The existence of the military spy ring, which Nixon, Alexander Haig, the military, and Bob Woodward covered up for months, could remain a secret no longer. By the beginning of January, reporters Jim Squires and Dan Thomasson were on the brink of confirming the ring’s existence and publishing their first stories. Their impending articles triggered a flurry of reporting by Woodward meant more for Haig’s benefit than for Woodward’s readers. Woodward, who had known about the spy ring since the previous May, began to contact the ring’s key players, shadowing the work done by Squires and Thomasson but publishing none of it. As much as anyone, Woodward would join the spy ring cover-up that was desperately vital to his old associate and crucial source, Haig. The president, meanwhile, virtually disappeared from public view, remaining in California until January 13.
Haig’s sales job with James St. Clair had succeeded. He agreed to be Nixon’s defense attorney, while Fred Buzhardt became the official White House counsel and resigned as the Pentagon’s general counsel, finally eliminating the conflict of interest that had existed from the moment Buzhardt went to the White House in May. Len Garment would shift from working as part of the legal team to be an assistant to Nixon. Press accounts at the time reported that Buzhardt and Garment had angered Nixon with their botched handling of the erasure of the June 20, 1973, tape and the two other tapes that had been subpoenaed but had turned out not to exist. But Buzhardt had other priorities. The existence of the military spy ring was on the verge of blowing open. He, Haig, and Melvin Laird, in his final days at the White House, had to minimize the damage.
Although hiring St. Clair appeared to be a coup for Nixon, the new attorney had the same problems as the others who had been brought in to help the president. Buzhardt still controlled access to the tapes, and St. Clair could not meet with his client unless Haig was present. Little had changed.1
As the White House announced St. Clair’s hiring, Haig got the shock he had feared was coming. Aldo Beckman, the White House reporter for the Chicago Tribune, approached him in San Clemente with a pressing question: Was Adm. Thomas Moorer involved in a spy ring that stole secrets from the White House and brought them back to the Pentagon? Haig looked stunned.
“Oh shit, I knew this was going to get out,” Haig said, turning white. “Let me get back to you.”
A few hours later, Haig found Beckman.
“There’s not a word of truth in it,” Haig said.2
Squires and Thomasson had the White House comment they needed and now put the final touches on the story they started to report in July.
Shortly after Beckman questioned Haig, Woodward went to work, calling Yeoman Charles Radford at his home in Oregon on January 7. Woodward told Radford that the news about the spy ring, the reason why he was rushed to Oregon from the Pentagon two years earlier, was about to break. “When I realized it was going to come out in the newspaper, I was sick to my stomach,” Radford said. Woodward kept asking questions, which Radford declined to answer.3
Then Woodward called Donald Stewart, the Pentagon investigator and former FBI agent whose questioning had forced Radford to reveal the spying.
“What do you know about a telephone tap on Charles Edward Radford?” Woodward asked. Stewart refused to answer and referred Woodward to the Pentagon press office. Stewart likely knew nothing about the telephone tap, because the tap was authorized by John Mitchell, then the attorney general, to see if Radford was leaking classified information after he was transferred.
Woodward kept asking questions, and Stewart, while declining comment, took notes.
What did Stewart know about Radford “feeding information from the White House to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and also to them from Kissinger and General Haig?”
Stewart said he was in no position to answer. “Where did you pick up this information?” Stewart asked.
“I have sources and I can’t tell you,” said Woodward, who then asked, “Were you there when the Plumbers were formed?”
Stewart said he must have been, since he had worked at the Pentagon for eight years.
“Did the Plumbers get into the Radford case?” Woodward asked.
“I don’t know.”
Was Stewart interviewed by the Senate Armed Services Committee about Watergate or related matters?
Stewart said no.
What about the Watergate committee?
Again, Stewart said no, which was technically not true, since Stewart had met in July with Senator Howard Baker and his staff.
“What do you know about Admiral Welander?” Woodward asked. Rear Adm. Robert Welander had been Woodward’s commanding officer when Woodward served on the USS Fox off the coast of Vietnam.
“Who is he?” Stewart answered. Stewart knew about Welander, since he had interviewed him in early January 1972 for Buzhardt’s report, which covered up key details of the spy ring.
Were the allegations against Radford and Welander legitimate?
Stewart again declined to answer.
Why was Welander’s office closed in December 1971 by the White House?
“I don’t know and didn’t even know he had an office there,” Stewart said.4 Kissinger had closed the office in a fit of pique shortly after learning about the spy ring and listening to the taped interview of Welander by John Ehrlichman and David Young.5 Laird, who opposed the office’s existence from the time he became secretary of defense, used the spy ring to force the White House to close the office.6
Stewart wrote a memo immediately after the Woodward call and reported the call to his superiors, writing that “Woodward took me totally by surprise. . . . I asked him why he bothered to call me,” Stewart continued. “He indicated he just wanted to verify what he already knew.”7
Haig’s collaboration with Chicago superlawyer Morris Leibman placed another lawyer in a key spot in the impeachment fight. The Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee picked Chicago attorney Albert Jenner, another former officer of the American Bar Association and the lead partner of the huge firm Jenner & Block.8 Jenner had formidable credentials as a member of the national security establishment and as a board member of the giant defense contractor General Dynamics, and he was also a senior counsel on the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President John Kennedy. In his memoirs, Haig claimed to be suspicious of Jenner because of his family friendship with Democratic Illinois senator Adlai Stevenson III, who had predicted that Nixon would not last long in office.9 Given Jenner’s close ties to Leibman, Haig’s clearinghouse for Watergate lawyers, Haig’s after-the-fact concerns about Jenner’s loyalties have little credibility. By January 7 Leibman had been instrumental in the selection of the chief Watergate prosecutor, Leon Jaworski; Nixon’s lawyer for the fight over the tapes, Samuel Powers; the president’s impeachment defense attorney, St. Clair; the chief counsel for the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment effort, John Doar; and the committee’s minority counsel, Jenner.
Haig’s dance with Jaworski over White House tapes and documents continued. At the beginning of January, Jaworski had asked Haig to listen to the June 4, 1973, “tape of tapes,” in which Nixon, assisted by Steve Bull and Haig, listened to the tapes of his previous meetings with John Dean. Haig was willing to agree, although Buzhardt reportedly objected, according to the Woodward and Carl Bernstein account, The Final Days. “But Haig saw a possibility of bringing Watergate, at least the special prosecutor’s investigation of it, to an end if Jaworski could be convinced that the White House had nothing to hide,” Woodward and Bernstein wrote.10 Given Buzhardt’s knowledge of Nixon’s guilt and his and Haig’s record of false statements about virtually every point of the Nixon defense, it is hard to believe Buzhardt’s objections. After all, Jaworski had already told Haig that he thought Nixon was guilty and needed to hire a criminal attorney, which was why St. Clair had joined their defense team. Haig and Buzhardt already knew of Nixon’s guilt, too; that had been assured from the moment Nixon told Haig about the White House tapes and Haig listened to Bob Haldeman tell Nixon that the president had asked him to obstruct justice. When Jaworski came to the White House on January 8 to listen to the tape, the president’s chief of staff had to know he was letting the Watergate prosecutor hear even more evidence damaging to Nixon’s case. As with many of the tapes, the poor quality of the recording, combined with the background noise, shuffling of papers, and scribbling of notes, made it difficult for Jaworski to make much of it. He asked Buzhardt for a copy, and Buzhardt declined. He called Haig, who told Buzhardt to give a copy to Jaworski.11 The next day, Jaworski sent Buzhardt a letter asking for twenty-five more White House tapes. Haig reported to Nixon what had happened, and the president ridiculed him for cooperating with Jaworski. No more tapes for anyone, Nixon ordered.12
By this time Woodward had called Welander, his former commander, about the spy ring.
“He said the story is going to break and I have to write, and what can you tell me about it?” Welander said that Woodward asked him.
Like Stewart, Welander said little and denied any wrongdoing.13
Woodward was correct about the story being ready to break. Squires’s story appeared January 11 in the Chicago Tribune, while Thomasson’s moved on the Scripps-Howard news wire. Woodward, who had known about the story since May, had nothing.
The treatment of the stories by the Tribune and the Scripps clients showed the scope of the issue. “Probers Charge Pentagon Spied on Kissinger in 1971,” the Tribune headline blared over the top of the front page. “A still-secret White House investigation in 1971 disclosed that top-ranking military officials engaged in a spying and eavesdropping campaign against Henry Kissinger, The Tribune learned today,” the lead of Squires’s story said.14 Both stories said that an unnamed “spy” had taken “top secret information” from the National Security Council and passed it to the Pentagon and to Moorer in particular. The reporters did not identify Radford and Welander; their names remained secret. They accurately reported that the military was angry at the secret moves made by Kissinger—under Nixon’s orders—and the general paranoia within the Pentagon about White House policies made without the military’s input. Especially interesting, since it did not come up in the White House and Pentagon investigations, is the mention of “eavesdropping” on the White House by the military. Laird had used the National Security Agency during his time as defense secretary to monitor the secret communications by Kissinger on his various missions for Nixon that the Pentagon did not know about.
The two stories landed with megaton force inside the White House. Haig and Buzhardt knew they were coming, and Woodward was running interference for them, but the stories stirred up a Washington press corps hungry for something different from the latest twist in the Watergate saga. Now Nixon’s claims of national security for why he left some issues undiscussed in his May 22 white paper from the previous year started to make sense. In the New York Times, Seymour Hersh had the story, while Woodward and Bernstein had the Post’s version. Hersh led with the report conducted by David Young, one of the White House Plumbers, with Donald Stewart. It showed how the Plumbers had uncovered the spy ring “attempting to relay highly classified information on the China talks and other matters” to Pentagon officials. Some of the officers, Hersh wrote, were assigned to the National Security Council, and Young’s investigation started because of the leaks to Jack Anderson. Hersh also named Welander as the officer punished for the spying. He also mentioned the stories by the Tribune and Scripps-Howard and attributed the spying to the White House’s secrecy and habitual exclusion of the Chiefs and Laird from critical deliberations. Finally, Hersh included the White House claim that Radford, though unnamed in the story, was responsible for the espionage and the leaks, and he quoted Anderson saying Welander was not his source.15
The Post’s story, by contrast, bore the distinct fingerprints of Alexander Haig. It did not mention the stories by Squires and Thomasson, giving Post readers the impression that Woodward and Bernstein had broken the story on their own, which Woodward had had the opportunity to do since he first learned of the issue the previous May. Despite Woodward’s head start, the story was less complete than Hersh’s, and it named Radford as “the central figure in the matter.” Woodward’s experience working in the Pentagon and delivering secrets to the White House should have been enough for him to conclude how ridiculous that claim was. The story was also shot full of inaccuracies, starting with its claim that the investigation that uncovered the spying “was ordered by an angry Kissinger after documents on U.S. policy in the India-Pakistan war were leaked to columnist Anderson in late 1971.” It was Welander who sought the investigation after discovering the leaks in Anderson’s column; he told Haig about the problem, and Haig told John Ehrlichman, the ultimate overseer of the Plumbers. As Woodward and Bernstein did in their story on October 10 that first mentioned more FBI wiretaps, this account emphasized the wiretaps and said their details were sent to David Young, one of the Plumbers and the investigator most suspicious of Haig. The story also said that four unnamed sources said the “information distribution” was not spying, although that was exactly how Nixon and the investigators characterized it. Woodward and Bernstein also said that the investigation was led by Fred Buzhardt, not Young and Donald Stewart. Buzhardt only started his investigation after Melvin Laird and Haig wanted to override whatever Young and Stewart had discovered in their probe, which Nixon then called off. It was during Young and Stewart’s investigation that Welander admitted to Ehrlichman that Haig routinely passed along White House secrets to the Pentagon through Welander and his predecessor, Rear Adm. Rembrandt Robinson. Kissinger was also incorrectly cited as calling for an end to verbatim notes being taken during critical national security meetings; actually, he continuously recorded his own telephone calls in order to create an accurate account of his activities. The story also said that Kissinger had long wanted to kill the Chiefs’ liaison office in the NSC. It was Laird who opposed that office from the beginning, correctly viewing it as a means for Nixon to bypass him and go straight to the Chiefs, and who used the discovery of the spy ring as leverage to wrest the investigation away from the White House and give it to Buzhardt. Woodward also cleared his former skipper, Welander, saying that he now held an important job that “Pentagon officials said would not have been given to anyone suspected of unauthorized distribution of classified material.”16
Finally and most importantly, the story did not mention that its main author, Woodward, had worked for two of the men at the heart of the investigation, Welander and Moorer, and that Woodward had delivered Pentagon documents to Haig while Woodward served in the navy. While the Post story delivered the impression that it revealed deep secrets about the flawed relationship between the White House and the Pentagon—complete with the frisson of Nixonian treachery on the wiretaps—it delicately diverted the focus of the spy ring from Woodward’s former bosses at the Pentagon and his key source, Haig, to the hapless Chuck Radford, now exiled in Oregon.
Hersh had a follow-up story the next day, January 13, about how an unnamed investigator, Stewart, had tried to blackmail the White House into giving him another job, including consideration as FBI director.17 This, Hersh said later, was a direct leak from Haig, who had tried to shake Hersh off the story about the FBI wiretaps the previous May.18 “The White House told the Senate Watergate committee last summer that a Government official who participated in the investigation of the unauthorized passing of National Security Council documents to the Pentagon had, in effect, sought to ‘blackmail’ his way to a more important job by threatening to make the secret materials public,” the story said. Haig and Buzhardt knew well that the Justice Department had already rejected their attempts to prosecute Stewart for blackmail, saying he had done nothing wrong. It was true that Buzhardt and Garment told the senators leading the Watergate committee in July that they believed Stewart was blackmailing them, but they also knew at the time that Henry Petersen, the head of Justice’s Criminal Division, had called the blackmail claim bogus and refused to prosecute. The leak to Hersh was, pure and simple, an attempt to damage the credibility of one of the people who knew the most about the spy ring and limit Stewart’s chances of testifying against them. Hersh regretted the story. “I had an early deadline,” he said in a 1987 interview. “I remember that I had an early fucking deadline, it was a Saturday story. And I certainly didn’t do Don Stewart any good in that story. There’s no question I should have gone to him and gotten comment and been balanced.”19
Woodward and Bernstein also checked in again on January 13. Their story looked at the role of the Plumbers in the spy ring investigation and whether Nixon exaggerated the national security implications of the spy ring as part of the Watergate cover-up. “Now it’s all public and you can see that national security was invoked because it would scare everyone and be the best justification. . . . [Y]ou can see that no government is going to fall,” they quoted one White House official saying. Buzhardt’s efforts to block criminal trials of the three White House officials closest to the Plumbers were highlighted.20 He wanted to stop John Ehrlichman, Charles Colson, and Egil Krogh from going to trial, specifically because they wanted to cite their investigation into the spy ring as part of their defense. Buzhardt’s motives hewed closely to Haig’s; they wanted to stop the investigation into the spy ring because it would expose Haig’s involvement and the possibility that the military’s top leaders leaked secrets to stop Nixon’s policies.
Almost everyone connected to the spying and the leaks about U.S. policy toward India and Pakistan had a reason to cover up. While Buzhardt’s Pentagon investigation pinned the spying and leaks on Radford, a more thorough probe would expose other suspects, such as the men at the top of the military brass to whom Radford gave the stolen documents from the White House. Moorer, Welander, and Robinson all praised Radford for what he was giving them. If they had truly not asked him to steal for them, they could have told him to stop at any time or transferred him to a less sensitive post. They did not. The navy’s top commanders, as well as Laird, also knew they had serious reservations about sending an aircraft carrier task force into the Bay of Bengal during the height of the India-Pakistan crisis, a powerful motive for them to leak Nixon’s orders to Jack Anderson.21 An investigation more honest than Buzhardt’s could have exposed them. Nor did the administration keep the movements of the carrier task force so closely held that Kissinger and Haig could not tell the Chinese their plans during a December 10 meeting at the United Nations.22 Laird was also using the National Security Agency to monitor Kissinger’s calls, an eavesdropping operation that let Laird know much of what Nixon tried to hide from him. It was also a potential breach of the NSA’s charter that would have blown back on Laird.23 Haig faced both threats. He cooperated with the military by sharing information that Nixon wanted to hide from it, thereby violating the president’s trust, and he stood liable to be exposed for that and, by extension, any of the leaked classified secrets that reached Anderson. The move toward a congressional investigation, perhaps something of the scope of the Watergate hearings, was gaining momentum.
Of the two competing newspapers, the Times and Hersh had the most consistently reliable reporting. Hersh was not compromised by his relationship with Haig, as was Woodward, and he was not hiding information to protect his two former commanders, as Woodward was with Moorer and Welander. Hersh followed his story about Donald Stewart, planted courtesy of Haig, with a more detailed report on January 14 that highlighted David Young’s role in the spy ring investigation.24 On January 16 he reported the anonymous claims from White House officials—no doubt Haig, Buzhardt, and maybe Laird in his final days in the West Wing—that Young’s investigation was “ludicrous.” None of the officials deriding Young’s accurate report had the courage to put their names behind their accusations, which were all aimed at damaging the credibility of the one legitimate investigation into the spy ring. Hersh also showed why Nixon wanted to keep the spy ring secret; “public disclosure,” he wrote, “of the incident would put the ‘whole military command structure on the line.’”25
Luckily for Haig and the rest of the plotters, their fate rested in the hands of a willing Senator John Stennis, a longtime friend to the military, Nixon, and Buzhardt. The Mississippi Democrat had recovered from the gunshot wounds that he had received the previous January and that had sidelined him for months and was now firmly back in control of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which would handle any Senate investigation into the spy ring. Buzhardt had called Stennis the “undertaker” of the Senate for his ability to bury inconvenient issues with a hearing stacked with friendly witnesses. His absence for much of 1973 had shown the White House how much it missed him, as Senator Stuart Symington, who chaired the committee in Stennis’s absence, had exposed Nixon’s support of the Huston Plan, the attempt to use the CIA to block the FBI investigation into Watergate and the secret bombing of Cambodia. Now, Haig and Buzhardt, on behalf of themselves and everyone else who stood to be exposed, were asking Stennis to pull out his shovel again. “I certainly want to take a look at this matter and I don’t expect [the White House] to hold anything back,” Stennis said about his investigation. Stennis also dodged claims that he had been briefed about the spy ring before it was revealed in the press. “Until the story broke, I didn’t know a thing about it. I was not confided in in anything at all,” he said.26 Hersh also reported that the spy ring had drawn Jaworski’s attention for potential inclusion in his list of cases. Jaworski knew about the spy ring because Haig and Buzhardt warned him in November not to pursue it.27
At times, the “investigation” into the spy ring devolved into farce. Defense Secretary James Schlesinger said through his spokesman on January 15 that he would investigate the reports, although he was skeptical of the seriousness of the accusations, because, after all, Admiral Moorer had been appointed to a second term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff after the discovery of the spying.28 Schlesinger had no idea that Nixon had done this on purpose, believing that he could blackmail Moorer at will into following his orders because the threat of exposure hovered over him. Jerry Friedheim, Schlesinger’s spokesman, also said Schlesinger would consult with Buzhardt and Laird—two of the architects of the Pentagon cover-up—for his investigation. Michael Getler, the Post’s Pentagon reporter, noted in his January 16 story that the report done for Laird by Buzhardt may have differed from Young’s investigation for the White House. He was correct, but neither he nor the public knew just how right he was.29
Jaworski continued to turn up the pressure on the White House about the missing eighteen minutes on the tape of Nixon’s June 20, 1972, conversation with Bob Haldeman. He asked for the FBI to investigate the apparent erasure on January 16, and the White House agreed the next day to give the bureau the cooperation it needed. Nixon talked about the investigation into the erasure with Haig and said he wanted “to get to the bottom of the situation,” said Gerald Warren, his deputy press secretary.30 Of course he did, because Nixon had no idea how the erasure happened and knew that it was one of the many factors destroying his credibility.
Jack Anderson weighed in with a January 17 column that spelled out exactly how information passed from Radford to Moorer, who Anderson said created the spy ring out of frustration with Nixon’s secrecy. Radford took the documents from the White House, Anderson wrote, and then gave them to Capt. Arthur Knoizen, Moorer’s assistant, who passed them to Moorer. “Knoizen also circulated those documents to the other military chiefs,” Anderson wrote. “Nothing appeared in writing to indicate the documents had been copied from Kissinger’s files. But sometimes Knoizen sent a cover memo warning of the ‘sensitivity’ of the material.” Anderson had details about the spy ring that Radford, accused by Buzhardt’s report and Woodward’s reporting as being the prime figure in the spying, would not know about. Radford would not have been involved with the writing of Knoizen’s cover letters or how the information passed to Moorer. Nor would Radford know of how Capt. Howard Kay, another Moorer deputy, routed information to Knoizen and Moorer. Anderson said Radford did not leak secrets to him; those only came from officers more highly placed in the Pentagon.31 The signs of what happened in the White House and Pentagon, the theft of documents Nixon wanted to hide, and the leaking of them to Anderson were there for anyone to find, whether the facts came from Donald Stewart, Radford, or Anderson’s columns. Haig and Buzhardt, eager to cover their tracks, were doing their best to keep those facts from being discovered.
At the Pentagon, Don Stewart watched the unfolding cover-up of the spy ring with alarm and some amusement. “In my opinion, Buzhardt and some White House people were more concerned in protecting the military and the White House people from embarrassment than they were concerned about the National Security interests of the country,” he wrote in a memo dated January 21 to Martin Hoffmann at the Pentagon. Stewart laid out how Buzhardt had covered up at the Pentagon and engineered a second interview of Welander to hide the disturbing details of what Welander had told Ehrlichman and Young at the White House. “Buzhardt and I interviewed Welander in the first week of January 1972 after I got called back from vacation,” Stewart wrote. “After the interview I prepared a 14-page memo. Buzhardt only wanted the original for his file, but since I know how things get misplaced, I prepared an extra copy for our office file. It was there when my files were removed in May 1973 for integration into the Defense Investigative Service files. This, of course, was never done.” Stewart also kept a copy for himself.32
On January 22 Kissinger had a news conference during which he lied about the spying and tried to cover for Moorer. When the spy ring was first discovered, Kissinger had wanted everyone involved prosecuted. He raged when he realized Nixon wanted to paper it over. Now, as secretary of state and in charge of the administration’s national security responses, he could take a more lofty stance. “I have no reason to question the argument that has been made by Admiral Moorer, that this incident of the unauthorized transfer of papers from my office to his office reflected overzealousness on the part of subordinates and in any case gave him no information that he did not already possess,” Kissinger said.33 The issue went beyond whether Moorer obtained information from the White House through unconventional means. The issue was whether he or other top military officials knowingly leaked classified information to the press to subvert the president’s orders. The leak about the Enterprise moving to the Bay of Bengal hurt Nixon’s ability to counter India, and the leak about the tilt toward Pakistan despite the official position of neutrality in the India-Pakistan war damaged his credibility. Kissinger was still trying to minimize his connections to the Plumbers and their illegal break-ins and collaboration with the CIA on U.S. soil. An honest investigation into the spy ring put that at risk.
Not satisfied with the anonymous leaking of the bogus blackmail claim against Stewart, Haig and Buzhardt leaked his name to the Post and Times. On January 24 Woodward called Stewart and told him that he was identified as the alleged blackmailer, which Stewart denied.34 Stewart then wrote a memo to his superiors detailing the conversation, as he had done earlier in the month when Woodward had first called him. Both papers had stories on January 25 that implicated Stewart in the alleged blackmail, which at least four officials in the Justice Department, including the head of its criminal division, had reviewed and found unwarranted. Stewart had done nothing wrong, but Haig and Buzhardt wanted to damage his credibility to make him too radioactive a witness to call before any hearings by the Senate Armed Services Committee. Haig told Hersh that he had told Stewart to “go to hell” when the White House received the blackmail claim, which was false.35 Stewart never talked to Haig. Stewart called Hersh and got his first chance to deny on the record that he had blackmailed anyone. “I was looking for a job, no question about it,” Stewart said. “But I wasn’t trying to put the muscle on them. I don’t have a damn thing to hide and I didn’t shake anybody down.” Stewart told Hersh he “would be tickled to death” to testify. Until the stories citing alleged blackmail appeared in print, Stewart had no idea what lies were being spread about him by the White House or what Justice was doing to debunk them.36
During the last week of January, Stennis met with Haig, Buzhardt, Kissinger, Moorer, Welander, and Schlesinger to determine the nature of and witnesses for the upcoming hearings by the Armed Services Committee. The fix to cover up the details of the spy ring was in. Conspicuously absent from those Stennis consulted were Stewart, Young, and Ehrlichman, who had investigated the leaks to Jack Anderson and the military spy ring. The men who knew the most about what happened between the Pentagon and the White House were being shut out, while those who had the most to hide were allowed to dictate the terms of the investigation. That, Laird said, was by design. “The Senate wanted to bury it and the Senate committee wanted to bury it,” he said. “They didn’t want to get into this.”37
Stewart learned just how much the White House had damaged his reputation on January 29, when Hoffmann showed him the evidence of the White House’s smear campaign. Hoffmann gave Stewart the memo from Henry Petersen that showed that Justice had rejected the blackmail claim on July 10, more than two weeks before Buzhardt and Garment met with Senators Ervin and Baker of the Watergate committee on July 27 and claimed that Stewart was still under investigation.38
Nixon, who had remained silent during the evolving spy ring crisis, had spent much of the month preparing for his January 30 State of the Union speech. Ordinarily, such an address would be a chance for a president to lay out his plans for the upcoming year and propose new legislative initiatives. This was no ordinary time or president. In the days leading up to the speech, Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal lobbied Nixon to include language that supported the Arabs’ claims against Israel. In exchange, Faisal would promise to lift or curtail the Arab oil embargo against the United States, which had sent gasoline prices soaring. Kissinger and Nixon worked to determine the right tone for any statement in the speech, and Kissinger continued to denigrate Nixon behind his back. “If I was the President I would tell the Arabs to shove their oil and tell the Congress we will have rationing rather than submit and you would get the embargo lifted in three days but I am not President until this GD constitutional amendment,” Kissinger told Brent Scowcroft, referring to a change in the Constitution that would have to happen for a foreign-born U.S. citizen, such as Kissinger, to be eligible to run for president.39
The White House machinery moved ahead as if Nixon was a figurehead. He showed Kissinger a draft of the speech, which Kissinger praised. Their brief conversation also reflected the extent to which Kissinger and Haig were shaping much of Nixon’s decisions. The draft, Kissinger said, was a “great and courageous speech.”
Nixon said he had “coppered down that Arab part. The coercion bit bothers me, but Al said you thought it was important. It’s a shot across the bow. We gotta let them know we don’t have to have them.”
“You’ll get more credit for having said it,” Kissinger said.40
That evening, Nixon rode the length of Pennsylvania Avenue for what would be his final State of the Union address. Many Democrats sat on their hands, while his fellow Republicans, beleaguered and wishing he would leave, applauded in all of the traditional places. Nixon offered a variety of policy proposals that had little chance of passing in a hostile, Democrat-controlled Congress and then closed with a relatively defiant plea to move on. “One year of Watergate is enough,” he said, vowing to remain in office to keep doing “the job that the people elected me to do for the people of the United States.”41
On January 31 Stennis announced his plan for hearings into the spy ring. Kissinger and Moorer would be the sole witnesses, and anyone else would be called if necessary. Some members of Stennis’s committee wanted more. Harold Hughes, a liberal Democrat from Iowa, wanted a deeper investigation, much like the one that had been conducted the previous July into the secret bombing of Cambodia while Stennis was still in the hospital.42 Stuart Symington of Missouri had pushed that probe in Stennis’s absence, and it implicated Nixon in the expansion of the Vietnam War into a neutral country and then the falsification of bombing records to show that the bombs were dropped in South Vietnam, not Cambodia. Now that he was back in charge, Stennis had no intention of letting that happen again. The undertaker had dug his hole. He just needed to put in the coffin and lay the spy ring to rest.