In November Nixon had tried valiantly to rebuild what remained of his image and public standing. Although often ridiculed, Operation Candor made some progress; Nixon’s approval ratings perked up slightly. They could not match what Haig had done—either intentionally or by accident—to sabotage Nixon, starting with the revelation in the Post about intentional gaps in the White House tapes and then the revelation of the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap on a tape that had been subpoenaed by the special prosecutor. Now Nixon stood accused of intentionally destroying evidence in a desperate attempt to save himself. December would provide no respite. Hearings into the tapes continued, and the president’s erratic behavior drew increasingly concerned reactions. As Gerald Ford’s confirmation as vice president neared, more people inside and outside the White House wondered how much longer Nixon would remain president.
A December 4 New York Times article highlighted the concerns about Nixon’s health, citing reports that his July bout with viral pneumonia was worse than acknowledged and that the president lacked energy. It raised anonymous speculation that once Ford was confirmed, Nixon could enact the Twenty-Fifth Amendment and step aside temporarily. “Some of the greater signs of stress have been seen, not in the President himself, but in his staff,” the Times reported. “Mr. Haig, J. Fred Buzhardt, Nixon’s Watergate counsel, and others have appeared extraordinarily fatigued from time to time.”1
In October Haig and Buzhardt concocted the ill-fated plan to have Mississippi senator John Stennis authenticate summaries of the White House tapes for Judge John Sirica and the special prosecutor, then Archibald Cox. The wrangling over the Stennis compromise became part of the pretext to fire Cox and eventually replace him with the more cooperative Leon Jaworski. On December 5 in an interview with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, Stennis demolished many of the White House’s claims about the Stennis compromise. Stennis told the Post that he “had no idea” the White House wanted him to authenticate transcripts to be given to the court instead of the tapes themselves. “I was to deliver two copies, one for the White House and one for the Senate Watergate committee,” Stennis said. “There was never any mention about the court. I wouldn’t have done it if there was. No, no, no, I was once a judge and the courts can ask for what they want.”2 Stennis’s refutation of the White House’s version of the deal did not blow back on the architects of the compromise—Haig and Buzhardt—but on Nixon, who had merely acquiesced to what his aides gave him. And Senator Sam Ervin, one of the intended recipients of the Stennis summaries, piled on, saying that he too had been misled by the White House. Once again, as the move toward impeachment gained momentum, Haig had weakened the president’s credibility.
Also on December 5 Haig began testifying in Sirica’s court about the tape gap. Nixon, Haig said, was “very, very disturbed” about the gap, which Haig did not tell him about until after he spoke to a group of Realtors on November 15, a day after Buzhardt told Haig about the problem. “I felt the situation was sufficiently worrisome I should let him complete his speech,” Haig said about the delay in informing the president.3 Haig maintained that neither he, Buzhardt, nor Nixon knew the June 20, 1973, tape was subject to the subpoena. If so, however, why was Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s secretary, bothering to transcribe it in the first place? Haig told the court that Buzhardt told him the gap on the tape was longer than the five minutes they expected—eighteen minutes and fifteen seconds, to be exact—and that it was covered by the subpoena. “I said, ‘This is a pretty late date to be telling me something like that,’” Haig said he told Buzhardt.4 Haig’s claim about the tape gap is hard to believe. It made no sense for Woods to waste time transcribing tapes not included in the subpoena, and Haig controlled the flow of information inside the Nixon White House. He and Buzhardt dominated the White House response to Cox, and he and Buzhardt engineered the plan that led to Cox’s firing. Haig knew about the original erasure by Woods and is the logical suspect for leaking concerns about problems with the tapes to Woodward, his old associate from the National Security Council. Then, once Haig learned from Buzhardt and Sam Powers that the tape erasure was much longer than expected, he waited almost an entire day before telling Nixon and let the president give a high-profile speech without accurate information.
Haig continued his testimony on December 6. He inadvertently tipped his hand under questioning by Len Garment, admitting that Nixon had told him about the taping system in late May. He later said under cross-examination by prosecution lawyer Richard Ben-Veniste that he had learned that “some recordings of some conversations existed.” Mostly, however, Haig continued to blame Woods for the entire eighteen-minute gap. Haig testified that Woods would be wrong about how much tape she erased, because he knew women who thought they had talked for only five minutes when they had actually talked for an hour. Sirica asked Haig if the tape could have been erased intentionally.
“Yes,” Haig answered. “There’s been discussion of what I’ve referred to as devil theories.”
Sirica then asked Haig who the “sinister source” was Haig suspected of erasing the tape.
Haig did not mention any suspects, although he said the court had to narrow its focus to those who had access to the tapes—Woods and Steve Bull.5
Haig knew that answer was not true. Buzhardt had constant access to the tapes, and the erasure had grown from the time Woods discovered it on October 1 to November 14, when Buzhardt allegedly stumbled on the eighteen-minute, fifteen-second version with Powers. Buzhardt knew how to work the tape recorder better than anyone in Nixon’s inner circle, and Haig and Buzhardt had the motive and opportunity to lengthen the erasure and then sandbag Nixon by not telling him about it. When Haig was asked why the White House did not reveal the longer gap until November 21, when Sirica forced Buzhardt to disclose it in open court, Haig said: “We had just had two nonrecordings, which was fairly traumatic from our perspective, and it was important we not have a repeat of that kind of thing, which led to perceptions by the American people which I don’t think were justified by the facts.”6
Impeachment loomed as a greater possibility as Gerald Ford moved even closer to being confirmed as vice president. The House debated on his nomination and voted on December 6. Senator Jacob Javits, a liberal New York Republican who had voted to confirm Ford in the Senate, said Ford’s imminent confirmation brought Nixon’s resignation into play, another indication of how badly Republicans viewed the extent of the damage Nixon’s continued presence in the White House was having on their political fortunes. The House voted overwhelmingly to approve Ford, who was sworn in that evening.7 Haig sat next to Pat Nixon in the House gallery to watch Ford become the first person sworn in as vice president under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. It was a moment Haig had waited for since he learned of the bribery investigation that made Spiro Agnew politically radioactive. Nixon’s replacement was now in place. “The atmosphere on Capitol Hill revealed more about the political realities of the day than perhaps had been intended,” Haig wrote. “Ford was treated throughout the ceremony and afterward as a President in waiting, especially by Republicans, and there can be little question that Richard Nixon’s presidency was over, in their minds, from the moment his successor took the oath. By then, the left wing of his own party, and much of the center, had effectively given up hope that he could be saved.”8
Many others shared that same feeling. Tom Wicker, a New York Times columnist, identified a growing consensus within Congress. The morning after Ford was sworn in, Wicker wrote that Ford’s presence now opened a chance for Nixon to depart gracefully. “Another possibility flowing from it is that Mr. Nixon might now seek to arrange something like an ‘Agnew deal’ with the new vice president,” Wicker wrote. “He could arrange to step down, that is, in return for certain assurances from President-to-be Ford that indictments or other legal action would not be pursued in the case of a private citizen named Richard Nixon.”9
Nixon rushed to assure Ford he had no intention of quitting. During his first news conference on December 7, Ford said, “I can assure you the president has no intention whatsoever of resigning. I heard him say it before and he reiterated it today. I don’t think he should resign. I see no evidence whatsoever that would justify a favorable vote in the House of Representatives on impeachment.”10
Ford, however, had been tipped off in August by Laird that Agnew was guilty. It is not a stretch to believe that Laird, Ford’s old friend and booster in the House, had shared what he knew about Nixon as well. But since Nixon had no intention of leaving office, it would have been politically suicidal for the newly installed Ford to say anything to challenge Nixon’s future. But Ford knew better, and he knew his options. Now settling in as vice president, Ford had to maneuver through an obstacle course that required protecting Nixon politically while also preserving his own credibility. Much of the public and many of his colleagues underestimated Ford, but few people rise as high as he did without mastering the system. Ford, after all, had maneuvered to get on the Warren Commission, which was investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.11 He also ousted two incumbent members of the Republican House leadership in the 1960s, including minority leader Charlie Halleck in 1965.12 Ford’s allies in Congress worried that Ford did not distance himself enough from Nixon, but the new vice president knew what he was doing.
Although Egil Krogh pleaded guilty on November 30, which eliminated the problem of a trial that would expose details of the Plumbers operation damaging to Haig, the Plumbers issue still threatened him. On December 10 reporter Seymour Hersh of the New York Times had a story that detailed many of the Plumbers’ activities, particularly their investigation of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and the rivalry between Krogh and David Young, the former NSC aide to Kissinger who helped Krogh run the special investigations unit.13 It was that tension that contributed to John Ehrlichman’s disbelief of Young’s suspicions of Haig’s involvement in December 1971 with the spy ring, because Krogh was close to Ehrlichman, while Young was identified with Kissinger. By this time, prosecutors had given Young immunity, so he would also not be tried. Hersh showed how the decision to break into the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, was made and the links between the Plumbers and Ehrlichman, Nixon’s close aide who supervised them. Every time a White House aide close to the Plumbers could avoid a trial, the better it was for Haig. Ellsberg’s trial in the spring showed how trials often took on lives of their own, spinning off new evidence and causing untold collateral damage. Ellsberg’s trial exposed the existence of both the Plumbers and the FBI wiretaps on seventeen government officials and journalists. A Krogh trial, especially if the defendant was allowed to use evidence about the investigation into the leaks during the India-Pakistan war, would have shown how the Plumbers knew Haig helped the spy ring steal secrets from the White House and then reveal those secrets to columnist Jack Anderson. Not only did Haig pass information to the military that Nixon did not want it to have, but then he, Laird, Buzhardt, and Adm. Thomas Moorer covered up what they had done with a whitewashed Pentagon investigation.
Haig’s negotiations with Jaworski walked a similar tightrope. While Jaworski complained that Buzhardt withheld information that Jaworski considered essential to the case against Nixon and his top aides, Haig was funneling tapes and other documents to Jaworski. Claiming to act in the name of the president, Haig requested help in mid-December from the National Security Agency, a division of the Pentagon, to make duplicates of certain tapes. Defense Secretary James Schlesinger was reluctant to get his department drawn into anything having to do with Watergate. Schlesinger consulted with Martin Hoffmann, his special assistant, about the propriety of Haig’s request, and Hoffmann suggested they could honor it if they had a member of Jaworski’s staff accompany them. That angered Haig, as did Schlesinger’s claim that if Haig was copying the tapes to make it easier for more people to listen to them, he should have no problem letting the prosecutor’s staff watch the copying. “Haig abruptly hung up; there would be no more Watergate-related calls to Schlesinger from Haig’s office,” Hersh wrote.14 Many of Jaworski’s staff were suspicious of his frequent meetings with Haig, but they did not know how much Haig was doing to help their case. Haig could not afford the exposure that Schlesinger’s proposal would have generated.
Signs of Nixon’s slippage, real or contrived, continued. On December 13 he met alone in the White House with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador and Kissinger’s longtime secret negotiating partner. They spoke for almost an hour, covering the recent developments in the Middle East and other issues. “The private conversation was unusual both in content and form in that he was extraordinarily frank about domestic questions,” Dobrynin wrote in his memoirs. Nixon, Dobrynin said, was unusually candid about Israel and Kissinger, who he said “strongly indulged Israel’s nationalist sentiments, for which he had to be corrected. . . . Finally he told me to give no credence to the hue and cry in the American media about his possible resignation or impeachment. He said he would stay in the White House until the end of his term, he was a persistent person, and he would be as good as his word—make no mistake about it.”15 Neither Nixon nor Haig gave Kissinger a heads-up, which enraged him. Kissinger sent his deputy, Brent Scowcroft, an angry telegram demanding to know why Nixon had met with Dobrynin and citing the dangers of having such a meeting without him. “Thus, I must insist that I be given a full report of the Dobrynin conversation with the President,” Kissinger wrote. “I am flying blind without it, which at this point could have disastrous consequences for all we are trying to do here and at home to build a peace and restore foreign and domestic confidence in this administration.”16 As he had through the Middle East crisis, Kissinger resented what he considered Nixon’s interference. He did not trust the president, because he thought Nixon’s grasp on reality was slipping.
So did some of Nixon’s allies. The president invited Senator Barry Goldwater to dinner at the White House on the evening of December 13. Sitting with Pat Nixon, Julie and David Eisenhower, Rose Mary Woods, and other close Nixon associates, Goldwater watched in horror as Nixon spoke in “gibberish” and appeared openly drunk. “Act like a president,” Goldwater told Nixon.17 Haig called this incident “one of many stories, apocryphal and otherwise, that fed rumors of a Nixon driven to drink and clinical depression by his troubles. The truth is that Nixon maintained psychological equilibrium under conditions that would have driven a saint around the bend.”18 As with much of Haig’s memoirs, that claim is simply not true. Every day Haig watched Nixon unravel, and he played on those displays to marginalize the president and maneuver for his removal.
Haig asked Nixon about his meeting with Dobrynin and reported to Kissinger on December 14. Nixon told Haig he had mostly sought continued cooperation with the Soviets on the Middle East and their help with Syria in freeing Israeli prisoners of war. That did not placate Kissinger. “I hope in the future if you are given any other hare-brained orders similar to the instructions to get Dobrynin in you will first check them with Haig to see if he can get them reversed,” he wrote in a telegram to Scowcroft. “As I indicated in my note to Haig, nothing could have gone on at that meeting that could do us any good at all.”19
Around this date, Buzhardt had learned enough from the people interviewed by Jim Squires of the Chicago Tribune and Dan Thomasson of Scripps-Howard to call both of them in for a meeting at the White House. The two reporters from different news organizations had joined forces the previous July after John Ehrlichman’s mysterious testimony about national security issues. By the time of Buzhardt’s call, the two were close to publishing, which Buzhardt most likely picked up from his sources. “Well I think he was trying to play poker with us and I think sometimes you know, we played a better game than he did, because I really believe that he thought we knew at that juncture one hell of a lot more than we did know,” Thomasson said. “And he was trying to tell us something,” Thomasson added, which was that Yeoman Charles Radford, the Pentagon’s scapegoat for the leaks to Jack Anderson and the existence of the spy ring, had been packed up and shipped out of the Pentagon to Oregon, where “they were baby-sitting this guy.”20
The Senate Watergate committee, which had stopped its hearings in November, kept up its pressure. On December 19 it issued an omnibus subpoena for hundreds of documents and tapes from the White House. At the top of its list, chief counsel Sam Dash noted, was the June 23, 1972, conversation between Nixon and Bob Haldeman. Dash did not know at the time that that conversation was the so-called smoking gun that proved Nixon had authorized using the CIA to block the FBI investigation into the Watergate break-in. “In the staff list this conversation was rated A and described as a conversation between the President and Haldeman on how to use the CIA to limit the FBI investigation,” Dash wrote.21 The committee did not obtain the tape transcript until the following July. Haig, however, knew when the subpoena arrived that the conversation was fatal to Nixon. He had known that since May, when he first learned of the White House taping system and that Haldeman acknowledged that Nixon had told him to tell the CIA to block the FBI.
On December 20 the House Judiciary Committee, as it geared up for the impeachment investigation, hired its chief counsel, John Doar, a Republican attorney who had led many of the Justice Department’s toughest cases during the civil rights era of the 1960s. He, too, came from the list of Morris Leibman, the unofficial placement officer for Watergate-related lawyers.22 As a longtime leader of the American Bar Association, Leibman knew most of the nation’s top lawyers. He also worked closely with Haig throughout the final months of the Nixon administration as Haig and Congress picked their top investigators.23
By mid-December Haig had started a series of meetings with Jaworski at the White House. In the Map Room, Haig often let Jaworski listen to tapes in what the prosecutor considered a misguided attempt to show Nixon’s innocence. As Haig knew, the tapes proved exactly the opposite: Nixon may not have ordered the Watergate break-in, but he knew about the cover-up. Haig told Jaworski that the March 21 tape in which Nixon and John Dean discussed the cover-up was “terrible, beyond description,” but added that the White House lawyers believed it did not show criminal conduct by Nixon. Jaworski believed that the tapes showed Nixon was guilty. “I told Haig that in my judgment the president was criminally involved and told him that he’d better get the finest criminal lawyers he could find in the country to pass on this information,” Jaworski said he told Haig on December 21.24 Haig, who had known about Nixon’s guilt for months, had shown the prosecutor in charge of determining Nixon’s guilt information that he called terrible, beyond description, and then seemed shocked when Jaworski agreed.
Nixon eventually pulled back on Haig’s disclosures. “And then the president got tremendously jittery,” Jaworski said. “And then it happened that the president said nothing else would be turned over to me except that which he passed on himself because he—I think he woke up fearing that I had gotten more information that was inculpatory than he had thought was actually there.”25 Nixon’s jitters made sense. He realized his chief of staff had given Jaworski evidence that would help drive him from office.
Nixon scheduled a rare Saturday morning breakfast on December 22 with the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; it took place in the second-floor dining room in the White House residence. Haig and Scowcroft joined the president, Defense Secretary Schlesinger and his deputy, Bill Clements, Admiral Moorer, Army Gen. Creighton Abrams, Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, Air Force Gen. George Brown, and Marine Commandant Robert Cushman to review the upcoming military budget. The unraveling that Goldwater had seen a week earlier remained, and the military leaders listened in mostly stunned silence as Nixon rambled. “The meeting went on for a long period of time and was almost totally a monologue by the president,” Zumwalt said in a 1991 oral history interview that Zumwalt asked to remain classified until 2013.
At one point Tom Moorer was able to make a short pitch for the budget, and at another point I was able to make a short pitch about the Navy part of the budget. I don’t think any other chief said anything, and the speech was full of such things as “we’ve got to stick together,” “this is the last best hope,” “the effete, elite, Eastern establishment is out to do us in.” In a way it was rambling, and in a way it was hortatory, and in a way he would seem to come back and focus on us from time to time. When we left the office, I turned to my friend, General Abrams, and said, “Did you get the same general impression that I got?” General Abrams said, “I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to make a minute about it, and I don’t want to have heard it.” I never talked to any of the other chiefs about it, Abe was the only one I felt close enough to talk to.26
Zumwalt said he did not mention anything to Schlesinger about the meeting, but three to six weeks later, Schlesinger issued a directive that no troops would be moved on Washington without his personal approval, because Schlesinger feared an unhinged Nixon would try to use the military to stay in power.27
It was at this time, Zumwalt noted, with Haig as chief of staff and Kissinger as secretary of state running the government, that the United States was “as close to fascism during the last year of the Nixon era as we have ever come in this country. I hope and pray that we will never again have such a combination of factors that we have two power-seeking men and a greatly weakened president.”28
Nixon decamped to San Clemente on December 26, fooling the press and many on his own staff by slipping into a Lincoln Continental, not his traditional limousine, and driving to Dulles International Airport in suburban Virginia for a commercial airline flight to California. He left Haig behind.29
Haig and Jaworski met again on December 27, when Haig said he had talked to James St. Clair, a skilled criminal trial lawyer from Boston. Once again, Haig had consulted with his consigliere, Morris Leibman, just as he had when he hired Jaworski and Samuel Powers.30 St. Clair had handled dozens of complicated cases and had defended the army during the 1954 Senate hearings led by Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy during the worst of the anticommunist witch hunts of the 1950s. Len Garment had recused himself from the Watergate defense, and Nixon was apparently mad at Buzhardt for his lapses handling the erased tape. St. Clair then flew to San Clemente, where he met with Nixon for more than an hour on December 31.
“I want you to represent the office of the president exclusively,” Nixon told St. Clair, stressing that the presidency, not the fate of any one man, needed to be preserved.31 In that respect, Nixon and Haig shared the same idea. Haig’s allegiances, to the extent they were ever tied to Nixon, had long skipped to the presidency and other institutions he valued.