Henry Kissinger’s breakthrough in the Middle East set up a trip that Richard Nixon thought could save his presidency. His rapidly prepared itinerary would take him from Austria to Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, allowing Nixon to bask in the adulation that evaded him at home. Nixon still believed he could beat impeachment, although his aides on Capitol Hill said his support dissipated almost daily. Alabama Republican Bill Dickinson, a House member courted by Nixon with a recent cruise on the Sequoia, said Nixon told him some of the tapes were too sensitive to be released, which suggested that they contained either proof of Nixon’s guilt or national security matters so sensitive that the White House dared not release them.1 Nixon already knew that the former was true; his listening session in early May showed that the June 23 tape proved that he had obstructed justice. All around him, Nixon faced threats that he had to negotiate delicately if he wanted to survive.
A new threat emerged with the publication of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s All the President’s Men, which captured the fear and paranoia of the Nixon era and Watergate. The two reporters took readers along as they went door to door trying to coax scared White House and campaign aides to reveal the secret pools of money that paid for campaign dirty tricks, the Watergate break-in, and the resulting cover-up. As noted earlier, prominent in this account was Woodward’s super source Deep Throat. Reviewers such as Doris Kearns Goodwin in the New York Times and Richard Whalen in the Washington Post injected some skepticism about the source’s omniscience. “Anonymous even now—one man or possibly several—Deep Throat had access to information from the White House, the Justice Department, the FBI and the CRP,” Goodwin wrote.2 Whalen, a former Nixon advisor, wrote that if he did not have such confidence in the authors, “I would be tempted to suspect that Deep Throat is a composite character made up of several sources—he is too knowing about too many very closely held subjects in widely separated political quarters to ring quite true.”3 Both were right. At the time, however, it did not matter. Most readers wanted to believe the worst about Nixon, and Woodward and Bernstein, aided by their mystery source, gave it to them. Some members of the Judiciary Committee pored over its pages seeking guidance as they pondered Nixon’s guilt or innocence.
The evidence against Nixon, much of it highly circumstantial or hearsay, continued to accumulate. On June 3 Charles Colson, the former political aide who said he would run over his mother to help Nixon, reached a deal and pleaded guilty in the Daniel Ellsberg case.4 On June 4 the panel of electronics experts appointed by Judge John Sirica ruled that the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap on the June 20, 1972, tape was made manually, meaning someone had erased it on purpose.5 The blame naturally focused on Nixon, who had listened to multiple tapes and had refused to deliver more than the handful the White House had turned over to the court, prosecutor Leon Jaworski, and the House Judiciary Committee.
What few transcripts had made their way to investigators started to pose real problems for Kissinger and, by extension, Alexander Haig as they prepared to leave for the Middle East. A June 6 article in the Post showed that Kissinger had ordered the seventeen wiretaps on government officials and journalists that started in May 1969. The story also cited a “censored portion” of the transcript of a February 28, 1973, conversation between Nixon and John Dean that revealed Kissinger’s involvement. The conversation was one of many in a four-week period in which Dean and Nixon worked on the cover-up and discussed paying hush money to the Watergate burglars.6 The Post report directly contradicted Kissinger’s sworn testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the previous September, when Kissinger minimized his connection to the wiretaps.
Later that afternoon, Kissinger lied in a news conference when he said he had not initiated the wiretaps and did not know about the Plumbers. He knew that his personal assistant, David Young, had left the National Security Council to join the Plumbers team and that Kissinger himself had listened to the taped interview Young and John Ehrlichman had conducted with Rear Adm. Robert Welander, one of the principals in the military spy ring. Haig suggested that the Post articles, coupled with a New York Times article that suggested that Kissinger was lying, “created in Kissinger a passion for rebuttal.”7 His news conference was a disaster, as the State Department press corps treated Kissinger like the perpetrator of a crime, not as the genius who had coaxed Israel and Syria to reach a peace deal against overwhelming odds. “That night,” author J. Anthony Lukas wrote, “a reporter found Kissinger ‘fuming and resentful’ at a White House dinner.”8 Kissinger deeply resented Nixon’s unpredictability and the constant fallout from the scandals that surrounded him. Since the start of the Arab-Israeli war in October, Kissinger had openly tried to marginalize Nixon, but he was being drawn back into the mire that had already submerged the president. All Washington felt the tremors that presaged an imminent eruption; the question was not if Kissinger would erupt but when.
Also on June 6 the secret that Jaworski had kept since the grand jury reported on March 1 came out in the Los Angeles Times: frustrated that it could not indict Nixon, the grand jury had named him an unindicted coconspirator.9 Jaworski had tried to leverage that secret into persuading the White House to turn over eighteen more tapes in May, but Nixon refused. The reaction to the news was predictably bad. Nixon’s growing legion of detractors considered it another sign of his guilt. James St. Clair confirmed the designation shortly after the story broke, and it immediately cast doubt on Nixon’s ability to survive impeachment. If the grand jury voted 19–0 to declare Nixon an unindicted coconspirator, its members obviously believed he had done something wrong. All the information considered by the grand jury was now in the hands of the Judiciary Committee. Those committee members who had not decided their stance on impeachment could be potentially swayed to reject Nixon.
Kissinger’s cover-up of his role in the FBI wiretaps unraveled further with the publication on June 9 of a Seymour Hersh story in the New York Times that said Kissinger’s office in the National Security Council “was directly responsible” for ordering the bureau to stop the wiretaps in 1971. Haig, Hersh wrote, made the order to the FBI at Kissinger’s request. The latest details, which were undoubtedly provided to Hersh by William Sullivan, Haig’s ally and the former FBI official who ran the wiretaps, and by Haig himself showed that Kissinger had lied during his confirmation hearings. Then, Kissinger said he never “explicitly” dealt with the FBI on ending a wiretap and that he and Haig rarely dealt with the FBI. Although Haig was not quoted by name, an unnamed White House official told Hersh that Haig “only did what he was told to do.” That same official then justified the wiretaps, as Haig had done to Hersh a year earlier for another series of stories about the wiretaps. “Those wiretaps were justified, because of extreme national security leaks. Anyone who claims otherwise is not filled in,” the official, probably Haig, said. The Hersh story, quoting a “closely involved official,” said that Haig had called Sullivan and said the wiretaps were no longer needed and should be shut down. “Haig always made it clear that he was a messenger,” the former official said. “If Henry didn’t approve of all this, he could have said so.” The unnamed official was obviously Sullivan.10 Hersh acknowledged that Sullivan was a major source for him on the wiretaps in his 1983 book, The Price of Power, and the quotes in the June 9, 1974, story match similar comments from Sullivan in Hersh’s earlier stories.11 The story also quoted a source saying that Haig and Lawrence Eagleburger should have been tapped if Kissinger had followed the criteria he claimed to use for picking the wiretap targets. Since Haig helped him determine the tapping targets and was in league with Sullivan, who ran the taps, it was highly unlikely that Haig would ever have been tapped.
Coming on the heels of the revelations that Kissinger had asked for the wiretaps, the story was a clear attempt by Haig, abetted by his longtime friend Sullivan, to distance himself and pin the blame on Kissinger. In his memoirs, Haig called the stories about Kissinger arrows in the back.12 If so, Haig had put them there.
Amid the growing controversy surrounding Kissinger and the wiretaps, Nixon set off for the trip to the Middle East. Haig’s nerves were fraying along with Nixon’s, said Steve Bull, who was on the trip. “I can remember on the final Mideast trip we had a meeting with Haig, who said, ‘If this president thinks he can run this presidency without Al Haig, he’s got another think coming.’ He was crazed. I thought he was unhinged.”13
Their first stop was Salzburg, Austria, where Kissinger could not stick to the script. He decided to conduct a news conference with the traveling press corps, which he mistakenly thought would care only about the trip, not domestic matters back in Washington. Haig considered the news conference a mistake because “it would have the effect of diverting attention from the real purposes of Nixon’s trip and cloaking it with a miasma of controversy that would follow us wherever we went.”14 Kissinger’s news conference blew up virtually immediately. Reporters threw question upon question at Kissinger about his apparent perjury during his confirmation hearings. Kissinger tried to take evasive action, saying he had told the Foreign Relations Committee everything and that he would not say anything more about the wiretaps. “‘I do not believe it is possible to conduct the foreign policy of the United States under these circumstances when the character and credibility of the secretary of state is at issue,” Kissinger said. “And if it is not cleared up, I will resign.”15
While Kissinger melted down before the press, Haig slipped into Nixon’s hotel suite and discovered another Nixon secret. Nixon showed Haig one of his legs, which had grown swollen and discolored from phlebitis, a blood-clotting condition. “I saw that Nixon was in considerable pain,” Haig wrote. Beyond that, however, phlebitis could turn fatal if a blood clot broke free and flowed to his heart, causing a heart attack. If he had known how bad Nixon’s health was, Haig said, he would have recommended calling off the trip.16 Eleven months earlier, the last time Nixon’s health had caused him to be hospitalized, Alexander Butterfield had revealed the White House taping system. Little wonder Nixon wanted to avoid the hospital.
The wiretap-related problems for Kissinger and Haig were compounded the next morning, June 12, with a story by John Crewdson in the New York Times that again bore Sullivan’s fingerprints. “Some of the ‘original requests’ for wiretaps placed on 17 government officials and newsmen came from Henry A. Kissinger or Gen. Alexander M. Haig Jr., according to a summary of an inquiry last year by the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” started the story, which referred to the May 1973 report ordered by William Ruckelshaus, then the acting director of the FBI. The report, for which Haig and Sullivan, but not Kissinger, were interviewed, said that Kissinger was mainly responsible for picking the targets of the wiretaps. Crewdson, citing a “source with detailed knowledge of the wiretaps program,” reported that the White House never sought to use any technique besides wiretapping to catch suspected leakers and that Haig would call Sullivan and say, “We want a tap on so-and-so.” Sullivan never spoke to Kissinger, the story continued, and whenever Haig called, he “made it clear that ‘he was speaking for someone’ in making the wiretap requests.”17 While Crewdson’s main source—it could only have been Sullivan—attempted to carve out some maneuvering room for Haig, he compounded Kissinger’s problems. Not only did the secretary of state face another round of hearings before the Foreign Relations Committee, but he could be investigated by the special prosecutor’s office for obstruction of justice or worse. So Haig would be part of the collateral damage.
Jaworski threw both men a lifeline with a June 13 announcement that he had nothing to show that Kissinger had any criminal exposure with the wiretaps.18 Instead, Jaworski cared more about those who used the wiretaps, primarily Nixon and Haldeman, to lobby Congress. Once again, Jaworski had come to Haig’s rescue. If Jaworski did not go after Kissinger on the wiretaps, he would not target Haig, who had less direct exposure. Such a huge break for Haig validated his reasons for picking Jaworski to succeed Archibald Cox.
Kissinger also learned on June 13 that fifty-two senators had signed a letter declaring confidence in his performance.19 By this time, most of Nixon’s foreign policy accomplishments had been attributed to Kissinger, whose work in the Middle East after the Yom Kippur War had indeed been masterful. Senators of both parties, particularly the Democrats, considered Kissinger the one thing they liked about the Nixon administration. “He hasn’t committed perjury in my opinion,” said Senator John Stennis, the Mississippi Democrat and enabler of some of the White House’s cover-up of the military spy ring.20 Kissinger got the credit for the opening of relations with China, the strategic arms deal and détente with the Soviets, and the end of the Vietnam War, as if Nixon had nothing to do with anything. Although senators such as Stuart Symington and Lowell Weicker knew that Kissinger had run a secret back-channel game for years, they did not want to risk losing him. They knew Kissinger would last longer than Nixon, whose resignation or impeachment seemed imminent.
With everything that faced him—the debilitating phlebitis and the continuing implosion politically at home—Nixon managed to pull together a dazzling success in the Middle East. Almost one million Egyptians lined the streets in Alexandria and Cairo to shout Nixon’s name as he paraded with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, who had thrown off his country’s dependence on the Soviet Union for an alliance with the United States. In his diary, Nixon wrote that Watergate had been put in its proper perspective and that the future looked bright. The pressure for Haig, however, remained, and his behavior became more erratic, aide Steve Bull said.
“He really did love his status,” Bull said of Haig. “I remember on that trip we were in Jordan, and it wasn’t long after the troops disengaged with the Israelis. We were in a motorcade from Amman to another palace, and a few vehicles got in the motorcade behind and in front of the car with the king and the president. It pushed everyone in the motorcade back, including Haig’s car. When we got out of the motorcade, Haig had to walk five cars ahead to get to the president. He started saying to us that if Bob Haldeman had been here, he never would have been that far back in the motorcade. He didn’t care if it had to do with the security of the president. He was just concerned about himself. He was irrationally concerned about it.”21
On June 18, while Haig was still with Nixon in the Middle East, the Judiciary Committee started examining how Nixon’s October 20 firing of Cox fueled the call by congressional Democrats for impeachment proceedings.22 Was the Cox firing part of Nixon’s furtherance of the Watergate cover-up? Many committee members knew Nixon wanted to stop part of Cox’s investigation, particularly the drive to get more White House tapes. But it was Haig who had sabotaged the handling of Cox as he misled Nixon to believe that then–attorney general Elliot Richardson would follow Nixon’s order to fire Cox. Richardson, however, had told Haig exactly the opposite, that he would not fire Cox. The debacle that followed pushed Nixon closer to the edge.
While Jaworski had said he would not target Kissinger on the FBI wiretaps, other investigators had made no such pledge. On June 20 another New York Times story laid out more discrepancies between the records and transcripts analyzed by the Judiciary Committee and Kissinger’s confirmation testimony.23 Any objective observer had to conclude that Kissinger had perjured himself. But he had also just pulled off another feat of superhuman diplomacy in the Middle East for which he and Nixon were taking a justifiable victory lap. Democrats knew that if they forced out Nixon, which seemed more likely each day, they had to leave competent people, particularly Kissinger, in charge throughout the rest of the government. Haig’s challenge throughout the investigation into the wiretaps was to minimize the blast radius caused by any explosive revelations. So far, thanks to the anonymous comments in the Times by Sullivan, his coconspirator in the taps, Haig had been portrayed solely as the implementer of instructions from Kissinger or Nixon. If Haig needed to get Nixon involved, he knew he could maneuver the president to focus the attention on Kissinger, not Haig. After all, Nixon’s anger in May 1973 that Kissinger tried to distance himself from the wiretaps led the president to tell Haig about the White House taping system, the transcripts from which were now causing Kissinger’s problems. Nixon had threatened then to expose Kissinger. Haig knew the chance existed that Nixon would be willing to consider it again if he felt he had to.
Nixon returned from the Middle East on June 19 buoyed by the joyous receptions he received in each country. He capped off Kissinger’s diplomacy in Tel Aviv and Damascus, and the Saudis embraced him as a brother. “My receptions in Egypt and Syria and my conversations with Sadat and Asad confirmed the tremendous potential of the new role of the United States as a force for peace in the Arab world,” Nixon wrote.24
He had little chance to enjoy his success, as he had to plunge immediately into preparations for his third summit meeting with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, which was scheduled to start on June 25. On June 20 Nixon convened a National Security Council meeting with his national security team, led by Kissinger and including Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, Adm. Thomas Moorer, CIA Director William Colby, deputy national advisor Brent Scowcroft, and Haig. Hard-liners, primarily Schlesinger and Moorer, had put détente advocates on the back foot, and they pushed for Nixon to take a harder line on arms control than Nixon knew the Soviets would accept. Kissinger’s and Schlesinger’s differences flared into the open, and Nixon found himself badgered by his young defense chief on the issue of how many warheads the Soviets could put on their missiles.
“Mr. Brezhnev has a very high respect for you, Mr. President,” Schlesinger said. “You can be very persuasive—you have great forensic skills. I believe if you can persuade them to slow down to 85 per year versus 200 per year, you will have achieved a major breakthrough. The Chiefs have been apprehensive about [multiple independent reentry vehicle] agreements, but I believe that most of them would endorse this approach.”
Moorer said the Chiefs were reluctant to extend any deal limiting warheads and that Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, the chief of naval operations, or CNO, wanted more restrictions on the Soviets and more flexibility for the United States. It was Zumwalt, unknown to Nixon, who had engineered a part of the military spy network on the White House and was a plausible suspect for leaking secrets to columnist Jack Anderson about the White House policies during the India-Pakistan war in 1971. Zumwalt viewed Kissinger’s détente policies with alarm, and that concern carried over to the president.
“You mean he prefers no agreement,” Nixon said.
“No, he just wants only a permanent agreement,” Schlesinger responded.
“Let’s put it all out on the table,” Nixon said. “When he suggests something that has no chance of success that means he wants no agreement. He has now written his letter for the record and I’m sure he will go out and say it publicly. But that’s OK; I will have to take responsibility for it, he won’t have to.”
Nixon had lost patience with Zumwalt, who was not at the meeting. He said he would only agree to something that satisfied the nation’s national security interests. “But I will say that one thing that we will not accept are patently cheap shots such as what CNO has done—after the support the Navy has received from this administration, which he’s aware of,” Nixon said. “He knows what we have gone through. We saved the US from a diplomatic disaster by the wrong kind of end to the war in Vietnam. To come forth on paper with a position, which he knows to be unacceptable, and I’m sure he plans to go public with it. I hear a lot of this from our military—of course not from anyone in this room.”25
The wolves were inside the door for Nixon. Haig said Schlesinger “treated the President with a mixture of condescension and thinly veiled contempt that shocked those who witnessed it.”26 Nixon called Schlesinger’s statement that “with my forensic ability, I could sell the idea that he presented, was really an insult to everybody’s intelligence and particularly to mine.”27
Despite the divisions between Nixon and the Chiefs over arms control, Nixon left for his third summit with Brezhnev on June 25. A second SALT agreement seemed distant. Nixon had little leverage, and neither, it seemed, did Brezhnev. As Kissinger had predicted during his earlier conversations with Schlesinger, détente had not provided the Soviets with many tangible gains. The Middle East war had cost the Soviets their client state in Egypt, and Syria was not strong enough to make up the difference. Soviet military leaders perceived they had lost influence, and they, like their American counterparts, did not want to give up whatever advantages they thought they still had.
Meanwhile, Haig and Kissinger squabbled over the trappings of power. Each wanted the hotel room closest to Nixon, an honor Haig wrested from a piqued Kissinger. After a state dinner on June 27, Nixon pulled his two indispensable aides into the presidential limousine to avoid eavesdropping. “I suggested to Kissinger and Haig that we have a brief meeting in my car, where we could talk without being bugged,” Nixon wrote. “Kissinger had seemed depressed all day. As I had guessed, the domestic harassment over the wiretaps still bothered him, as well as his realization after his talks with [Soviet foreign minister Andrei] Gromyko during the afternoon that our negotiating position had been seriously undercut by the anti-détente agitation within the administration.”28
In Moscow and Crimea, where he and Brezhnev zipped around in one of the Soviet leader’s speedboats, Nixon did his best to make something out of the third summit. Each visit with Brezhnev, Nixon knew, made the world safer. The two leaders had built a relationship in which they could communicate freely in spite of their obvious language and cultural differences. However, a politically weakened Nixon might overreach in his desperation to get a deal he could cite to save his presidency. The hard-liners, abetted by Haig, did not want to risk having Nixon give up anything more. They felt Nixon had given away too much during the first two summits; they did not want to see it happen again. Haig had helped send the military White House secrets during the heyday of the spy ring, and then he and Fred Buzhardt had helped cover it up just a few months earlier in 1974. Haig had helped make Schlesinger the defense secretary during the confusion of May 1973 and had told Nixon to make William Colby the director of the CIA. He had helped build the national security team that was causing Nixon such aggravation now, and the levers of power remained close enough to Haig that he could minimize whatever his weakened president could do.
June closed with Nixon deeply immersed in the international diplomacy he enjoyed the most. In the royal palaces of Amman and Riyadh and on the streets of Alexandria, Cairo, and even Moscow, Nixon reveled in his status as a transformational world leader. With the help of Kissinger, he had ended a war, signed a peace, and warmed by a few degrees the Cold War with the Soviet Union. In Washington, however, his political troubles only deepened. His enemies in Congress saw the accumulating evidence against him and saw their chance to get rid of him, while his allies, increasingly skeptical of his innocence, dwindled each day.