Nixon careened into November with the revelations that two of the nine tapes sought by the special prosecutor’s office were either missing or had never existed. Judge John Sirica had forced Fred Buzhardt to acknowledge the missing tapes in open court on October 31, and the fallout from that revelation blanketed the administration like ash falling from an exploding star. “What is inconceivable is that the President and his advisers could wait until the last minute, just before the scheduled delivery of the tapes to Judge Sirica, to announce to the public, to the grand jury and to the court that this vital evidence did not, in fact, exist—and never had,” the Washington Post editorialized, summing up the wholesale frustration felt at the White House’s delay and obfuscation.1 That Buzhardt, Haig’s hand-picked Watergate counsel, botched the handling of the tapes makes more sense, given his collaboration with Haig in setting up the revelation of the tapes’ existence in the first place and his knowledge that Nixon, his client, was guilty.
The missing tapes nagged at Nixon, who believed he had a reasonable explanation for why they did not exist. He scribbled these notes on the top of a briefing paper on November 1:
There were no missing tapes.
There were never any.
The conversations in question were not taped.
Why couldn’t we get that across to people?2
Instead of Archibald Cox, the White House had a new special prosecutor to handle, one who Haig hoped would be more understanding of Haig’s particular concerns. Leon Jaworski’s hiring was announced on November 1, complete with the assurances to the public that he would have the independence denied Cox. The White House officials who persuaded him to take the job—Haig, Buzhardt, Melvin Laird, and Bryce Harlow—already knew Nixon was guilty and would not finish his term. Hiring Jaworski and letting him go after Nixon would guarantee that the president would be either impeached or convicted of a crime. For Haig, Jaworski’s arrival was a relief; some accounts described Haig as “exultant.” Haig knew Jaworski would avoid the sticky “national security” areas that posed a problem for him while he stayed with Nixon, who decamped to Key Biscayne shortly after the Jaworski announcement, followed closely by speculation about when he would resign and who would persuade him to do it.
Nixon’s escape to Florida provided no relief. Some Republicans said on November 2 that Nixon should testify before the Senate Watergate committee. Prominent columnists James Reston of the New York Times and Joseph Alsop said Nixon needed to consider resigning.3 Reston and Alsop personified the core of Establishment Washington thinking, and while Nixon resented the Establishment, he craved its approval. Those opinions also gave cover to timid members of Congress who needed signals of shifting winds to move. So insistent were the calls that Gerald Warren, Nixon’s deputy press secretary, felt compelled to insist that Nixon would not resign.4
In Washington, White House aide Steve Bull testified in Sirica’s court that Nixon had listened to tapes on June 4 and that there existed a “tape of tapes” from that session.5 The recorders logged Haig’s meeting with Nixon that day, making it clear that Haig knew about Nixon’s taping at least by then. Other tapes showed that Nixon told Haig about the taping system on May 8, less than a week after Haig became chief of staff.
Nixon’s approval rating from the Gallup poll hit 27 percent in the survey released November 3, a day on which New Yorker political writer Elizabeth Drew wrote, “The thought seems to have spread that the President must leave office.”6 Buzhardt and Len Garment apparently agreed. They flew to Florida to meet with Nixon and persuade him to resign. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote in The Final Days, for which Haig and Buzhardt were major sources, that Buzhardt and Garment wanted to get Nixon to quit, while Nixon, who did not meet with them, wrote that the duo wanted to quit themselves.7 Either way, Haig blocked Buzhardt and Garment’s access to the president, instead shuttling between them to give messages and try to shape some kind of response to the mounting crisis.
The missing April 15 tape of the meeting between John Dean and Nixon particularly vexed Sirica and the White House. Bull said he had checked it out when he got the tapes for Nixon on June 4. Its existence and then apparent disappearance reinforced the growing belief that Nixon was hiding or destroying evidence. Buzhardt and Garment believed Nixon could have also dictated his thoughts after the meeting into his Dictabelt recorder. After searching everywhere in the White House where such a recording might be kept, they concluded it did not exist. “I had put Buzhardt in an untenable position,” Nixon wrote. Nixon had first raised the possibility that a Dictabelt recording, not a reel-to-reel tape, existed of the April 15 meeting. He had Buzhardt write a letter to Cox in June to that effect. “Len Garment felt the public revelation of this latest blunder would throw us into a fatal spin,” Nixon wrote, adding that Buzhardt and Garment were so discouraged that they wanted to quit. “We were always in a completely reactive situation, and there seemed to be no prospect for changing that pattern no matter what we did,” Nixon wrote.8
Haig told Nixon about his meeting with Buzhardt and Garment, and the president sensed the two lawyers wanted out. “I could not blame them.”9
Haig also told Nixon that no one in Key Biscayne or Washington could find the Dictabelt. The president, Haig said, responded with an incredible suggestion: “You know, Al,” he said, “as far as the Dictabelt is concerned, all we have to do is create another one.”10
“Nixon’s words shocked me,” Haig wrote, “in the literal sense that I felt something like the tingle of an electrical current along my scalp. . . . ‘Mr. President, that cannot be done,’” Haig said he told Nixon. “It would be wrong; it would be illegal; it would be totally unacceptable. It’s just impossible.”11
Nixon let the idea drop, and Haig rushed to tell Buzhardt and Garment, who both threatened to resign. Haig told them to reconsider. If they resigned, then the world would want to know why, and if they told the truth about why, then Nixon would be impeached, Gerald Ford would not be confirmed as vice president, and Carl Albert would rise to the White House from his position as House Speaker. Once again, Haig fell back on the “Albert as president” canard, knowing full well that Albert had no designs on the White House. In fact, Albert had urged a speedy confirmation of Ford as vice president so he could be in place to succeed Nixon if and when he resigned or was impeached.12
“Doubt is not proof,” Haig wrote that he told Buzhardt and Garment. “Whatever this man is, whatever he’s done, whatever office he holds, he has the right to due process. If you won’t defend him, knowing more about the case than anybody else, who will?” Buzhardt and Garment went home.13
The truth was that Haig continuously undermined Nixon’s defense. He picked Buzhardt as the president’s Watergate defender, and then Buzhardt told his allies, especially Laird, that Nixon was guilty, which eroded Nixon’s support from within. Haig recommended against using executive privilege to stop Vernon Walters from testifying in May, and then Walters told the Senate that key members of Nixon’s staff had urged him to get the FBI to back off the Watergate investigation. Haig knew about the White House taping system and that Alexander Butterfield would tell the Senate about it but did nothing to alert Nixon or stop the testimony. He pushed Spiro Agnew out of the vice presidency to find a more politically palatable successor to Nixon when he inevitably left office. Haig’s claims that he warned Buzhardt and Garment not to quit, when they had actually gone to Florida to get Nixon to resign, ring hollow.
If those calling for Nixon to resign knew what he had suggested to Haig about the Dictabelt, the cries would have surged. On November 5 someone on the White House staff, most likely Haig or Buzhardt, contacted Woodward at the Post. Some of the White House tapes have been intentionally erased, the source told Woodward. In All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein wrote that the source of that information was Deep Throat, whom Woodward later said was former FBI official Mark Felt.14 That, like much of the Deep Throat mythology, cannot be true. By November Felt had been gone from the FBI for five months. Only five people at the White House knew about the June 20, 1972, tape from which Rose Mary Woods had mistakenly erased five minutes. They were Woods, Steve Bull, Haig’s aide John Bennett, Haig, and Buzhardt. None trusted Felt to tell him about the tapes, and if Felt had known, he would have gone directly to Sirica instead of telling Woodward. The tip sent Woodward and Bernstein scrambling for confirmation.
Jaworski also threw a curveball at Haig and Buzhardt on November 5. The pair thought Jaworski would back them up on national security issues, but the new prosecutor signed a brief from his staff opposing the White House claim of national security for the records that Egil Krogh wanted to use in his defense. Included in Krogh’s October 31 defense motion was a call for materials related to the White House Plumbers’ investigation of the India-Pakistan crisis of December 1971, which also involved the discovery of the military spy ring operating inside the NSC and assisted by Haig. National security, the prosecution team wrote, was too often used as a “talisman” to scare away legitimate inquiries. There was no need to allow that to happen with Krogh, the prosecution wrote.15
The furor over the tapes continued on November 6. Bull testified in Sirica’s court about the White House staff’s often casual handling of the tapes. Woods took some with her, as did Bennett. Bob Haldeman checked out some for his use after he resigned the previous April.16 Bull’s testimony shredded the White House’s claim that it kept the tapes closely held, and he also helped heighten the suspicion that the Nixon had somehow destroyed the two missing tapes to protect himself. Not only were Sirica, the prosecution, the press, and the public unwilling to give Nixon the benefit of the doubt, when it came to the president, there was no doubt at all: more and more Americans simply assumed he was guilty. Each new disclosure turned up the pressure for him to go. Nixon, the New York Times reported, was increasingly isolated and relied almost exclusively on Haig and Ron Ziegler for support.17
On November 7 Nixon went on television to introduce energy-saving measures to cope with the oil embargo placed on the United States by Arab nations during the war with Israel. He called for the relaxation of some environmental standards, a lower speed limit to save gas, and lower thermostat settings at home as winter neared. The embattled president said he would not resign. Nixon looked defeated, an impression heightened by Congress’s move that day to override Nixon’s veto of the War Powers Act, which limited the president’s ability to commit troops to conflicts without congressional approval. The act was a direct reaction to the disclosures through the year about Nixon’s authorization of the secret bombing of Cambodia and secret missions by U.S. troops into Laos, two neutral countries in the Vietnam War. Ziegler said in the White House press briefing that the president would provide answers to the new questions about the tapes and that Nixon was not seeing a psychiatrist or taking tranquilizers as the pressures on him mounted.18
That day in Sirica’s court, Bennett compounded the impression that something was wrong with the White House tapes. Woods, Bennett said, complained to him the previous day that one of the conversations she was trying to transcribe “seemed to trail off in mid-conversation.” Haig, Bennett testified, told him Woods was transcribing the tapes for Nixon, although Bennett added that Woods might be summarizing the tapes instead of making verbatim transcripts. Sirica, whose zeal to push the Watergate investigation had angered the White House for more than a year, announced in court that he wanted electronics experts to analyze the tapes and tell the court “the reasons that might exist for the non-existence of these conversations.” This phase, he said, “may well be the most important and conclusive part of these hearings.”19
If Woods told Bennett about problems with the tapes on November 6, then Bennett told Haig and Buzhardt. Woods had already told Nixon that she had mistakenly erased part of a June 20, 1972, tape on October 1. Who knew about the issues with the tapes would become more important the next day, November 8.
That morning’s Post contained a story about Bennett’s testimony paired with a Woodward and Bernstein story that had been sparked by the tip three days earlier about problems with the tapes. “According to White House sources questioned over the past three days, there is serious concern among the president’s aides and advisers that the latest problems regarding the tapes will further strain the credibility of the White House,” the duo wrote. “Of five sources who confirmed that defects have been found in the tapes, one said the problems are ‘of a suspicious nature.’ According to this source, some conversation on some of the tapes appears to have been erased or obliterated by the injection—inadvertent or otherwise—of background noise.” They also included a knowing quote from a White House aide: “This town is in such a state that everybody will say, ‘They’re doctoring the tapes.’”20
Into the already heightening suspicion that Nixon was destroying evidence and obstructing justice dropped this nuclear bomb. It followed Buzhardt and Garment’s unsuccessful trip to Florida to get Nixon to resign and Nixon’s suggestion to make a fake Dictabelt recording. Woodward and Bernstein wrote that the White House officials were interviewed over the last three days, which would put the first tip to Woodward and Bernstein on November 5, within hours after Buzhardt and Garment returned to Washington. Nixon and Haig arrived back in Washington on the evening of November 5. That put Haig in Washington in time for him to tell Woodward about the tapes.
Someone was doctoring the tapes. It just was not the person—Nixon—or for the reasons that many people suspected.
Woods testified before Sirica on November 8. Samuel J. Powers, the new White House attorney hired to handle the tapes case, questioned her about the alleged gap in the tapes.
“Are you satisfied there is no gap in the tapes?” Powers asked.
“Perfectly satisfied,” Woods said in an answer that would eventually boomerang back on her and Nixon in unforeseen ways.21
Her questioner, Powers, was also a member of the Morris Leibman stable of attorneys. He had recommended Powers, a Miami attorney, to Haig.22 Powers also worked closely with Leibman on American Bar Association issues, including anticommunism; they were both members of the ABA’s Standing Committee on Education against Communism.23 Not only did Leibman recommend Jaworski to Haig, he was helping pick the president’s defense. It would not end there.
In a telegram to Kissinger, who was in Jordan, Haig summed up the darkening mood in the White House. “Due to overriding necessity to reinforce confidence here, the President feels strongly that there should be no, repeat, no announcement of any easing of oil restrictions from your party if you are also able to add this feather to your cap,” Haig wrote. “He hopes that progress made in this area could be announced by him from the White House after your return. . . . I promise you early notice on any new jolts,” Haig continued. “As of now the problem I anticipated is under control but I will keep you advised in [a] timely manner.”24
The danger increased again on November 12, when Nixon sent a statement to Sirica that the April 15 Dictabelt never existed. “My personal diary file consists of notes of conversations and dictation belts of recollections, and I believed in June that I had dictated my recollections of April 15, 1973, of conversations which occurred that day.” He had not, said Nixon, who closed with a sentence that captured his magical thinking: “It is my hope that these steps will clear up this aspect of the Watergate matter once and for all.”25
On November 13 Haig summoned Jaworski to the White House in the late afternoon to meet with him and Buzhardt. They gathered in the White House Map Room to discuss urgent business with the new prosecutor, and they dived right in, according to Jaworski’s handwritten notes. The demands from Egil Krogh’s lawyer in the October 31 court filing were “trouble” that risked exposing a sensitive national security case, Haig and Buzhardt told Jaworski.26 That case, the two continued, involved a “yeoman used as secretary by Haig” and “tremendously sensitive conversations and agreements with heads of state,” copies of which were sent to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Haig and Buzhardt described the spy ring operation that Haig abetted with the help of navy yeoman Charles Radford, who was caught in December 1971 and shipped to a base in Oregon. They also told Jaworski of the January 10, 1972, report prepared by Buzhardt at Laird’s request that whitewashed Haig’s involvement and sealed off the matter for good from the White House. Both Haig and Buzhardt knew that a more detailed White House investigation conducted by David Young, one of the Plumbers, existed, but that report cut too close to Haig. By steering Jaworski to a limited and fraudulent investigative report that buried the issue for the Pentagon, they obstructed justice.27 Perhaps Jaworski did not care, given his coziness with the national security establishment, but by accepting Haig and Buzhardt’s guidance, he protected Haig. The following day, Jaworski told U.S. District Judge Gerhard Gesell, who oversaw the Krogh case, that the White House, with Nixon’s approval, would grant him access to some of the tapes and documents that Krogh sought. Those materials, Jaworski told Gesell, would allow him to look for “any information of an exculpatory nature or relevant to punishment.”28
The November 13 meeting was the first of what would become many between Haig and Jaworski. They usually met in the Map Room, where Haig handed Jaworski documents intended to prove that the White House was acting in good faith. In the meantime, Buzhardt would drag his feet on requests from other prosecutors and Congress, creating the outward impression of a White House pushing back hard against the thundering hordes of Watergate zealots. The reality was that Haig gave Jaworski virtually everything he wanted. “So they would meet in the Map Room, and Haig would move close to Leon, stare at him intensely with his blue eyes, and warn Leon about the dangers to the nation that Watergate posed,” an aide to Haig told author Seymour Hersh. “The aide says, with obvious admiration, ‘Haig understood the play,’” but given the Leibman seal of approval and Jaworski’s willingness to take the job, Jaworski understood the play as well.29
Buzhardt and Sam Powers sat down November 14 to listen to the tape from June 20, 1972, between Nixon and Bob Haldeman that Rose Mary Woods had accidentally erased in October. Powers said Buzhardt warned him they would encounter a four-to-five-minute gap. But as they listened to the tape with headphones and a stopwatch sitting on the table next to them, the gap kept going until it reached eighteen and a half minutes long. An astonished Powers had expected a much shorter gap, but now, in the presence of Buzhardt, he realized Nixon had a more serious problem. Buzhardt and Powers went to see Haig. “When we notified Al Haig that evening, the President, as I understood it, was entertaining some senators, some of the leadership of the Senate,” Powers said later in an interview. “In the East Room of the White House. And Haig didn’t want to interrupt him.”30 Nixon reassured the fourteen Republican senators gathered that they had seen the last of the bad news to emerge from the White House about Watergate.
Nixon met for breakfast with Republican House members on November 15, still ignorant of the mysterious erasure. Haig still had not told Nixon, despite the warning from Buzhardt and Powers the evening before. Nixon told the House members they were turning the corner on Watergate. Then Nixon, still in the dark about the erasure, spoke to a convention of Realtors at the Washington Hilton and said he did not violate the law. Haig did not want to rattle Nixon before the Realtors speech, although he had information that would have influenced what Nixon told them. Haig waited until 4:00 p.m. to tell Nixon about the tape gap and another bombshell: the tape was also on the list of tapes subpoenaed by the special prosecutor. A gap of more than eighteen minutes on a tape that was not covered by subpoena meant little, but on a subpoenaed tape that gap meant the destruction of evidence, whether intentional or not.
The missed signals between Haig, Buzhardt, and the other attorneys working on Nixon’s defense reflected Haig’s tight control. Only he could talk to Nixon alone. Even friends of Nixon, such as Illinois judge John Sullivan, who was brought in to help in November, left shortly after arriving, realizing they had nothing to do.31 Cecil Emerson of Dallas, a Nixon defense attorney, said Buzhardt controlled the access to Nixon and the tapes, and Buzhardt did nothing without Haig’s knowledge and approval. An unnamed White House aide confirmed Emerson’s impression, saying, “Any assessment that Buzhardt controls access to the tapes and what is on them is absolutely correct and it is one that causes some concern to members” of the legal team.32 Nixon lacked a strong defense when he needed it most, but his chief of staff had no interest in giving him one.
After the first weekend of the month, when Nixon weathered a barrage of bad news tied to the missing tapes and the calls for resignation from his top lawyers, he resolved to turn things around by rallying Republicans on Capitol Hill and taking his case to friendly audiences around the country. The press called it Operation Candor. On November 16 Nixon traveled to Orlando for an address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors and a question-and-answer period. He told the audience that the missing tape from June 20, 1972, was a record of a call to John Mitchell, his friend, former attorney general, and campaign manager, to cheer him up three days after the Watergate burglars were captured. On the issue of taping meetings in the Oval Office, Nixon said his predecessors, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, also taped their calls and meetings. Nixon said he created the Plumbers to stop the national security leaks that had bedeviled his administration. One, he said, was so serious that Senators Sam Ervin and Howard Baker of the Watergate committee agreed “it should not be disclosed.” That was the spy ring, which Buzhardt and Garment had persuaded the senators to leave alone in July. As for the two missing tapes, Nixon said, “[The fact that they were not there was a] very great disappointment . . . and I just wish we had had a better system. I frankly wish we hadn’t had a system at all. Then I wouldn’t have to answer this question.”33
Nixon moved on to Macon, Georgia, where he said in a news conference that the American people needed to have faith in the president’s integrity and to know whether he was a crook or not. “Well, I am not a crook,” he said, adding another line to the growing Nixonian lexicon. “From then on, variations of the line ‘I am not a crook’ were used as an almost constant source of criticism and ridicule,” he wrote.34 In Memphis on November 20 Nixon said he did not think there would be any more bad revelations to come, but he did not know then that none of the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap on the tape could be recovered. Shortly after the Memphis appearance, Haig checked with Buzhardt, who told him he could not reproduce the buzzing sound on the tape gap. In fact, Buzhardt said the sound was such that it did not appear the gap could be accidental. Someone had erased the tape on purpose.35
Haig told Nixon about the gap on the flight back to Washington. The president would suffer another devastating blow to his credibility. “The headline in papers all across the country the next morning was my assertion that there would be no more Watergate bombshells,” Nixon wrote.36 Later that morning, November 21, Buzhardt met in Sirica’s chambers and described the tape gap, how a shrill buzz blocked out more than eighteen minutes of conversation between Nixon and Bob Haldeman from June 20. Buzhardt tried to persuade Sirica to keep this latest revelation private, arguing that its disclosure would be devastating. Jaworski countered by saying they had to disclose the longer gap immediately. Sirica sided with Jaworski, and minutes later, Buzhardt told a stunned crowd in the courtroom about the missing eighteen minutes of conversation on the tape.37
Sirica said he wanted to take control of the tapes. “This is just another instance that convinces the court that it has to take some steps, not because the court doesn’t believe the White House or the President [but because] the court is interested in seeing that nothing else happens,” he said.38
Just how the eighteen minutes disappeared from the tape has stumped experts for the last forty years. Only a handful of White House officials and staff members had access to the tapes: Nixon, Haig, Buzhardt, John Bennett, Steve Bull, and Rose Mary Woods. Of those, only Haig and Buzhardt had the motive to erase part of the tape to further discredit Nixon. They had engineered Alexander Butterfield’s revelation of the taping system in July, shared the news of Nixon’s guilt with Melvin Laird and Bryce Harlow, blown the handling of Archibald Cox’s firing, and argued that Nixon needed to resign. Buzhardt also used the tapes the most and was the most adept at handling the Uher tape recorder the staff used to listen to the tapes and make the transcripts. Buzhardt also had a convenient witness when he first discovered the length of the gap—Samuel Powers, the attorney picked with the help of Haig’s old friend and advisor, Morris Leibman. Finally, Buzhardt knew the tape was not relevant. While Nixon and Haldeman discussed Watergate in that June 20 conversation, they did not do so in great detail. The damaging conversation, as Haig and Buzhardt had known since the previous May, came on June 23, when Nixon authorized Haldeman to tell the CIA’s leaders to tell the FBI director to slow down the investigation into the Watergate break-in. That tape, the true smoking gun, still existed intact and remained for future discovery.
But Buzhardt said none of that to Sirica, the president, or anyone else. He professed ignorance and confusion about the cause of the gap. Woods testified that she had caused the gap accidentally while transcribing the tapes for Nixon. Few people inside the court believed her, assuming she was taking a bullet for her longtime boss. Haig also testified, claiming that a “sinister force” had erased the tape. Haig was right, but he failed to say the name of that force—Buzhardt.
Nixon and Haig knew the latest disclosure crippled the White House. “If Nixon felt any special sense of foreboding over this development, he did not show it,” Haig wrote.
But of course he knew, as we all did, that the revelation that a vital segment in one of his tapes had mysteriously been erased, coming on the heels of the announcement that two other key tapes had never existed and a critically important Dictabelt had been lost, would be the straw that broke the back of public opinion.
And so it was. Another media story lighted up the skies over Washington. Accusations flew; suspicions festered; the mood of the Establishment darkened. And as a practical matter, the burden of proof on the questions of the guilt or innocence of the President of the United States for crimes still to be discovered or named had shifted. He was now faced with the necessity of establishing his innocence, a process known by the legal profession to be so far beyond human ingenuity that the Founding Fathers had abolished it from American practice in the Bill of Rights.39
Haig knew that innocence could never be proved. And within days, Nixon’s eventual replacement, Gerald Ford, would be confirmed by Congress as the new vice president, replacing the unacceptable Spiro Agnew, whom Haig had forced to resign the previous month. The Senate on November 27 confirmed Ford by a 92–3 vote. The House, where Ford had served for a quarter century, was next, and it was virtually guaranteed to replicate the same lopsided vote.
As the month closed on November 30, Haig received an unexpected break when Krogh, whose requests for documents about the Plumbers’ investigation of the military spy ring threatened to expose Haig, pleaded guilty to perjury. That prevented embarrassing details about the Plumbers from surfacing in court.
Also on November 30 Laird announced he would leave the White House staff early the following year. While Laird did not say so publicly, he had accomplished what he needed to do when he joined the staff in June: preserve the cover-up of the military spy ring with Haig and Buzhardt, push out Agnew, and promote the nomination of his longtime friend and ally Ford as vice president. Ford, Laird said, would take over the domestic policy duties, although presumably with more access to the president than Laird had.
While Laird had managed to keep a lid on the spy ring, it still remained a threat to those who had participated in it and covered it up. As Laird announced his departure from the White House, Donald Sanders, the Watergate committee staffer who got Butterfield to reveal the existence of the White House tapes, met with his old friend from the FBI, Donald Stewart, the chief investigator at the Pentagon who discovered the spy ring. While the Watergate committee leadership had agreed not to investigate the spy ring, Sanders’s boss, Senator Howard Baker, believed it was a key to much of what motivated the secrecy in the Nixon White House. He was not letting go. Stewart wrote Sanders a memo the next day to summarize their meeting and highlighted how Buzhardt covered up the Defense Department’s exposure in the leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.40
Nixon started November reeling from the news that two of the tapes subpoenaed by the Watergate special prosecutor did not exist. Two of his main defenders, Buzhardt and Garment, believed he had to resign. By month’s end, Buzhardt had revealed the destruction of another tape, knowing that the real evidence of Nixon’s still remained available for discovery. Nixon still believed he could weather the fight, but his chief defenders knew better.