By March 1 President Nixon faced crises all around him. The House Judiciary Committee investigation gained momentum each day as its investigators pored over the growing trove of evidence it had gathered, often with help from Leon Jaworski’s office and Judge John Sirica. In the Middle East, Henry Kissinger shuttled from capital to capital to build a peace deal between the sides in the October war while simultaneously managing the Soviet Union toward another summit meeting between Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev and renewed arms talks. Kissinger’s resentment toward Nixon kept growing, and the cutting references toward the damaged president continued. By this time, Kissinger was in it for himself; his alliance with Nixon had frayed almost to the point of disintegration. The progress Kissinger had made in preventing a renewed outbreak of war and in bringing the Arab nations closer to the United States was real and possibly ensuring, and he did not want a compromised president, often absent or under the influence of alcohol or pills, meddling in his affairs and ruining what he had done.
At home, the energy crisis continued to dominate the news. High fuel prices had made the winter one of the most expensive ever. Americans endured the cold wrapped in warm clothes indoors as they kept their thermostats set to sixty-five degrees. They drove more slowly on the highways, which traded better gas mileage for longer trips than usual. None of this endeared the president to the American people, already weary of a political crisis that had stretched into a second year with little visible end.
On March 1 Nixon suffered a huge blow when seven of his closest associates—John Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Charles Colson, Robert Mardian, Gordon Strachan, and Kenneth Parkinson—were indicted by the grand jury in the Watergate case for crimes including conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury tied to the Watergate break-in and cover-up. Alexander Haig and Ron Ziegler gave Nixon the news shortly after a meeting about energy policy, and the president took it hard. The charges cut to the heart of the Nixon White House, particularly the president’s ruling triumvirate of Mitchell, his attorney general and former law partner; Haldeman, his first chief of staff; and Ehrlichman, his onetime counsel and domestic advisor. Particular attention in the indictments was paid to the March 21, 1973, conversation between Nixon and John Dean, then Nixon’s White House counsel, about the attempts to raise money to buy the continued silence of the Watergate burglars. Haldeman’s perjury indictment hinged on his testimony about the conversation.1
Firing Archibald Cox in October had not stopped the Watergate special prosecutor’s office. Jaworski had taken the staff and honed their work to a razor’s edge. While Haig had managed to turn Jaworski’s focus from the national security issues that most threatened him—the spy ring and the FBI wiretaps—he had also helped direct Jaworski closer to the president himself. The evidence the White House provided to Jaworski helped lead to the seven indictments issued on March 1, but it also led more closely to Nixon, whom the grand jury also wanted to indict. Confused by conflicting legal advice about their ability to indict a sitting president, the grand jurors held off issuing an indictment for obstruction of justice to Nixon. Instead, the grand jury named Nixon an unindicted coconspirator, which they kept secret and which Jaworski held in reserve to extract more concessions from the White House.2 A secret report from the grand jury was sent to Judge John Sirica, and Vice President Gerald Ford said that report should be sent to the House Judiciary Committee, which was weighing impeachment.3 For Haig, who already knew the details of Nixon’s guilt, the events of March 1 showed again the extent of Nixon’s increasing vulnerability.
While Fred Buzhardt dragged out the process of releasing documents to the court, Watergate committee, and House Judiciary Committee, Haig had leaked enough information to Jaworski through their meetings to give the prosecutors more leads in their investigation. That, in turn, spilled over to the Judiciary Committee, whose investigators were using what they received from Jaworski and company to build the impeachment case against the president. Nixon had demanded that the cooperation stop, but it never did. The president’s case was eroding from within.
A curious profile about Haig appeared in the March 3 New York Times. It veered between accuracy and fantasy. Haig, the story reported, was a fusion of H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. That much was true, as were the sentences that described the strain on Haig, primarily his chain-smoking and long hours. But the passages that said Haig had aspired to a new openness in the White House seemed concocted from the ether; from the moment he took over as chief of staff, Haig had limited the access of other officials to the president and controlled Nixon’s activities to an unprecedented degree. He had also maneuvered Nixon into a series of disastrous admissions and mistakes, from the misguided May 22 white paper that acknowledged parts of the cover-up, to the disclosure of the White House taping system, to the Saturday Night Massacre. They all combined to leave Nixon’s approval rating in the Gallup poll released that day at 27 percent. “General Haig is not and cannot be his own man,” the Times profile said. “His powers are meaningless unless the President survives.” Haig, however, was doing whatever he could to make sure Nixon did not survive.4
Senator John Stennis’s Armed Services Committee released on March 2 the transcripts from the testimony two weeks earlier of Yeoman Charles Radford and his onetime superior in the NSC liaison office, Rear Adm. Robert Welander. That generated reports in the Times by Seymour Hersh and the Washington Post by Michael Getler that demonstrated the competing narratives of the spy ring that the different parts of the government were trying to peddle. Hersh reported that the desire to cover up the burglary at the office of the psychiatrist of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and other activities of the White House Plumbers was behind much of the Watergate cover-up. That was based on reporting on the prosecution. However, those behind the cover-up knew little about the Ellsberg burglary at the time of the Watergate break-in. Nixon mostly feared the disclosure of the Plumbers’ investigation into the spy ring. Although the revelation into the spying and the subsequent hearings by Stennis took the sting out of the national security argument, Nixon truly feared that if the U.S. rivals in Moscow and Beijing knew about the deep rifts between Nixon and the Pentagon, his ability to negotiate would be damaged, and his chances at improving the United States’ power would disappear.5 In the Post, Getler’s story followed the same line that Defense Secretary James Schlesinger used with Henry Kissinger during their meeting in early February: Kissinger and the White House were not just the victims of spying but also the perpetrators. “It was a two-way street,” a source told Getler, who noted that the Chiefs’ liaison office at the NSC was authorized “but highly ‘unorthodox.’” Draft versions of Pentagon documents had ended up at the White House before they were completed. As Kissinger told Schlesinger a month earlier, that was hardly spying, since the Defense Department reported directly to the president. Getler wrote that Melvin Laird was “upset” when he learned about the office, but Laird had complained to Kissinger before Nixon was even sworn in for his first term that the office would cause him problems. Kissinger ignored him until it was too late.6
During an early morning breakfast with Schlesinger on March 6, Kissinger gave the lie to the claims of harmony with the military that he told Stennis’s committee a month earlier. He and Schlesinger had a standing weekly breakfast meeting during which Kissinger’s deputy, Brent Scowcroft, took copious notes. As Watergate continued to grind on Nixon, Kissinger and Schlesinger took ever bolder steps to shape U.S. national security policy on their own, recognizing the precarious conditions facing the country as crises mounted and Nixon unraveled.
Contrary to his belief at the beginning of October, when the Egyptians and Syrians attacked Israel, Kissinger said he was “now convinced that the Soviet Union didn’t know of the October war” and that the Soviets have “gotten little from détente” with the United States. He also told Schlesinger that “someone has managed to implant in the public mind that you and I are split. I think most of the leaks [on nuclear arms talks] have come out of Defense.”
“I have said there are no divisions within the government,” Schlesinger said.
“I don’t feel we are in conflict, but it seems as if we were, the country couldn’t stand it,” Kissinger said. “The way this debate is going, the President is being put in a box—that while Defense is wanting to build up our defense while Kissinger wants to give things away. Then if the President makes an agreement, he is giving things up.”
Schlesinger talked about the specific deals of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty talks with the Soviets.
“That isn’t what bothers me,” Kissinger said. “I think [Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Thomas] Moorer is playing a cynical game.”7
That evening Nixon conducted another news conference. This time, the March 21, 1973, meeting between Nixon and Dean drew extra scrutiny, and Nixon told the reporters assembled for the forty-one-minute conference that anyone who listened to the tape could draw different conclusions about what he meant. “But I know what I meant,” the nervous Nixon said, his lip quivering, “and I know, also, what I did. I meant that the whole transaction was wrong, the transaction for the purpose of keeping this whole matter covered up.” Nixon said he did not know why $75,000 was paid to E. Howard Hunt, one of the leaders of the Watergate burglars, shortly after the March 21 meeting. “I have no information as to when a payment was made,” Nixon said.8
Nixon also said he did not believe his political problems would cost the Republican Party seats in the upcoming elections, a comment that was proved wrong almost immediately, as the votes were being counted that night for a special election to fill the Cincinnati-based House district of Republican William Keating, who had resigned to become a newspaper executive. Democratic City Councilman Thomas Luken beat his Republican counterpart, Willis Gradison, a highly respected moderate, to become the first Democrat elected from the district in decades. The result reflected the drag that Nixon had on all Republican candidates and was a harbinger of a blowout to come in November. Republicans in competitive sections of the country sounded the alarm. Massachusetts Governor Francis Sargent, a liberal Republican, said the country would be better off if Vice President Gerald Ford were president.9 He said openly what many other Republicans believed but remained too reluctant to say openly.
More cracks in Nixon’s standing emerged among Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee, which was investigating whether the president should be impeached. Nixon had said a week earlier that only evidence of a serious crime would warrant impeachment, but an influential group of committee Republicans disagreed, saying that proof of conspiracy to obstruct justice, a more tepid violation, would suffice. Representative Robert McClory of Illinois, the committee’s second-ranking Republican, said he did not know what was in the sealed grand jury report sent to Sirica but that conspiring to obstruct justice “would be in the category of serious offenses” that would make impeachment possible.10
One reason committee Republicans were open to considering evidence against a president of their own party was the work done by Albert Jenner, ostensibly the Republicans’ lawyer, to counter the push by committee Democrats to impeach Nixon. Jenner, committee staffers noted, worked closely with John Doar, the majority counsel, to present evidence that pointed toward Nixon’s guilt, not away from it. “He was out to do sort of an independent investigation,” said Bernard Nussbaum, one of the committee lawyers.11 “He formed the view pretty early on that the President was going to be impeached,” said William Weld, one of the Republican lawyers on the committee and later the Republican governor of Massachusetts. “I remember him saying that to me and a couple of other people in a car in March or April and that was not yet in the newspapers, I don’t think. So he got there pretty quickly and he and Doar spent a lot of time together.”12
The colorfully dressed Jenner charmed most of the staff and swayed enough Republican members that the tide turned toward impeachment. But some of the panel’s more partisan Republicans, such as Delbert Latta of Ohio, distrusted Jenner. They began to turn to Sam Garrison, a more partisan Republican on the legal staff, because, committee lawyer Evan Davis said, they “thought he was not sufficiently telling the other side of the story.”13 By then it was too late. Jenner, another pick from the stable of Haig’s legal advisor, Morris Leibman, had broken some of the partisan barriers to impeachment.
John Ehrlichman and Charles Colson were indicted again on March 7, this time for violating the civil rights of Dr. Lewis Fielding, Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, whose office the Plumbers broke into on September 3, 1971. The break-in was aimed at finding information in Fielding’s files the White House could use to smear Ellsberg as mentally unstable. Also charged were four members of the Plumbers team involved in the Fielding break-in: G. Gordon Liddy, Bernard Barker, Eugenio Martinez, and Felipe de Diego. Egil Krogh, E. Howard Hunt, and David Young were unindicted coconspirators, and Hunt and Young were granted immunity so they could testify against the others. These new indictments presented another chance for testimony that could endanger Haig by dredging up some details about the spy ring but had become far less likely after the denial of Krogh’s bid to use records from the Plumbers’ investigation in November.
The Plumbers’ role in investigating the spy ring played a big part in the testimony of the final witness before Stennis’s committee on March 7: Buzhardt. The president’s lawyer and the former Pentagon general counsel took the committee on an elliptical journey through the case, running senators through circuits of logic that left many of them confused and frustrated. Buzhardt brought a copy of the report on the spy ring, and he presented it to Melvin Laird, then the defense secretary, on January 10, 1972, but he would not show it to the senators or give them copies without Laird’s permission, which Laird said Stennis never sought. “It represents your personal opinion on some of the matter, which is another reason why I think that we should have to specially handle it,” the always helpful Stennis said.14 Buzhardt agreed. It was mostly a collection of observations mixed with some personal opinion. Nor, Buzhardt continued, did it contain national security information that could not be revealed. So if it was not really a report or laden with national security information, why could no one see it? Well, Buzhardt said, the report might not be completely accurate because the testimony so far by Welander and Radford had led Buzhardt to reconsider. “As these facts have developed and all, particularly the circumstantial evidence is not as strong as I thought it was in the beginning, because of the reports I heard, I have changed my mind somewhat about this,” he said. If it was no longer accurate, Buzhardt said, the report could then be libelous to either Radford or Welander. Also, Buzhardt added, he had used information gathered from polygraph examinations from the witnesses, and since polygraph examinations were not admissible in court, it would be improper to release a report that contained them.15
Buzhardt said he told Laird that no one could be prosecuted for spying because the cases against them were too circumstantial to stick. While Welander suspected that Radford had given documents about the India-Pakistan war to columnist Jack Anderson, Buzhardt said they did not have the evidence to prove it. Also, the testimony of Welander and Radford two weeks earlier had demonstrated that multiple copies of the key documents existed, thereby expanding the number of possible leakers. The alleged case against Radford—that he knew Anderson socially and had developed a special affinity for Indians while stationed in New Delhi—was thin compared to the motives of Laird and the navy brass, who questioned sending an aircraft carrier task force into the Bay of Bengal during the height of the war. That information was not public knowledge at the time, and Buzhardt, Laird, and the navy leadership were not keen to make it so. Buzhardt also said he believed that Adm. Thomas Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had received information from the spying that he should not have received but that he never formally interrogated Moorer as part of his investigation.
Senators of both parties remained perplexed by the collusion between Stennis and Buzhardt to keep them from seeing the Buzhardt and Young reports. With Buzhardt at the witness table in front of them, they spoke as though he was not there and therefore unable to give them the documents they wanted. Buzhardt’s Byzantine logic confounded them. He would not give the Young report to the current defense secretary, James Schlesinger, because it was a White House document, and Schlesinger was not authorized to receive it. He could not give either report to the committee, because it would not be fair to do so. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, a conservative stalwart and the 1964 Republican nominee for president, jousted with Stennis and demanded answers.
“Let me say this on that, Senator, if you will yield to me: I have said I negotiated with Mr. Buzhardt here on the so-called Buzhardt report,” Stennis said. “I have been negotiating with him too about the Young report, and there has been no finalization absolute on that but he is really working on it, and I think the chance is we will get the report. If you could hold that in abeyance now.”
“I don’t want to hold it in abeyance,” Goldwater said.
“No, but I think it will help get the report,” Stennis said.
“Will the senator yield?” Senator Stuart Symington said. “I have written the chairman and suggested we get that report.”
“I have been trying to get it before then,” Stennis said.
“Are you negotiating for the whole report?” Goldwater asked.
“Yes, that is what I asked for, Senator, the whole report,” Stennis said.
“I am interested to know why we cannot see it,” Goldwater said.
“He will talk to any of you,” Stennis said. “I think he needs a little more time now and ask him to finalize some things on it. I am sawing wood, I can assure you of that, and not going to put it off on anybody. I want to get it and I want to get through with it.”
“Would you say the chances are 50-50?” Goldwater asked.
“I think so,” Stennis said. “I don’t want to, I cannot speak for him, though. He has got the situation about it that he has got to cope with. He is trying, I am satisfied with that. I thank you very much for your attitude about it. It just takes time, negotiations.
“All right, gentlemen, shall we go vote?”16
With that, Stennis dismissed one of the Senate’s leading Republicans, as well as Democrats Harold Hughes of Iowa and Symington of Missouri.
Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, the youngest member of the committee, also sensed something wrong. Someone had lied to the committee, either Radford or Welander, and there needed to be a deeper investigation to determine the perjurer. That Welander, a high-ranking member of the navy leadership, had escaped punishment made no sense, Nunn said. “I also would like to observe if some disciplinary action is not taken against Admiral Welander, either in his career, administratively or some prosecution is not pursued, I have a very difficult time understanding how our committee or the Department of Defense or anyone else can expect the proper conduct from high-ranking officials,” Nunn said.17
Hughes, who had suspected a whitewash, was the last to fall. He wanted to see Buzhardt’s report and said he would ask Buzhardt privately. Stennis asked him to reconsider. Hughes said he would ask for a committee vote, but too many of his colleagues had left the hearing room by the time Hughes made his request, so they lacked a quorum. Stymied, Hughes let it drop, and with that, the committee’s investigation petered out. No one would see Buzhardt’s report or the one written by David Young with investigator Donald Stewart’s help. No one would listen to Young and Ehrlichman’s interview with Welander in which Welander placed Haig in the middle of the spy ring. Young, Stewart, and Ehrlichman would not be witnesses, although Hughes had asked for at least Ehrlichman to testify. Stennis, Buzhardt’s “undertaker” of the Senate, had helped him bury the investigation of the spy ring and with it the chances of exposing Haig for spilling Nixon’s secrets.18
Republicans increasingly rallied around Ford, gravitating to his office and maneuvering to get closer to him. Ford openly supported Nixon, but small cracks started to develop in that support. On March 11 Ford said at an appearance in Boston that he did not believe Nixon was involved in the Watergate break-in and cover-up, “but time will tell.”19 In the White House, aide Jerry Jones said, Haig openly disparaged the president he had isolated from the rest of the staff. “Haig made fairly continual derogatory remarks about Nixon,” Jones said. “He did not have high regard for him. He crapped on him every chance he could.”20
Jones, who had helped Haig fill the dozens of empty administration jobs that they confronted in 1973, had moved from the personnel office in early 1974 to help Haig oversee the tapes. Gen. John Bennett, who had testified about problems with the tapes in November, had resigned in disgust, Jones said, because of what he had witnessed in Haig’s service.21 Bennett died in a 1980 plane crash in Alaska.
Nixon tried to maintain a steady pace of public appearances to give the impression that he remained focused on his job. He spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention alongside Stennis at the head table. He traveled to Chicago to speak to business executives. Watergate and its growing shadow hung over the president with each step. He could not escape it or its fallout. A Harris poll in mid-March showed that 54 percent of those surveyed believed Nixon should be impeached if he did not give material to the House Judiciary Committee. William Saxbe, the acerbic new attorney general, said Nixon was just like any other citizen before the law and would get no special favors from him.22 Judge John Sirica ruled that the Judiciary Committee could receive the material that he had received from the grand jury, meaning they would have the report that concluded that the grand jurors believed Nixon was guilty.
Compounding the gloom were reports such as one in the March 15 Washington Post by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about how prosecutors used the March 21 tape of Nixon and John Dean to match up the final payment of hush money to the Watergate burglars. Prosecutors, the Post reported, had tracked the movement of Nixon campaign aides Fred LaRue and Manyon Millican on March 21, 1973, and shown how LaRue gave Millican an envelope filled with $75,000 in cash. Millican took that envelope to the suburban Maryland home of William Bittman, Hunt’s lawyer. The story also reported that some of the prosecutors believed the tape itself only gave one piece of information for an indictment, while the passage of money from LaRue to Millican to Bittman on the same day of Nixon’s talk with Dean gave them a critical second element to make a case. Haig and Jaworski had discussed how bad the March 21 tape was for Nixon in December, when Jaworski told Haig that Nixon needed a criminal attorney. The latest news showed that others had focused on the same problem.23
Arab nations lifted their embargo on sales of oil to the United States on March 19, which promised relief from the energy crisis crippling the U.S. economy. Kissinger, whose tireless negotiations around the Middle East had helped achieve this, met with Schlesinger that morning to review arms control strategies and possible moves by the Soviet Union. Kissinger said the recent diplomatic gains with the Arabs in the Middle East had closed off the Soviets. “What have the Soviets gotten from détente?” Kissinger asked. “The psychic satisfaction of reducing the chance of war and gaining equality with the U.S. Nothing else. We have defused the peace movement here. The Middle East must be painful to the Soviets.”
Still, Kissinger and Schlesinger worried about Western Europe and NATO and having the right U.S. commander there to keep the Europeans in line. Each suggested a capable commander, but each one caused them more aggravation than they preferred.
Despite their successes, they saw a national security in disarray after months of scandal and years of war in Vietnam. The alliance with Europe was a mess, Kissinger said. His solution was to send Haig, his former deputy, sometime ally, and sometime rival for power, to Europe as the supreme allied commander in Europe, or SACEUR in Pentagon speak.
“How about [Adm. Elmo] Zumwalt for SACEUR?” Schlesinger asked.
“Not bad, except he is Navy,” Kissinger replied. “Haig would be a good SACEUR.”24
The only way that would happen was if Nixon decided he wanted to let Haig return to the army or if Haig was no longer chief of staff because Nixon was no longer president. Again, Kissinger’s thoughts had turned to a Nixonless White House.
On March 23 the Los Angeles Times reported that investigators who had listened to the March 21 tape had concluded without a doubt that Nixon had conspired to obstruct justice. That tracked with the Post report a week earlier about that tape and reflected again on Haig’s decision to give it to Jaworski. When Nixon sat down the previous June 4 to listen to his tapes with John Dean, he knew the March 21 tape posed problems for him. He said so to Haig that afternoon, and Haig agreed. Jaworski’s case against Nixon gained momentum when he obtained the tape, and now that momentum was showing up in the House.25
Two days later, Dean testified for the prosecution in the corruption case against former attorney general John Mitchell and former commerce secretary Maurice Stans, who were accused of aiding Robert Vesco, a financier and major Nixon donor under investigation by the Justice Department. Nixon and Haig watched the case carefully. Not only did they want Mitchell and Stans, two of Nixon’s closest associates, to prevail, but they wanted to gauge Dean’s effectiveness as a witness. Dean was pivotal to the March 21 cover-up tape, and his testimony before the Senate Watergate committee the previous June had propelled Nixon into deeper trouble. Anything that damaged Dean’s credibility as a witness would diminish his value in the impeachment fight.
The two leaders of the Judiciary Committee, Peter Rodino of New Jersey and Edward Hutchinson of Michigan, started reading documents and listening to tapes on March 27, while counsels Doar and Jenner matched the new evidence with what the panel had received earlier.
Kissinger’s mood toward Nixon darkened even further by the end of his three-day visit to Moscow in late March 28. For the first time, reports said, Nixon’s Watergate problems had affected talks with the Soviet Union, and some Russians joked about working with a new President Ford in the near future. Already frustrated by Nixon’s detachment, Kissinger struggled to find new ways to reach a nuclear arms deal with the Soviets.
After hinting to the committee on March 11 that forty-two tapes existed to help exonerate Nixon, the White House said on March 28 that some of those tapes might not have existed in the first place. The continued back-and-forth on the tapes, all controlled by Haig and the White House attorneys, drained Nixon’s credibility even further.26
Haig had escaped the spy ring investigation courtesy of Stennis. Now he focused on the fight over the tapes, which Nixon seemed destined to lose. Haig needed to engineer Nixon’s departure without too much evidence emerging from the Judiciary Committee as it moved ahead to impeachment.