Nixon had regained his physical strength by the beginning of August despite the deluge of bad news flowing from Watergate. Alexander Butterfield’s revelation about the White House tapes had started a legal battle between the president, Archibald Cox, and the Senate committee. Nixon claimed executive privilege, as he refused to turn the tapes over to the committee, but his decision not to destroy the tapes also made it inevitable that they would eventually become public.
Lost in the furor that ensued after the disclosure of the tapes were witnesses who came ever closer to pinning Nixon with obstruction of justice. Bob Haldeman said on July 31 that Nixon had directed him to tell CIA officials Richard Helms and Vernon Walters to tell the FBI that the Watergate investigation might threaten the bureau’s operations in Mexico, which Haldeman knew was a lie. On August 2 Helms said essentially the same thing, although he pulled back from claiming any specific wrongdoing.
By August 1 the federal prosecutors in Baltimore had finished their work against Vice President Spiro Agnew to the point where U.S. Attorney George Beall had written a letter to Judah Best, Agnew’s attorney, informing him that Agnew was under investigation for bribery, conspiracy, and extortion.1 Agnew had predicted this in June when he told Nixon and Haig he would be indicted, and it was now just a matter of time before the letter became public and the countdown toward Agnew’s departure began.
Agnew “felt frustrated and helpless” when he received the letter, fearing that he was unfairly in the crosshairs of Beall’s ambitious Democratic career prosecutors, who wanted to claim the biggest trophy they would ever get in their prosecutorial careers: the head of a sitting vice president. They wanted copies of Agnew’s financial records and taxes. “They wanted to wreck my life,” Agnew wrote. “All of a sudden my enemies found in their hands a weapon to get rid of me.”2
Foremost among those enemies was Haig, whom Agnew called “the de facto president for all other matters while Richard Nixon struggled desperately to escape the entangling web of Watergate.” Haig was making it impossible for Agnew to get a fair hearing from the prosecutors or help from Congress, which, Agnew believed, “made the administration’s commitment to my departure from the vice presidency irreversible.”3
Attorney General Elliot Richardson had been begging Haig for days to arrange a meeting with Nixon, but Haig put him off until Agnew had received the letter and learned just how bad his options were.4
Haig, Buzhardt, and Richardson had less luck persuading the Justice Department to prosecute Pentagon investigator Donald Stewart for allegedly blackmailing the White House to give him a job in exchange for his silence about the military spy ring. As Henry Petersen, the Justice Department’s criminal chief, had done in July, Justice official Alfred Hantman wrote a memo to his boss, Carl Belcher, calling any attempted prosecution of Stewart “foolishness.” Stewart’s initial conversation with White House lawyer Richard Tufaro in May was “low-key” and not a shakedown attempt. “It certainly strains credulity,” Hantman wrote, “to believe that if a former FBI agent, such as Stewart, intended to ‘commit or attempt an act of extortion,’ he would reduce such intention to physical proof in the form of a writing,” Hantman wrote. Stewart was merely looking for help landing a new job, not trying to blackmail the White House into giving him one.5 Belcher sent Hantman’s recommendation immediately to Henry Petersen, who would soon become immersed in the Agnew case, and then on to Richardson.6
During the summer, Richardson had told Melvin Laird about the evidence against Agnew. Laird already knew from his meetings with Nixon and Haig in June that Agnew faced serious difficulties, but Richardson told him that two witnesses said they had paid Agnew kickbacks for state contracts he helped deliver to their companies when he was the Baltimore County executive in the 1960s. They also settled previous debts by delivering cash to Agnew while he was vice president.7 Laird told Richardson to keep pushing the case hard, regardless of Agnew’s position. On August 4 Laird flew on an air force plane to Groton, Connecticut, the site of the navy’s submarine facility, to dedicate a new submarine. Along for the ride was Gerald Ford, the House minority leader from Michigan. The two old friends from the House and fellow midwesterners—Laird had pushed Ford for two House leadership posts—talked about Nixon, Watergate, and Agnew.
“You think things are bad now,” Laird told Ford, according to an interview Laird gave to his biographer, Dale Van Atta. “They’re going to get worse.”
“Tell me about it,” Ford pressed him.
Agnew was in serious trouble, Laird said, so Ford should be careful about siding with him and should be “prepared for some major changes.”8
If Laird is to be believed here, and given his previous shadings of the truth, one should be careful about that, then Ford knew two months before Nixon selected him as Nixon’s second vice president that Agnew was guilty. If Ford knew that, courtesy of Laird, then Ford had plenty of chances within the House Republican Conference to diminish enthusiasm for supporting Agnew. In his memoirs, A Time to Heal, Ford repeated Laird’s story with the exception of the final sentence, in which Laird told Ford that Agnew was in serious trouble.9 Laird’s biography, however, was published after Ford’s death in 2006.
On August 5 Richardson called Buzhardt and Garment to his home in McLean, Virginia, to show them the evidence against Agnew, who believed it was the first time “the White House lawyers had learned any details of the case,” but Haig had already told Buzhardt the details weeks earlier.10 Agnew still hoped the White House lawyers might interfere with Richardson and Justice to either slow or drop the case against him, but Haig had completely different ideas. He had taken Agnew’s suggestion in June of a double impeachment as gospel, and he and Buzhardt believed that Agnew had to go. They embraced the case against Agnew and moved it forward. After they talked to the Justice team, Buzhardt and Garment prepared a memorandum for Nixon the next day that said Agnew had to quit.
Richardson had his long-awaited meeting with Nixon on Monday, August 6. He arrived in the Oval Office to show Nixon and Haig Beall’s letter detailing the case against the vice president. “Not wishing to breach the confidentiality between the President and the chief lawyer of his administration, I stayed away, but an optimistic Nixon told me afterward that the meeting ended with the usual admonitions and assurances that nothing about the case must leak,” Haig wrote.11 That is, again, a lie. Haig already knew what Richardson would tell Nixon, and Nixon’s calendar shows Haig was in the meeting for its entirety.
That evening, the Wall Street Journal, followed quickly by the Washington Post, had the details of the letter to Agnew. Haig’s lies about his presence at the Nixon meeting with Richardson, along with Haig’s desire to remove Agnew, make him the most likely suspects for the leaks.
Jerry Landauer, one of the Journal’s best investigative reporters, had the story first and then was matched by Richard Cohen at the Post. Cohen wrote that Bob Woodward had passed along the initial tips about Agnew. The August tips, Cohen and coauthor Jules Witcover wrote in their book about Agnew’s resignation, reached Landauer “from a source inside Agnew’s office.”12 Landauer, who died in 1981, never specified his source, but he had an unlikely connection—Woodward, whom he had met years earlier on another story.
Although they worked for different newspapers, Woodward considered Landauer his mentor. Their relationship started in 1970, when Woodward was a navy lieutenant working for Adm. Thomas Moorer, the chief of naval operations and soon to be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The navy was then trying to expand its artillery practice range on the small Puerto Rican island of Culebra. A small group of islanders protested and hired Covington & Burling, a powerhouse Washington law firm, to represent them. Young associate Richard Copaken handled the case. As he wrote in his 2008 book, Target Culebra, Copaken sought Landauer’s help to publicize the navy’s misdeeds.13 One of their best sources, Copaken wrote, was Woodward. “I knew Jerry ranked high in Bob’s pantheon of heroes,” Copaken wrote. They met for dinner at the Two Continents Restaurant in the Hotel Washington across the street from the Treasury Department, and Landauer advised Woodward on how to get a good job in journalism. Woodward told Copaken and Landauer how the navy worked with the CIA through the “special intelligence group,” or OP-92. Often, Woodward said, the navy and CIA worked together in Puerto Rico without telling “the civilian heads of the Navy.” Afterward, they went to Woodward’s apartment, where the navy officer looked through his handwritten journals “to see if there were more he could share with us.” Woodward’s final tidbit of information concerned how the navy feared a possible communist takeover of Puerto Rico similar to that in Cuba and that Culebra could provide “a redoubt” similar to the role the Guantánamo Bay naval base played in Cuba.14
Woodward, therefore, was already a source for Landauer, while Woodward and Haig also had a long-standing relationship. It is not a great leap to believe Haig used Woodward as the conduit to Landauer and Cohen, because Haig was already feeding Woodward information. A May 17, 1973, story by Woodward and Bernstein contained information that could only have come from Haig. A doctor for Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, who was briefly the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1972, had written Haig on May 15 that his office had been burglarized and his files stolen. Also that month, Woodward met with his former commander from the navy, Rear Adm. Robert Welander, who had collaborated with Haig in the military spy ring. Pentagon investigator Donald Stewart had contacted the White House on May 14 and intimated that he might go public about it. Haig knew about the call almost immediately, and within days Woodward had asked Welander to meet him for lunch and told him the issue was bubbling up and about to go public. Woodward then sat on the story for more than seven months. Haig also learned about the White House taping system on May 8, and days later Woodward told the Senate Watergate committee staffers that they needed to interview Butterfield. By August 1973 Haig and Woodward often shared secrets Haig wanted to hide or publicize, depending on his needs. Each time, Woodward cooperated.
Agnew had dreaded the Beall letter, and he knew that when Richardson met with Nixon and Haig he faced a serious and potentially career-ending crisis. A bare-knuckled fighter who had succeeded as a Republican in Democrat-dominated Maryland, Agnew’s political antennae had few equals. He knew bribery and tax evasion charges would destroy his hopes of running for president in 1976. He had realized this from the moment he learned of the grand jury, which was why he wanted Nixon to stop Beall. Now, as the type for the next day’s edition of the Wall Street Journal and Post was being set, Agnew needed the help and protection of the damaged and beleaguered president he served.
Haig blocked his way.
After he met with Richardson in the morning of August 6, Nixon spent the rest of the day dodging Agnew. Nixon and Haig left the White House for Camp David at 1:22 p.m., Nixon’s schedule shows, and arrived there at 2:35. They met for another fifteen minutes between 3:15 and 3:30 and then went swimming at 4:55 for an hour. They had dinner between 6:55 and 7:27, when Haig flew back to the White House.15 Meanwhile, Richardson met with Agnew at Nixon’s request and told him his future looked dire. Angered, Agnew hoped he would have a chance to fly the helicopter back to Camp David, but Nixon had different plans.
That evening, Agnew was joined by Haig and Bryce Harlow, Nixon’s Capitol Hill liaison and someone Agnew trusted. These two men, who guarded virtually all access to Nixon and his inner circle, reinforced Richardson’s message. Agnew needed to resign. “They said the President had been ‘floored by the news’ of the charges against me and had flown to Camp David to consider this blow against the very survival of his administration,” Agnew wrote in his memoirs. From Nixon to Richardson to Haig, they all considered Agnew’s indictment “inevitable.” Haig said Nixon wanted Agnew to resign immediately. “I was seething with rage, frustration, and despair,” Agnew wrote. “I could not imagine that they could think I would resign without even talking to the President and having at least a chance to defend myself.”16
Nixon then called Haig at 10:35 p.m. to see if Agnew had agreed to resign.17
Agnew had no intention of resigning but believed he had limited options. He hoped to see Nixon and persuade him of his innocence, believing that it was Richardson, not Haig, who was leaking the damaging information about the case. Even if Nixon wanted to do something, his political capital dwindled each day. On the morning of Tuesday, August 7, the stories Agnew dreaded appeared in the Journal and Post. Agnew could no longer hope to contain the crisis in private. His problems and Nixon’s deepening Watergate quagmire had become one, as the entire administration looked like a sinkhole of lies and corruption. A president desperate to save himself and his legacy could ill afford a vice president trapped in a bribery scandal. Nixon had little doubt of Agnew’s guilt and had believed the worst from the beginning. Governors, he believed, were inherently corrupt. Only after Agnew’s skeleton had been dragged out of the closet for the world to see, his political fortunes ruined, did Haig allow him to meet with Nixon. Haig prepared Nixon carefully. They ended the previous evening with a thirty-minute call after Haig and Harlow told Agnew to quit, and they started August 7 with another twenty-one-minute call. Nixon then spent time with Press Secretary Ron Ziegler, who gave him an appraisal of the morning’s grim headlines, which all looked ominous for Agnew. After Nixon flew back to the White House, he and Haig met three more times before seeing Agnew. Haig also had three minutes alone with Nixon before Agnew entered the office at 4:04 p.m.18
While Haig had pushed Agnew to resign, Nixon said nothing about it during his meeting with the vice president. Haig told Nixon the night before that “Agnew was wavering between fighting and resigning.”19 When Nixon finally met Agnew that afternoon in the hideaway office in the Old Executive Office Building, the president said nothing about resigning. A desperate Agnew, an embattled Nixon, and a cool Haig spoke for an hour and forty-four minutes, in which Agnew told Nixon that the charges against him were untrue, the accusers were lying about Agnew to save themselves, and “there was still no proof the money went into my pocket.”20 Agnew vented about the unfairness of the federal prosecutors, the Democrats and liberals who were out to get the partisan vice president. Nixon had heard it before. Agnew had made the same argument in April when Nixon first learned of the bribery and tax investigation, and he had made it again with Nixon and Haig in June after Nixon had assigned Haig to watch the Agnew case.
“All they’ve got is the testimony of a few men who have done business together for years,” Agnew said. “They were caught in a tax evasion problem and they saw a hell of a good way to extricate themselves from it by dragging me in.”21 Agnew repeated his earlier belief that the guilty plea by William Fornoff, a Baltimore County official, in June had started a chain reaction in which anyone tied to the case started to make deals to save themselves. “I don’t think I’m getting a fair shake out of Richardson,” Agnew said. “I want an independent review of the case.”22
Nixon threw Agnew a bone and said he would assign Henry Petersen, the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, to investigate the case apart from Richardson. That did not soothe Agnew either; he believed Petersen had been roughed up by the press and Democrats for not prosecuting the Watergate case hard enough and would seek to atone by making an example out of Agnew.
If he had to depend on Haig, Agnew knew he was finished.
“Alexander Haig saw himself as in control of everything that happened,” Agnew said in a 1987 interview. “And Nixon was so distraught, and upset and concerned that [Haig] was just running things. I mean that was obvious to everybody around, that Haig was, was sort of in control.”23
Agnew, as he promised Nixon, held a news conference on August 8 in which he robustly defended himself against the accusations of bribery and corruption. He attacked the prosecutors and the leaks coming from the Justice Department.
“I have nothing to hide,” Agnew said three times as he stood before two hundred reporters in the fourth-floor auditorium in the Old Executive Office Building. Nixon, Agnew said, gave him his full support. “It really isn’t that important what a President says,” Agnew said. “I’m not spending my time looking around to see who’s supporting me.”24
In a response to a question about when he told Nixon about his problems, Agnew was vague and made a slip that also exposed Haig’s role in managing the problem before it went public. Agnew said he had told Haig about the problem “months” ago and that he assumed Haig had told Nixon. Agnew had actually told then chief of staff Bob Haldeman on April 10, and Haldeman told Nixon. Haig learned about Agnew’s exposure to the corruption investigation on May 17 at the latest, and Nixon had made Haig responsible for handling it. Contrary to Haig’s and Nixon’s wishes, the news conference showed that Agnew would not leave quietly. The fight he promised would embroil the White House in another protracted scandal.
Haig and Buzhardt visited Nixon shortly after Agnew’s news conference. The vice president may have experienced a temporary endorphin rush from vigorously defending his honor, but he had made such blanket declarations of innocence that he would soon be exposed as a liar. The evidence against Agnew, Buzhardt said, was so strong that “his denials simply won’t hold up. I can’t understand how he can make such flat denials in light of the facts that are bound to come out.”25
Haig had been prepared by William Ruckelshaus, Richardson’s deputy at Justice, that Nixon would need to talk to Richardson again about the growing evidence against Agnew. As the keeper of the Agnew account for Nixon, Haig knew the evidence would continue to get worse. With the exposure of Agnew’s legal problems, anyone involved in the Maryland investigation with potential evidence against the vice president now had a target for their claims.
“There was never the slightest doubt that Agnew would have to go,” Haig wrote. “Nixon thought that Agnew had inflicted mortal damage on himself.” Nixon told Haig to call John Connally, the former Texas governor and treasury secretary, to be on hold in case the president needed him, and Haig did. Connally said he would be ready. Haig talked to Richardson and then again to Nixon, who said Agnew’s combative news conference indicated he would not resign, even though resigning and then fighting to prove his innocence were the most graceful options. “We want to keep him away from the constitutional route [impeachment],” Haig wrote that Nixon told him. “We’ll just say that’s out of the question.”26
That, Haig claimed, was the “first reference Nixon had made in my presence to the possibility of impeachment. But what he said made it obvious that he shared my apprehensions about a possible double impeachment and its consequences to American institutions and American democracy.”27 At best, this is an incorrect memory. Agnew had first raised the prospect of double impeachment with Nixon and Haig in June, as the vice president feared the Democrats in Congress were plotting to remove Nixon and Haig and make House Speaker Carl Albert the president. “Oh God,” Haig had said then in a combination of shock and disbelief.28
Not only did Haig have to contend with Agnew, but he had to tell Secretary of State William Rogers that he needed to leave so Nixon could replace him with Henry Kissinger, Rogers’s longtime antagonist. Rogers, Haig wrote, told him that Kissinger’s Senate confirmation hearings would be difficult. “(As indeed they were, owing mainly to the fact that the 1969 FBI wiretaps, of which Rogers had no knowledge, were leaked from the Department of Justice and became an issue.)”29 Haig again bent the truth. The FBI wiretaps and Kissinger’s role in them had become public knowledge three months earlier in the FBI investigation ordered by Ruckelshaus when he was the bureau’s acting director. Leaks to the New York Times by William Sullivan, Haig’s longtime FBI ally, highlighted Kissinger’s involvement. Kissinger’s attempts to minimize his exposure to the wiretaps in May led Nixon to tell Haig about the White House taping system as a way to embarrass Kissinger.
Since July, Nixon’s intermittent Senate nemesis, Democrat Stuart Symington of Missouri, had been conducting hearings of the Senate Armed Services Committee into the secret bombing campaign of then neutral Cambodia that Nixon had authorized in March 1969. The report in the New York Times of that bombing on May 9, 1969, had launched the series of FBI wiretaps. Four years earlier, during the deliberations leading up to the bombing, Laird and Rogers had opposed keeping the raids secret, realizing that they would eventually be revealed and that the secrecy would cause more troubles than it would solve. On August 9 the committee unveiled a memo that showed that Laird and military leaders had approved creating false logs showing that the B-52 bombers flying the raids had dropped their payloads in South Vietnam, not Cambodia.30 The memo contradicted Laird’s earlier claims that he knew nothing about the fake reports. It also put added strain on Laird, Haig, and Kissinger, who had lied about the secret bombing to the public. Kissinger and Haig then authorized the wiretaps and picked their targets as they launched a search mission to find who told the Times about the bombing.
Symington’s hearings would continue to cause problems for the White House. The following day, August 10, Admiral Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that troops who carried out one of the first military operations of Nixon’s presidency, Operation Dewey Canyon, had ventured into Laos, one of South Vietnam’s neutral neighbors. “This was the first and only time where United States ground combat forces went into Laos,” Moorer told the committee.31 That, too, was a lie. U.S. troops had ventured into Laos in 1970 as part of the ill-fated Operation Tailwind.32
In the week following Agnew’s August 8 news conference, Nixon spent most of his time at Camp David huddled with speechwriters Ray Price and Patrick Buchanan to write another address about the need to move on from Watergate, which Congress and Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox showed no interest in doing. Cox sent the White House a detailed note on August 13 specifying the tapes and documents he wanted as evidence in his continuing investigation, further angering Nixon.33 One influential Democrat, Representative John Moss of California, wanted Cox to investigate Haig’s hiring as chief of staff while he remained a four-star army general.34 The reports from Camp David were grim. Nixon, associates said, veered from seeming healthy and calm to wallowing in despair. Some doubted if the speech would help. “I think he could pull out of it,” one associate told the New York Times. “But I wonder if this is the way to do it. It could be tragic.”35
On August 15 Haig told Nixon that Richardson said Henry Petersen’s review of the Agnew case had yielded the same grim result for the vice president as Richardson had presented nine days earlier.36
Seemingly rested by his time at Camp David, Nixon spoke on television with a renewed fervor that night, as if he thought he could will himself out of the Watergate morass and back to the presidency he had planned on having during his final four years in office. “The time has come to turn Watergate over to the courts, where the questions of guilt or innocence belong,” Nixon said. “The time has come for the rest of us to get on with the urgent business of our nation. I recognize that this statement does not answer many of the questions and contentions raised during the Watergate hearings. It has not been my intention to attempt any such comprehensive and detailed response. Neither do I believe I could enter upon an endless course of explaining and rebutting a complex of point-by-point claims and charges . . . and still be able to carry out my duties.”
Nixon said that he had not used the CIA to block the FBI investigation of the Watergate break-in (a lie that he appeared to repeat reflexively every time the issue arose), that no one on his staff had offered any of the Watergate defendants clemency, that he had not authorized the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, and that he depended on John Dean when he said no White House staff members were implicated in Watergate. “I had no prior knowledge of the Watergate operation,” the president said. “I neither took part in nor knew about any of the subsequent cover-up activities, I neither authorized nor encouraged subordinates to engage in illegal or improper campaign tactics. That was—and is—the simple truth.
“In all the millions of words of testimony, there is not the slightest suggestion that I had any knowledge of the planning for the Watergate break-in. As for the cover-up, my statement has been challenged by only one of the thirty five witnesses who appeared—a witness who offered no evidence beyond his own impressions, and whose testimony has been contradicted by every other witness in position to know the facts.”37
As was often the case with Nixon, some of what he said was true, and some was a whopping lie. He did not know about the Watergate break-in in advance and thought it was a ridiculous idea when he first learned the burglars had been arrested. Nixon definitely took part in the cover-up when he told Haldeman that he and John Ehrlichman needed to meet with CIA leaders to get them to tell the FBI to back off the Watergate investigation because it might stumble into CIA operations in Mexico. Nixon, Haldeman, and Haig all knew that looked and sounded like obstruction of justice, and the proof for it was contained on the tapes held in the White House. Dean, the witness to whom Nixon referred in his comments, may not have told the complete truth in his Senate testimony, but a strong plurality of Americans believed him, and little Nixon said on August 15 changed that.
On August 18 Don Sanders, the aide for the minority staff of the Watergate committee, had a four-hour meeting with former FBI official William Sullivan in Boston’s Logan Airport. Sanders wanted to pursue more of the details that Senator Lowell Weicker and other members of the committee staff had learned from Sullivan in their previous meetings. The wily former intelligence chief spun through several of the points he had made during his earlier interviews but focused primarily on what he had told Dean in the previous winter about the FBI wiretaps. He also dished out rumors from the 1960 and 1964 presidential campaigns and told about the bureau’s tracking of Anna Chennault, a Chinese American activist for Nixon who had helped him sabotage the Johnson administration’s attempts to get the South Vietnamese government to the 1968 Paris peace talks. Sullivan had leaked details of the wiretaps to the New York Times, and he also leaked to reporters all over Washington. Sanders asked him about an August 15 report by Scripps-Howard reporter Dan Thomasson that cited a five-page Sullivan memo about FBI activities in previous elections. Sullivan said he had not spoken with Thomasson or Jim Squires of the Chicago Tribune, who were investigating the unknown national security issues that Ehrlichman could not tell the Watergate committee in July.38
By August 20 Agnew knew that despite Nixon’s claims, Agnew had few friends in the White House. Laird had told his fellow Republicans in the House to avoid making confident defenses of Agnew because he was guilty. Laird also knew by this time, courtesy of Buzhardt, that Nixon was guilty, too, and that Nixon would inevitably be forced from office. If that happened, Agnew could not succeed him. Laird, Agnew wrote, “closed down any chance of my getting a sympathetic hearing, even poisoning the minds of many Republicans. As their actions had shown, General Haig, Laird, and their allies on the Nixon staff wanted me out in a hurry, even though they could not persuade the President to make me resign. It is logical to conclude that they permitted officials to leak all they pleased without fear of censure. Their campaign amounted to a White House staff war against the Vice President.”39
Agnew issued a statement on August 21 accusing Justice Department officials of leaking damaging information to sabotage him and demanded in a news conference that Richardson investigate.40 Agnew really knew, however, that Haig was the culprit. Richardson provided a convenient foil; Agnew could lash out at what he considered unfair behavior without targeting the president himself or his top aide.
On August 22 Cox and the White House lawyers met in Judge John Sirica’s court to argue over Cox’s tape request. “Happily ours is a system of government in which no man is above the law,” Cox said. There was “strong evidence to believe that the integrity of the executive office has been corrupted, although the extent of the rot is not yet clear.”41 Haig said this argument worked because of the strong public perception of Nixon’s guilt. Whatever the claims were in court, Haig and Buzhardt knew they were bogus, since they had set the court fight over the tapes in motion when they engineered Alexander Butterfield’s revelation in the first place.
Rogers resigned as secretary of state on August 22, and Nixon immediately nominated Kissinger, who would remain national security advisor, to replace Rogers. While that ended the tensions between Rogers and Kissinger, it also forced Kissinger to face confirmation hearings before the Senate for the first time. As national security advisor, Kissinger had avoided testifying under oath because it was a White House staff job protected by executive privilege. Now Kissinger would no longer have that protection, meaning that everything he had done in the previous four and a half years was fair game for curious members of the Foreign Relations Committee. That included the FBI wiretaps that he had sought on members of his own NSC staff.
Nixon now said that Haig, after slightly more than three months as chief of staff, “had become bogged down in Watergate.” So vast were the tentacles of the scandal that Haig had little choice, even if he had been protecting Nixon’s best interests and not his own. “Al Haig, I am sure, would be the first to acknowledge that he ran a very protective White House,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs. “It probably would have surprised the press corps to hear the assessments from Cabinet and staff that beneath Haig’s far more affable and accessible exterior he was in many ways a more rigid administrator than Bob Haldeman. . . . To prevent it, he drew more and more authority and responsibility to himself.”42
Nixon had given Haig that power, which Haig magnified by turning Nixon into a virtual prisoner in the White House and limiting his access to the rest of the staff. Meanwhile, Haig kept pressing Agnew to resign.
During a late-month trip to San Clemente, Nixon said he would fire anyone in the Justice Department who leaked information about Agnew. Nixon kept playing the good cop to Haig’s bad one, lying to reporters that his confidence in Agnew’s integrity “has not been shaken and in fact has been strengthened by his courageous conduct and his ability, even though he’s controversial at times as I am, over the past four-and-a-half years. And so I am confident in the integrity of the Vice-President and particularly in the performance of the duties that he has had as Vice-President, and as a candidate for Vice-President.” Nixon called speculation about Agnew resigning irresponsible, although he had delegated Haig to make that happen. “The Vice-President has not been indicted,” Nixon said. “Charges have been thrown out by innuendo and otherwise which he has denied to me personally and which he has denied publicly. And the talk about resignation even now . . . would be inappropriate.”43
Nixon had to get Agnew out before he could fire Cox. He told Haig to warn Richardson on August 23 that Nixon was “talking about moving against Cox.” Any thoughts Cox may have had about challenging Nixon’s “abuse of power,” Haig told the attorney general, were unacceptable, and “regardless of the price the president is not going to tolerate it.”44
In less than a year, Nixon’s abuse of power, including the wiretaps Haig and Kissinger abetted, would make up the article of impeachment against Nixon that would receive the most votes in the House Judiciary Committee.
Sirica ruled on August 29 that Nixon had to turn over the subpoenaed tapes. The White House immediately announced an appeal, claiming the order was “clearly erroneous and beyond the power of the judicial branch in that it purports to subject the President of the United States to compulsory process for acts performed in his official capacity.”45 In essence, they argued, Nixon was above the law in this regard, which by this time had been proven to be a losing argument in the courts. Nixon had no palatable options, since he knew the tapes showed he was guilty. He still did not realize, however, that Haig and Buzhardt, his main defenders, knew of that guilt, too, and were steadily undermining him.
Nixon was angry that Richardson had agreed to appoint a special prosecutor as a condition for his Senate confirmation, and he thought Richardson compounded that mistake by picking Cox, Nixon’s philosophical and geographical opposite, as the prosecutor. That was no one’s fault but Nixon’s. When Richard Kleindienst resigned as attorney general in April because of the problems Nixon created, Nixon could have picked anyone to succeed him. Instead, he picked Richardson and boxed him into a corner.
By the end of August Haig had let Agnew’s problems spill into the open and then tried to get Agnew to quit. He also leaned on Richardson to get Cox to back off and presided over the White House’s attempts to keep the tapes out of the prosecutor’s hands after Haig had helped expose the tapes’ existence in the first place. As the summer ended, Haig was pushing the president deeper into two crises that would speed Nixon’s eventual departure: Agnew’s resignation, which would lead to the appointment of a more desirable vice president who could succeed Nixon, and the firing of Cox, which would trigger the demands for Nixon’s impeachment. Nixon saw none of it coming.