutor to replace Cox, and to release some actual tapes. On April 30, 1974, Nixon faced another court deadline to turn over more tapes. This time he took a harder line, stating he would not retreat. His action meant that the Supreme Court would have to resolve the impasse.