It took a day for the details of the transcripts of the White House tapes to sink in, and the early reviews were terrible. Alexander Haig said the transcripts would give Nixon a chance to fight back and rebut the lies from his accusers, starting with John Dean. But the initial reports focused instead on Nixon’s attempts to hide the details of the White House involvement in the Watergate break-in and cover-up. The March 21, 1973, tape of Nixon and Dean talking about paying off the Watergate burglars, which Leon Jaworski told Haig in December was proof of Nixon’s guilt, drew particular attention. In that tape, the New York Times reported, “Nixon discussed over and over again paying off Mr. [E. Howard] Hunt as a viable option, and never said that silence money would be wrong. In fact, he said at one point that paying as much as $1 million ‘would be worthwhile.’” The many passages marked “unintelligible,” the Times noted, “seemed to bear on significant matters or to be in areas where the President’s voice logically would have been raised.”1 In his many conversations with Dean, the transcripts showed, Nixon wanted to target his political enemies after the 1972 election was over. Dean was an imperfect witness, as demonstrated by the verdict in the case against John Mitchell and Maurice Stans, but he remained a bit player in the building case against Nixon, who the transcripts showed was a scheming, suspicious, and vindictive manipulator. The transcripts would not resurrect the president but help bury him.
That burial, however, would have to be done with the transcripts currently available. James St. Clair said on May 1 that Nixon believed he had given the Judiciary Committee and Jaworski enough information to investigate impeachment and any criminal cases adequately, and perhaps he was correct.2 On its own, the transcript of the March 21 Dean conversation was already generating talk that Nixon was guilty. There was more. St. Clair said Nixon would invoke executive privilege and refuse to give Jaworski any more information on the seven former aides who were indicted on March 1. That meant they could not get the White House documents they considered essential to their defense, which allowed Nixon and, by extension, Haig to limit their exposure to potential criminal cases stemming from any of the information that would have been released.
Nixon’s use of executive privilege reversed his earlier pledge from the previous year in which he said he would use the claim sparingly, if at all. But he had much at risk, and so did Haig. John Ehrlichman, for example, wanted to use the documents in the investigation of the military spy ring in his defense, including the tape of the interview with Rear Adm. Robert Welander. In that interview, which Haig had heard, Welander implicated Haig in the spy ring. Since Haig controlled Nixon’s defense with Fred Buzhardt, he froze what could come out of the White House.
Haig had heard the footsteps of investigators coming for weeks. In April he asked Joseph Califano, his former boss in LBJ’s Pentagon and his frequent advisor, to meet for a late dinner at Jean-Pierre, one of the expense account lobbyist havens on Washington’s K Street. A troubled Haig told Califano that the Watergate committee had subpoenaed him to testify. At the time, the committee was investigating Nixon’s income taxes and the transfer of $100,000 from reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes to Bebe Rebozo, Nixon’s closest friend.
“I can’t testify about Nixon or any work I am doing for him,” Haig told Califano. “Shouldn’t I claim executive privilege?”
“You shouldn’t,” Califano said, “but maybe Nixon should. It’s the president’s privilege.”
Califano noted that President John Kennedy had done the same for Robert McNamara, his defense secretary, during a Senate hearing more than ten years earlier.3
On May 2 Haig went to the Senate hearing room and produced a letter from Nixon declaring executive privilege for Haig, proof that St. Clair was serious the day earlier. It was the first time a senior White House official had invoked executive privilege since Nixon released his white paper on May 22, 1973, in which he declared that “executive privilege will not be invoked as to any testimony concerning possible criminal misconduct.” Senator Sam Ervin, the committee chairman, was incredulous. “Claims of executive privilege in the Haig case are totally unsupportable,” Ervin said.4 Some senators called it proof that Nixon was hiding something. Califano said senators just saw Haig as the messenger, although he had coaxed Nixon into executive privilege.
Haig’s brief appearance before the committee dripped with irony. He had engineered the white paper in which Nixon said he would not claim executive privilege, and he had persuaded the president not to use it in May 1973 to stop his two deputy CIA directors from testifying before Congress. That led Robert Cushman to disclose the agency’s help for the White House Plumbers and Vernon Walters to reveal how Bob Haldeman, on Nixon’s order, wanted to use the CIA to block the FBI’s Watergate investigation. Their testimony set much of the ensuing controversy of the following year in motion. Now, under fire himself, Haig sought the advice of the Democratic Party’s lawyer and a prime Nixon antagonist, Califano, to save himself. If Haig did not have executive privilege, then the senators could have asked Haig about anything, such as the military spy ring. Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, the panel’s top Republican, already knew about that. Califano’s guidance, given without Nixon’s knowledge, saved Haig.
Days earlier, Haig had told the cabinet that the transcripts were Nixon’s best hope for survival, but their apparent inaccuracies were drawing fire. Not only were passages suspiciously marked as unintelligible, but they did not match the transcripts of the handful of tapes the Judiciary Committee already possessed. Chairman Peter Rodino argued that the committee should have the full tapes of the conversations covered in the transcripts so its members could determine for themselves which versions were the most accurate. Rodino said John Doar, the majority counsel, would wire the hearing room for sound so members could listen to the tapes themselves. Again, the March 21 tape caused the most problems. Representative George Danielson, a California Democrat, said it seemed that Nixon approved the idea of paying off Howard Hunt.5
On Sunday, May 5, Vice President Gerald Ford gave an interview in which he acknowledged that the president he saw in the transcripts disappointed him and was not the Nixon he had known for twenty-five years.6 At the White House, press secretary Ron Ziegler told reporters that people were reading too much into the March 21 tape. Few in the press room believed him; they thought the tape made Nixon look guilty.7
Early that afternoon, Leon Jaworski met Haig in the Map Room. The grand jury, he said, had voted 19–0 in March to name Nixon an unindicted coconspirator. The Judiciary Committee also had the secret grand jury report with the vote. That information would guide the committee as it closed in on Nixon. “I had hoped that the Judiciary Committee proceedings would be ended before this was made public,” Jaworski said. “Of course, it would have to be made public eventually, at a pretrial hearing,” unless the defendants pleaded guilty. Haig was stunned, Jaworski reported, although, given what he knew about Nixon’s guilt, his surprise seems unlikely. “If we can find some way of reaching an accord, we won’t have to divulge the matter now,” Jaworski said, while the committee was still deliberating.8
Haig called in James St. Clair and two of Jaworski’s assistants. St. Clair was at first uncertain, then concerned. Jaworski offered to cut his demand for sixty-four taped conversations to eighteen and to keep secret the news about Nixon being named an unindicted coconspirator until it absolutely had to be revealed in court. That sounded like blackmail, Haig told Jaworski. Well, Jaworski responded, there’s blackmail and there’s blackmail. Haig told him St. Clair did not like the proposal, while Jaworski said St. Clair just said they needed to talk to Nixon, and Haig agreed.9
Nixon was at Camp David. His calendar showed that he talked to St. Clair for four minutes shortly after two in the afternoon.10 Nixon returned to the White House and began listening to the tapes again. On Sunday, May 5, at 8:02 p.m. he walked to the Old Executive Office Building hideaway, where he listened to the June 23, 1972, conversation with Bob Haldeman, the so-called smoking gun that would prove he tried to obstruct justice.11 For almost a year, since Vernon Walters appeared with his memoranda detailing the White House attempts to use the CIA to block the FBI’s Watergate investigation, Nixon knew the tape would do him in. So did Haig and Fred Buzhardt, but they never told St. Clair. Nixon’s lead defense attorney was never allowed to hear any of his client’s tapes. “I had indicated in all my public statements that the sole motive for calling in the CIA had been national security,” Nixon wrote. “But there was no doubt now that we had been talking about political implications that morning.”12 Nixon knew that the June 23, 1972, tape shredded his claims in the May 22, 1973, white paper.
Nixon returned to the hideaway at 7:53 a.m. on May 6 and remained there until shortly after noon.13 Haig wrote that Nixon called him into the office and told him he did not need to listen to more tapes. “We’ve done enough,” Haig wrote that Nixon told him. “We’re not going any further, not with Jaworski, not with the Judiciary Committee. We’re going to protect the presidency. You tell them that.” No one should listen to any more tapes, Nixon ordered. Haig needed to lock them up.
“I told him that his orders would be carried out,” Haig wrote. “But as I left him, I was overwhelmed by feelings of doubt and apprehension. Something fundamental had changed. There was something bad on the tapes, and Nixon had discovered it. I was sure of this as a matter of instinct, though I had no idea what it might be.”14
This recollection is, of course, false. Haig had known of Nixon’s guilt for months.
Jaworski had hoped Nixon would accept his offer, but he realized Nixon would rather face exposure as an unindicted coconspirator than cope with whatever was on the tapes he refused to hand over. However, Jaworski mistakenly assumed that only Nixon knew about the damaging information on the tapes. Not only did Haig know about the taping system more than two months before the rest of the world, he had sat with Nixon and Haldeman as they discussed Nixon’s orders to Haldeman to get the CIA to block the FBI probe. You told us to do it, Haldeman had told Nixon the previous May. Haig then did nothing to stop Walters from telling the Senate Armed Services Committee about the cover-up attempt a few days later and even told Nixon that Walters’s testimony would help him. It did not. “I did not think that Haig, for all his advocacy of the President’s position, would close his eyes against what he considered clear-cut proof of Nixon’s criminality,” Jaworski wrote.
Haig’s eyes were wide open. He dribbled out the proof of Nixon’s guilt while distancing himself from it and in doing so kept his secrets while releasing Nixon’s.
Withholding the tapes would not save the president, Jaworski said.
“I’m not trying to save the President, Leon,” Haig responded. “I’m trying to save the presidency.”
That was one of the most truthful things Haig said during his fifteen months as chief of staff. For Haig, it was never about Nixon.
“You may be destroying the presidency,” Jaworski said.15
It was obvious a week after Nixon’s bold move to release the transcripts that it had backfired on him. Public sentiment was rising against the president. The multiple passages marked unintelligible made it look as if Nixon was still hiding evidence, while the deleted expletives showed Nixon’s coarse nature behind closed doors. He seemed unpresidential, a diminished figure during a crisis. In the heartland, a rising chorus began calling for his resignation. In solidly Republican Omaha, Nebraska, the World-Herald called for him to resign. The Chicago Tribune’s conservative editorial page did, too.16 Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, the Republican leader in the Senate, said the transcripts showed “a shabby, disgusting, immoral performance by all those involved.” Speculation about Nixon’s imminent resignation ran wild. On May 10 Nixon and Ford met in the hideaway office, and Ford emerged again expressing confidence in the president. On May 11 Jaworski went to Judge John Sirica’s court and gave him a memorandum in which he sought more tapes, which Sirica sealed because it used secret grand jury testimony.17 Haig contributed to the fever with an interview with the Associated Press in which he said there was no reason for Nixon to resign, but he added an odd qualification that indicated the situation could change.18 A May 12 article by Seymour Hersh in the New York Times reported that some of the expletives deleted in the transcripts were actually ethnic slurs. Nixon had referred to Sirica, a proud Italian American, as a wop and to Justice Department prosecutors as “Jew boys.”19
Kissinger, meanwhile, spent May shuttling between Israel and Syria negotiating an end to the clashes that still continued after the end of the October War. Each side distrusted the other passionately. The Israeli government of Prime Minister Golda Meir teetered because the Israeli public believed it had been caught unprepared by the Egyptian and Syrian surprise attacks in October. Syrian president Hafez Assad was a ruthless military dictator who balanced atop a turbulent swirl of ethnic tensions inside his own country. Kissinger bridged these differences masterfully. He was conciliatory and understanding and then tough and uncompromising when the times demanded it. As he had for months, Kissinger continued making cutting asides about Nixon in his messages to Brent Scowcroft. On May 14 Kissinger said the Israelis’ intransigence was due in part to their “assessment of presidential paralysis—the last message from the President was brushed off with disdain” by Meir. The Israelis also believed they could go directly to the Pentagon for help, so Kissinger asked Scowcroft to tell Haig to ask Defense Secretary James Schlesinger not to make any more commitments to Israel for weapons and equipment. Nixon’s threat to cut off aid to Israel also frustrated Kissinger because it would “produce hysteria and maybe a military outburst.”20 Inside the White House, Haig and his small cadre of assistants knew they were barely holding together a president with a weakening grip on reality. While Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize for his talks with North Vietnam that had helped end the war there, his Middle East diplomacy endured much longer than the “decent interval” between the end of the Vietnam War and the inevitable collapse of South Vietnam. Kissinger’s frustration with Nixon endured; Kissinger often resented the president’s interference as he did the diplomatic heavy lifting needed to reach a deal.
Some savvy outsiders saw the forces inside the White House aligned against Nixon. On May 19 the persuasive John Connally called Nixon to relay a message from Jaworski. “The President has no friends in the White House,” Connally told him.21 Nixon’s closest friends, such as John Mitchell, suspected correctly that Haig and Buzhardt had turned on the president.22 Jaworski had collaborated with Haig since he took the job in November. The message Jaworski passed to Nixon through Connally reflected his sense of conditions inside the White House but also sent a warning: Nixon should come up with an exit strategy.
On May 20 Sirica upheld Jaworski’s subpoena for the sixty-four conversations, meaning Nixon had to either surrender the tapes or take the case to the appeals court in Washington. Nixon appealed, and Jaworski responded by jumping past the appeals court and directly to the Supreme Court. The move held some risks. Nixon had appointed four of the court’s members—Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justices Harry Blackmun, William Rehnquist, and Lewis Powell—and a fifth, Potter Stewart, was a moderate named by Republican Dwight Eisenhower. Powell was a longtime leader in the American Bar Association and an expert in national security legal issues along with Morris Leibman, Haig’s legal advisor. A skillful White House argument steeped in the rights of presidential power could possibly sway enough justices. But Jaworski felt confident in his case because he knew the law: Nixon was guilty, and Haig knew it.
In the Middle East, Kissinger continued his work with Israel and Syria. Success there would end the fighting but also give Nixon a reminder for Americans of the president who ended the Vietnam War, opened relations with China, and created détente with the Soviet Union. Kissinger, however, resented Nixon’s dependence and interference. A May 21 telegram from Scowcroft to Kissinger that summarized Nixon’s feelings showed the tensions. “Of all your superb accomplishments since we have worked together, the Syrian/Israeli breakthrough, regardless of what comes out in the odds and ends of bargaining which still lies ahead, must be considered one of the greatest diplomatic negotiations of all time,” Nixon said through Scowcroft. “I know well how hard you have worked, how discouraged you must have been at times, and I just wanted you to know how personally grateful I am for this example of diplomatic service far beyond the call of duty, which has become your trademark. I believe we should follow up this development with a trip to the Middle East at the earliest possible time. We will thereby be able to seal in concrete those new relationships which are essential if we are to be successful in building a permanent structure of peace in the area.” After his deep expression of gratitude, coupled with his desperation to go to the Middle East for a triumphant tour, Nixon closed with “a personal note” that showed just how much the Watergate scandal permeated his every thought. “I thought you would be interested to know that nowhere in the transcripts or the tapes, and I had Len Garment listen to the three in question, did I ever use the terms ‘Jew boy’ or ‘wop.’ The New York Times following its usual practice nevertheless refuses to retract.”23
While Jaworski fought the White House in one courtroom, John Ehrlichman fought it in another. The man to whom the White House Plumbers reported had filed a subpoena for the White House to produce his notes and files to use in his defense on perjury charges related to the break-in at the offices of Dr. Lewis Fielding, the psychiatrist for Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Ehrlichman claimed Nixon had ordered everything about the Plumbers kept secret on national security grounds, and to prove that argument he wanted to use his December 1971 interview with Rear Adm. Robert Welander, a principal in the military spy ring, to highlight the sensitivity of the issues involved in that case. Haig could not afford to have that interview reach open court, where jurors and various attorneys could interpret it in ways that would destroy Haig’s career. He still depended on the president, be it Nixon or Ford, to trust him; the Welander interview, which had been mentioned during the earlier Senate Armed Services Committee hearings, would shatter that trust. Haig had dodged a similar problem when Plumber Egil Krogh had sought similar evidence in his defense in the fall. Haig and Buzhardt lobbied Jaworski that releasing that information would damage national security. Buzhardt moved to stop Ehrlichman’s subpoena through the sweeping claim of executive privilege the White House had made earlier in the month. Ehrlichman’s counsel countered, arguing that Ehrlichman would not receive a fair trial without the evidence. Without the evidence, they argued, Judge Gerhard Gesell should dismiss the charges, and Gesell said he was inclined to dismiss the case if Ehrlichman was denied the evidence. Gesell had larger issues. He said on May 24 that national security was not a reason to break into an office without a warrant.24
The inevitable tensions between Nixon, who was desperate to remain president, and Ford, who wanted to preserve his credibility while serving for a president under investigation for impeachment, continued to rise. By the end of May Ford had said that Nixon’s stonewalling of Congress would not work much longer. In a May 22 news conference, he said the White House needed to give up “any relevant material and the sooner the better.”25 Nixon, through Haig, then summoned Ford to a meeting in the White House, where they met for thirty-seven minutes shortly after noon on May 23. Haig then remained with Nixon for seventy-two minutes, a sign of how seriously Nixon had taken the meeting.26 Ford said he had told Nixon the same thing in their meeting that he had said in public: “I indicated that there was no change in the position I had taken before, and I have shown no indication that I’m going to change again.”27 Ford’s situation was untenable. Although he did not say so in public, he may have already known that Nixon was guilty; his close friend Melvin Laird, who had helped recruit Ford as vice president, had known of Nixon’s guilt for almost a year. Laird had told Ford the previous August that Spiro Agnew was guilty of accepting bribes as vice president. Once Ford became Nixon’s no. 2, how likely was it that Laird would not tell his close friend that the president was guilty and on the verge of losing his job? It seems plausible that Ford already knew he would become president and needed to preserve his credibility.
Just how imminent Nixon’s departure would be seemed unclear on May 29, when the Judiciary Committee finished its closed-door hearings on impeachment. Democrats who wanted Nixon gone believed the evidence indicated that Nixon had committed impeachable offenses. The majority of Republicans believed otherwise. Charles Wiggins, the Orange County, California, conservative who represented the bedrock of Nixon’s support, said the committee staff had not persuaded him that Nixon was guilty and that many of his colleagues agreed. Nevertheless, the committee voted 28–10 the next day to warn Nixon formally that his continued refusal to ignore its subpoenas “might constitute a ground for impeachment.” The defection of eight committee Republicans showed Nixon that he could only refuse to cooperate for so long, as his own vice president and a majority of the seventeen committee Republicans wanted Nixon to provide more documents and tapes.28
Kissinger’s toil paid off on May 30, when he announced that Israel and Syria had reached an agreement to end the fighting along the Golan Heights. Nixon exulted. Now he could travel to the Middle East in ten days and reclaim the mantle of international statesman. “It was important to move fast while the momentum was still fresh,” Nixon wrote.29
Tempering Haig’s optimism at Kissinger’s news was Ehrlichman’s move on May 31 to call for seven members of the White House staff, including Haig, to provide national security documents that could clear Ehrlichman of charges in the Fielding break-in.30 Ehrlichman wanted documents into all investigations of leaks of classified information, which definitely included the spy ring and the leaks to Jack Anderson during the India-Pakistan war. That put Haig at risk; he had received the initial tip that led to the discovery of the spy ring and had been deeply involved in the Plumbers’ investigation. As May closed, Haig had to stop the court from allowing the records to be released. As Haig had encouraged Nixon to claim executive privilege earlier in the month, he would go to Buzhardt to make sure the White House did so again and made it stick in court.