By April the Nixon White House faced so many different crises from so many different angles that the beleaguered president had few places to turn for solace. Construction workers, the hard hats at the heart of Nixon’s Silent Majority who had fought antiwar protesters on the streets, had turned on him. Their union leaders heartily applauded labor leader George Meany’s April 1 speech calling for Nixon to resign. A congressional committee brought in to analyze claims that Nixon may have incorrectly misstated his earnings and paid less taxes than he owed reported on April 4 that he owed $400,000 in back taxes. Nixon had said he would comply with the committee’s ruling, so he had to sell off assets or borrow money to pay the bill. The tax ruling compounded the impression created by Watergate, revelations of illegal campaign contributions, and the resignation of Spiro Agnew that this was an administration wracked by out-of-control sleaze not seen since the presidency of Warren Harding in the 1920s. Making matters worse, the tax report was sent to both special prosecutor Leon Jaworski and the House Judiciary Committee, giving each more ammunition to use against Nixon.1
Nixon’s battles over the White House tapes also continued. On April 2 a new lawyer, John Chester, a litigator from Ohio and close associate of Attorney General William Saxbe, argued in the appeals court in Washington against surrendering to the Senate Watergate committee five tapes of Nixon with John Dean. The tapes at the heart of the appeals argument had already been released to prosecutors. In fact, the Nixon-Dean tape from March 21 was already causing problems for the president; leaks from Jaworski’s office and Congress showed that those who had listened to the tape had concluded that Nixon was guilty. One of the judges commented that something bad had to be on the tapes if the White House wanted so badly to keep them secret. Chester’s argument showed how Haig and Fred Buzhardt hid the tapes from the rest of Nixon’s defense team. Chester told the court that he had not listened to the tapes himself, although other unnamed White House lawyers had. That could only be Buzhardt, because he and Haig would not allow anyone, not even chief defense counsel James St. Clair, to listen to the evidence at the heart of the case.2
Since February 25 the House Judiciary Committee had wanted the White House to deliver the tapes, but St. Clair and others kept delaying. Each day, a constitutional crisis loomed larger. Would the president have to provide documents that he considered classified by executive privilege to Congress? On April 4 John Doar, the chief lawyer for the committee’s Democrats, wrote St. Clair and told him he had until April 9 to respond. The delays could not continue indefinitely. On April 5 Vice President Ford told a group in Colorado that Nixon could not expect to keep denying requests without consequences. Continued delays tempted impeachment by the House of Representatives, he said. Ford, who had led House Republicans until the previous December, knew the mood on Capitol Hill as well as anyone.3
On April 7 the first excerpts of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book about Watergate, All the President’s Men, appeared in Playboy magazine. The passages included the revelation that Nixon campaign aide Hugh Sloan had been an early and influential source for the pair’s reporting on Watergate. They also introduced a secret source called Deep Throat, named after the pornographic movie popular at the time. The book described Deep Throat as a source inside the government who would only agree to talk on “deep background,” meaning his or her name could not be used, and the source would only confirm what others had told the reporters. In one passage, Deep Throat said Nixon appointed L. Patrick Gray as the FBI director in February 1973 because Gray had somehow blackmailed Nixon into doing it. “In early February, Gray went to the White House and said, in effect, ‘I’m taking the heat on Watergate,’” the excerpt said. “He got very angry and said he had done his job and contained the investigation judiciously, that it wasn’t fair that he was being singled out to take the heat. He implied that all hell could break loose if he wasn’t able to stay on the job permanently and keep the lid on.”4 Such a claim, regardless of the source, was patently false. Gray had met with Nixon and John Ehrlichman on February 16, 1973, and told Nixon he was eager to take on the FBI directorship. Gray also said that if Nixon picked someone else, the president would be accused of trying to cover up parts of the bureau’s early investigation of Watergate.
The excerpts immediately set off speculation about the source’s identity, a fascination that would last for another thirty-one years until former FBI official Mark Felt, then beset by dementia, claimed through his family and their attorney that he was the source.5 Woodward verified the claim later that afternoon. But, as noted in earlier chapters here, evidence that has surfaced since 2005 shows that Felt could not be the source for all the Deep Throat revelations in All the President’s Men. The source as written in the book is a composite character meant to cover some of Woodward’s secret sources, including Haig and former FBI official William Sullivan. The first wave of excerpts showed the sources’ misguiding claims, including how there was a seamless flow from the FBI wiretaps conducted on seventeen journalists between 1969 and 1971 to the White House Plumbers and the Watergate burglars. That linkage was a misdirection by Sullivan, who wanted to hide his connection to the wiretapping, which also involved Haig and Kissinger. The wiretaps were becoming a key section in the articles of impeachment being drawn against Nixon and remained a threat to those responsible for them, primarily Haig and Kissinger. While generally welcomed as a gripping tale of two reporters doggedly breaking the story of the Nixon administration’s trail of secrecy and dirty tricks, All the President’s Men also presented a false impression of who was guiding Woodward and Bernstein in their work. Their sources cared less about the truth and more about settling old scores and saving themselves. Many of Woodward and Bernstein’s sources had played the two reporters, but the anti-Nixon fever ran so hot that few readers noticed or cared.
Amid the turbulence, Nixon saw enough hope that he believed he could survive. An April 8 Harris poll showed that his recent political trips to Chicago, Nashville, and Houston had lifted his approval rating by five percentage points.6 Nixon’s new optimism drove him to go to Michigan on April 10 to campaign for James Sparling, the Republican running to hold an open Republican seat. More than seven thousand people in Saginaw saw Nixon plead with them to keep the faith amid the mounting odds against them. It was not enough. Sparling lost the election a week later, and although observers thought Nixon had actually helped Sparling, he was still a drag for all Republican candidates. Republicans knew that a Nixon-led ticket in November would be crushed.
The Judiciary Committee kept pushing for more documents. Democrats and Republicans agreed that Nixon was stalling. St. Clair responded on April 9 with a letter saying that the White House needed until April 22 to be ready to comply with the panel’s request. Meanwhile, Ronald Ziegler and other White House officials continued to pressure the committee to speed up its investigation, which meant the House would have to finish its impeachment investigation without the proper evidence. Not even Republicans bought it. Led by John Rhodes of Arizona, House Republicans warned the White House that their patience was running out. Edward Hutchinson, the committee’s top Republican, called the White House response “offensive to the House” and hinted at a long summer of impeachment hearings and legal fights. On April 11 the committee grew tired of waiting for the White House and voted 33–3 to force Nixon to turn over forty-two tapes by April 30. “It is a little too late to make a deal,” said Representative Robert Kastenmaier, a Wisconsin Democrat. “The course has been set, and it has been set by the White House. They have had forty-five days in which to reply, and an eleventh-hour offer forty-five minutes before this meeting is unacceptable.”7 By April 12 a Harris poll indicated that a plurality of Americans now favored impeachment.8
Nixon flew that weekend to Key Biscayne, Florida, where he and his core staff concocted a new plan: the White House would prepare its own transcripts, release them to the public, and bypass the committee. That would let Nixon eliminate the leaks from the tapes the committee already had. Buzhardt led the effort, assembling a squad of secretaries to listen to and transcribe the tapes, which he knew intimately. He then read all the transcripts and marked parts to be deleted.9
Buzhardt’s and Haig’s vise-like grip on the defense team was causing division. Cecil Emerson of Dallas, a Nixon defense attorney, told the New York Times in an interview published on April 16 that St. Clair did not control Nixon’s defense. Instead, Emerson said, it was Fred Buzhardt who 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 St. Clair’s staff.” St. Clair called his relationship with Buzhardt “cordial” but declined to say how much access he had to the tapes or any materials Nixon could use in his defense.10 John Chester, who had argued some of the appellate cases for the White House on the tapes, said he never had access to the tapes, although he increasingly suspected there had to be something on at least one of them that would devastate Nixon. Haig told Chester that “if we lose on the tapes we’ve lost the presidency.” Chester did not ask Haig how he knew what was on the tapes, and “I never said anything about it to anybody, never talked about it because I considered that simply a communication between myself and General Haig. And it was not to go any further.”11
Saxbe, an old friend of Chester’s from Ohio, thought the White House legal case was mismanaged from the start. Nixon, Saxbe said, “asked me to get him defense, and when I got him somebody, he hired St. Clair, who I thought was very ill-prepared and did a poor job.” Chester, Saxbe said, won the only case for the White House, but the other attorneys “were like tramping pissants dealing with people that were just not capable of giving him a good defense, I thought.”12
The pressure was getting to everyone, particularly Haig. On the flight back to Washington from Key Biscayne on April 16, reporters heard a military aide say that Nixon had spoken to Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana earlier that afternoon, a detail that had escaped Haig. Haig exploded. “What did you say?” Haig asked. “I run this White House and don’t you ever forget it.”13
Jaworski had had enough of the White House delays, which often followed times when Haig had let him listen to tapes during their Map Room meetings, so he asked Judge John Sirica to approve a subpoena for sixty-four tapes. They included conversations with John Dean, Bob Haldeman, Charles Colson, and John Ehrlichman between June 20, 1972, and June 4, 1973, the day Nixon, with Haig’s help, listened to tapes of his meetings with Dean. Haig had allowed Jaworski to listen to the so-called tape of tapes, after which Jaworski asked for even more information. Jaworski wrote St. Clair that he had sought the information since January 9 and heard nothing. “I have delayed seeking a subpoena in the hope that the President would comply with our request voluntarily. Indeed, I have sought no more at this time than an assurance that the materials would be provided sufficiently in advance of trial to allow thorough preparation.”14
Although Haig had passed some tapes to Jaworski—primarily those that led Jaworski closer to Nixon’s wrongdoing—the tapes caused problems for Haig, too. The May 11, 1973, conversation in which Nixon, Haldeman, and Haig discussed Vernon Walters’s memoranda about the White House’s attempt to have the CIA block the FBI’s Watergate investigation showed Haig that Nixon had authorized obstructing justice. You told us to do it, Haldeman told Nixon, a claim Nixon acknowledged. Nixon had admitted he had obstructed justice in Haig’s presence, which made Haig part of the cover-up, too. Instead of coming clean, Haig engineered the exposure of the White House taping system before the Senate Watergate committee to flush out the truth. Haig had to navigate the transcripts carefully by moving Jaworski toward Nixon and away from himself.
Sirica approved Jaworski’s subpoena request for the sixty-four tapes, which pushed Haig, Buzhardt, and Nixon into overdrive. The discussions that started over the weekend of April 12 in Key Biscayne turned into a full-bore rush to transcribe the tapes and release the transcripts publicly before turning the tapes over to Sirica and the Judiciary Committee. On April 18 that left three fights for the tapes in play: the Judiciary Committee’s request for forty-two tapes, Jaworski’s for sixty-four, and the Senate Watergate committee’s ongoing fight for just five. In the White House, Haig said they should give the committee summaries of the tapes, but the lawyers argued in favor of giving transcripts. Nixon took on much of the editing, tweezing his multiple bouts of profanity and anti-Semitism. Haig’s account in his memoirs, particularly after the tapes had been released publicly, is laughable. “Although, inevitably, it was charged that he had also removed incriminating matter, his purpose was not to suppress the evidence, which was clearly in his favor, but to spare himself and others embarrassment,” Haig wrote. “Nothing could have been more characteristic of the man; he swore little and relatively mildly, as men of his generation go, and those he was attempting to preserve from embarrassment had in many cases said far worse things about him in public than he had said about them in private.”15 The transcripts damned Nixon, and his language would scandalize his supporters, even with the deletions.
Henry Kissinger grew more frustrated with Nixon’s weakness, which diminished Kissinger’s status with foreign leaders. Many did not understand Watergate or how it could have unraveled Nixon. In China Zhou Enlai, Kissinger’s negotiating partner during the secret July 1971 trip to Beijing, was being marginalized because, as Kissinger told James Schlesinger, he had based Chinese policy on Nixon remaining in charge.16 Kissinger’s recent trip to Moscow failed to generate anything concrete in the run-up to Nixon’s visit there in June, also because the Soviets saw weakness. So, too, did the Pentagon, where military leaders had combined with Cold War Democrats like Senator Henry Jackson of Washington to demand a harder line on arms control than Nixon had pushed during his successful summits with Leonid Brezhnev in 1972 and 1973. Jackson wanted the Soviets to allow more Jews to emigrate in exchange for more progress on arms control, a linkage that annoyed Kissinger and the Russians.17 During one of Kissinger’s regular breakfasts with Schlesinger on April 23, Kissinger said the new emphasis on warhead size, the throw weight of a missile, was meaningless. Schlesinger agreed but argued that it was important from a negotiating standpoint. If the Soviets had a big warhead, then the United States needed one, too, regardless of the lack of military value.18 The breakfast meeting foreshadowed a lengthy meeting between Kissinger, diplomats, and military leaders later that morning, in which they haggled over what kind of positions to take when Nixon traveled to the Soviet Union in June, a trip the president hoped would show him as still a vital world leader able to shape grand policy.19 Kissinger knew that was no longer true; he considered the president who gave Kissinger power and a platform to shape history as an albatross.
On April 28 Nixon got some rare good news from a courtroom: John Mitchell and Maurice Stans, Nixon’s former attorney general and commerce secretary, were acquitted of charges they had been paid off to influence the government case against financier Robert Vesco, who had embezzled more than $220 million from mutual funds he operated. The case in New York had lasted forty-eight days, as prosecution witnesses had detailed a complicated corruption case against the two men who once dominated Nixon’s cabinet and reelection campaign. Mitchell ran Nixon’s campaign at the time of the Watergate break-in, while Stans helped raise most of the money, including for the fund that paid for the activities of the Watergate burglars. Their acquittal showed the weakness of Nixon’s main accuser, former White House counsel John Dean, who was the main prosecution witness against the two men. “The question is whom do you believe? John Mitchell or John Dean?” asked Peter Fleming, Mitchell’s defense attorney, during his closing arguments.20 The jury believed Mitchell and Stans. Nixon hoped that if he could somehow discredit Dean with the tape transcripts he was preparing to release, he could derail the impeachment investigation and save himself from any criminal cases filed by Jaworski.
The transcripts the White House team of secretaries and clerks had prepared were ready by Friday, April 26. Buzhardt had picked through each one to minimize the damaging parts while still providing a sense of what happened in each conversation. Nixon had followed Buzhardt’s trail to sand down any other rough edges he found, particularly his language and caustic characterizations of Washington personages, be they friend or foe.
Haig called Jaworski, who was in Texas, and told him they needed another Map Room meeting on Sunday afternoon, April 28. Jaworski, who arrived first, knew Nixon had until Tuesday to honor the subpoena. Jaworski thought Haig planned to tell him the White House response and then try to sell him on why it would work. “Both he and Nixon had great confidence in me, Haig said, and believed I was rendering a great service to the country—a flattering preamble to a list of ‘wrongs’ committed by Archibald Cox and some members of my staff,” Jaworski wrote. Cox and his team had mishandled witnesses, Haig said, and the entire process was done to damage Nixon.
“That’s unacceptable, Al,” Jaworski said. “The approach was totally objective.”
One of the prosecutors, Haig continued, had manipulated witness testimony before the grand jury.
“That’s rank bunk,” Jaworski said.
Haig urged Jaworski to recheck some of the testimony about what happened on March 21, 1973. He called John Dean a liar and said the tapes after March 21 would show that.
Jaworski said nothing. He believed the tapes completely supported Dean.
Nixon, Haig continued, would not turn over the tapes as required but instead give up the transcripts and make them public.
“I hope you’ll study it carefully,” Haig said, “and after you study it, let me have the benefit of any ideas you get. If you study it carefully, and believe it, it might solve some of your problems with the cover-up trial.”
The tapes, Jaworski responded, were not just intended for the prosecution; the defendants in all of the cases would have access to them, too, and it might turn out that the tapes would acquit them. If the tapes were not made available, he said, then it was possible that some of the charges against the defendants would be dismissed.
“Well,” Haig said, “that’s what the defendants’ lawyers want, of course,” adding that some of the defendants, such as John Ehrlichman, came out well in the transcripts.
Jaworski left, realizing that Nixon hoped the transcripts would somehow satisfy the demand for the tapes. If they did not, then the president would take the issue all the way to the Supreme Court. “This would be the President’s last strong effort, I felt,” Jaworski wrote. “If it failed, Richard Nixon’s fight to hold off impeachment would fail.”21
Haig called a cabinet meeting for 7:30 p.m. on April 29 to announce what Nixon would say during his televised address at 9:00 p.m. The mood was grim. Instead of honoring the court order to give the tapes to the House Judiciary Committee, Haig said, Nixon was going to announce that he was releasing forty-nine volumes of transcripts of the tapes directly to the public. Nixon did not attend the meeting but prepared his speech in his office in the Old Executive Office Building. Haig was accompanied by St. Clair.
“We voluntarily turned over to the Judiciary Committee all the material given to Jaworski,” Haig said. “Then they asked for 42 tapes. We asked for specificity. Three weeks later they were more specific. We answered and we said we had to review the tapes to decide how much to provide. That did not sit well, and a subpoena issued. It is due tomorrow. The President will respond with the transcripts of all relevant material comprising the President’s knowledge and actions with respect to Watergate. It is in 49 volumes.”
Nixon had edited the transcripts, Haig said, to remove his frequent use of bad language.
“It will be a bombshell to the American people,” Haig said. “There is some tough stuff in the tapes which could not be eliminated. You will have to ‘hunker down’ on some of it.”
To make sure no one doctored the tapes, Haig continued, Nixon would offer committee chairman Peter Rodino and Edward Hutchinson, the ranking Republican, the chance to go to the White House to listen to any tape to verify the transcripts. “This is on the subpoenaed tapes,” he said. “On the voluntary documents, they can hear the part we are turning over.
“Everything pertinent to the President’s knowledge and actions is here,” Haig said. “There is no need for further turnovers. Material is exculpatory, troublesome, and devastating to Dean.”
Haig knew this was a lie. Nixon still had the June 23, 1972, “smoking gun” tape in his possession, and he would not turn that over to anyone, certainly not voluntarily. Haig had known for almost a year that the tape showed how Nixon had authorized using the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation into the Watergate break-in, a case of obstruction of justice that went to the heart of the Judiciary Committee’s impeachment investigation. As for Dean, he was not the force he was when he testified before the Senate in June 1973. Polls then showed the public was split between believing him or Nixon on the key details of Dean’s testimony. While Dean lied under oath or exaggerated details of his role in the Watergate cover-up, so many other things had weakened Nixon in the following ten months that debating the truth or falsity of Dean’s testimony at this point was a lost cause.
Nixon’s speech and the transcripts will be “persuasive to the American people,” Haig said. The press will not believe it, but “any fair-minded person” would. “Read this material—I think then you will be able to stand up and be heard. If we don’t make it this time, time is very short. Now is the time to turn this around.”
St. Clair stepped in. Nixon had to release these transcripts, he said, because keeping them “would be getting into an even longer credibility gap, because it looked like he was hiding something.” Nixon could “never prove what was enough.” The only way to prove he had nothing to hide was for Nixon “to let the people know what there is and to make it public. The transcripts will tell it like it is—it reads believably. The case will rise or fall on this presentation.”
No other president had ever been this forthcoming, St. Clair said. “It is confidential—and it should also demonstrate the need for executive privilege.” The transcripts show, he continued, that Nixon told the truth about what he did with the Watergate investigation and that he did not collude with Dean in the cover-up.
“We have a good case,” St. Clair concluded. “The president has suffered by virtue of not turning over materials that were given to the grand juries. A fair reading of the material will exonerate the President. There will be those who will twist the material, but the weight of the material is clear.”
George H. W. Bush, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, asked why they waited so long.
Nixon wanted to preserve the ability of his staff to talk confidentially with his staff. “When you read the material you will see the kind of courage it took to release these,” Haig said.
“This whole thing demonstrates the personal courage of the president,” Haig said, ending the meeting. “I hope we can match it in the days ahead with the flak we will get in the days ahead. The evidence, though, is conclusive. The speech is not tub-thumping. It has some humility but is strong.”22
Nixon appeared on television less than an hour later. He sat in the Oval Office alongside a table with the transcripts stacked neatly atop it. He started by describing the Watergate break-in and how it was revealed that the burglars were connected to his reelection campaign. The FBI has investigated it thoroughly, Nixon continued, and the White House did nothing to get in its way. “These actions will at last once and for all show that what I knew and what I did with regard to the Watergate break-in were just as I have described them to you from the very beginning,” Nixon said.
But they were not. Nixon still held on to the smoking gun tape, the one recording that would show that his claims of innocence were false.
“Ever since the existence of the White House taping system was first made known last summer, I have tried vigorously to guard the privacy of the tapes,” Nixon continued. “I have been well aware that my effort to protect the confidentiality of presidential conversations has heightened the sense of mystery about Watergate and, in fact, has caused increased suspicions of the President. Many people assume that the tapes must incriminate the President, or that otherwise, he would not insist on their privacy.
“But the problem I confronted was this: Unless a President can protect the privacy of the advice he gets, he cannot get the advice he needs,” Nixon said. Almost a year earlier, however, Nixon had been willing to burn one of his main advisors, Henry Kissinger, by releasing taped recordings that would damage Kissinger’s reputation. That was when Haig first learned of the taping system.
These transcripts, Nixon said, would “provide all the additional evidence needed to get Watergate behind us and to get it behind us now. Never before in the history of the Presidency have records that are so private been made so public. In giving you these records—blemishes and all—I am placing my trust in the basic fairness of the American people.”23
It was a bold performance, but one Haig knew was doomed to fail. While he claimed to believe the transcripts exonerated Nixon, Haig wrote, “I was aware of a struggle between my heartfelt admiration for Nixon’s nearly superhuman courage in taking this hideous risk with the presidency—and his own place in history—and the rational part of my being, which told me in a most visceral way that he was finished. And indeed, by morning his long-held hope of exculpation had disappeared.”24
Haig’s explanation for the reaction to the transcripts was wholly disingenuous. As much as anyone, Haig knew why Nixon had declined to reveal the June 23, 1972, tape. Haig’s wistful remembrances to the contrary ring hollow. He knew from almost the moment he returned to the White House that the president was guilty. Although Haig wrote that it would have been better to “have seen the tapes go up in smoke the previous summer,” he had known since May 1973 that the tapes existed.25 Never between then and July 16, when Alexander Butterfield told the world about the taping system, did Haig tell Nixon to destroy them.
Releasing the transcripts publicly allowed Nixon to grab some of the attention away from the stream of leaks from the Judiciary Committee and prosecutors. Americans could read for themselves about the meetings Nixon had kept secret for years.
Whatever Nixon and the rest of his team at the White House thought would happen with the transcripts did not. The transcripts covered only twenty of the sixty-four tapes that Jaworski wanted. Democrats on the Judiciary Committee thought Nixon had failed to comply with the subpoena, a feeling that gained more intensity when Buzhardt said that eleven of the forty-two conversations contained in the subpoena were not given to the committee because they were either never recorded or the recordings could not be found. Some Republicans thought they were lucky to get as many transcripts as they did and delayed criticizing the White House, while others knew Nixon’s lack of disclosure would hurt him.
Nevertheless, St. Clair launched an attack on Dean as the transcripts appeared. In a fifty-page legal brief, St. Clair claimed that Dean had repeatedly perjured himself during sworn testimony before the Senate and in federal court. St. Clair cited the March 22, 1973, conversation with Nixon in which the president told Dean he wanted him to write a report of Dean’s investigation of the Watergate cover-up. Dean told the Senate in June 1973 that Nixon never asked him to write anything. One White House insider said they had a rare chance to get Dean: “We’ve got to get him or he may get us, and now we think we really have a chance to get him.”26 As legal arguments went, it was not unreasonable; the Mitchell and Stans verdicts showed Dean’s vulnerability, and the transcripts showed what were at the least serious inconsistencies with Dean’s testimony.
For a few hours after the jury acquitted Mitchell and Stans, Nixon thought he had a chance. He threw the transcripts out like dice on the craps table, hoping to press whatever advantage he thought he had. It was not enough.