President Nixon remained in the Soviet Union as July opened, desperately trying to reach another nuclear arms deal with Leonid Brezhnev. But the two sides were too dug into their positions, and the hard-liners on the U.S. side, empowered by Alexander Haig, bogged down any accommodation. The tensions created by the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty in 1972, signed at Nixon’s apex as president, had worsened during the following two years. Military leaders such as Defense Secretary James Schlesinger and Adm. Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had allied themselves with Nixon’s domestic rivals to hold the line on more arms cuts. Nixon and Henry Kissinger tried to do more, but they failed, destroying Nixon’s hope for another foreign policy triumph.
The House Judiciary Committee started its open hearings on impeachment on July 2 with Alexander Butterfield as its first witness. Butterfield drily explained how the White House staff worked, who sat where in the West Wing, and what their roles were. He described how memoranda flowed from Bob Haldeman, then the chief of staff, to other staff members. Butterfield also mentioned his long and close relationship with Haig, which started when they both worked in the Pentagon as aides to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in the Johnson administration. Then John Doar, the committee’s majority counsel, showed Butterfield a memo he had written to Jeb Magruder, then another member of the White House staff. “I ask you to look at that document and tell me whether you recognize it,” Doar asked Butterfield, who said he recognized the memo.1
The memo, dated January 8, 1969, dealt with questions that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had about former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, McNamara’s successor, who was writing a magazine article aided by Morton Halperin, the former NSC aide who was the first person targeted by the FBI wiretaps in May 1969. But there was a problem with the memo. On January 8, 1969, neither Butterfield nor Magruder worked for the White House, because Lyndon Johnson remained president and the Nixon team had not started working.2
“Well, I am familiar with this memorandum, because it became an issue some time ago when I was talking to the staff of the Special Prosecutor,” Butterfield told Doar. “But I can tell you that this is not a copy of the original. This is a copy of an altered original. It appears—I don’t doubt that it is my memorandum, but a lot of the words here are words which I use, sentences are structured much as I structure them. So when I first saw this, I didn’t doubt that it was mine.
“Then as I looked at it more closely, I knew for a fact in my own mind that it was not a true copy of the original, which at that time, I was supposed to be looking at the original. I was handed the original, told this was an original memo of mine, and I knew that it was not.”3
The original memo, dated January 8, 1970, told Magruder that he “should go—first of all—to Al Haig (not to [name redacted]) and find out who participated in Henry’s December 29th meeting. If he had more than one meeting on that day, you could say that it is your understanding that this particular meeting concerned Vietnam and options to our future courses of action there.” Two paragraphs later, the memo said, “Al Haig can get you squared away on at least a preliminary scheme. We can build from there.” “Needless to say,” Butterfield concluded, “this item is every bit as sensitive as the memorandum indicates.”4
The second memo, dated January 9, 1969, omitted the reference to Haig squaring away Magruder and had a different closing paragraph. It had been reworked to airbrush away the major reference to Haig as someone who could devise a strategy to deal with the Clifford article and the ramifications of his collaboration with Halperin, who had worked with Clifford in the Pentagon before joining Nixon’s NSC. Butterfield said he had previously spoken about both versions of the memo to members of Jaworski’s special prosecutor’s staff, who had been given the memo by the White House. “The J. Edgar Hoover memorandum which was labeled top secret, mentioned information which had been obtained by the FBI by way of sensitive sources, or sensitive means, or something like that,” Butterfield told Doar. “That evidently meant telephone taps. The reason I had been called in on that occasion to be interrogated by the Special Prosecutor’s staff was because they thought I knew something about those early telephone taps which the whole world now knows about. The J. Edgar Hoover memo to me said nothing about telephone taps, but I have learned since that if I had been wiser, I would know that ‘sensitive sources’ means telephone taps. To me it means someone overheard someone in a restaurant or something like that. But that is what the Hoover memo was about and it did relate to something Clark Clifford was going to do. But it was about telephone taps.”5
Butterfield realized that his old friend, Al Haig, had set him up. “The memo came from Haig,” Butterfield said in a 1987 interview, “’cause he’s the one, he’s the one that gave it to the special prosecutor.”6
Haig could not count solely on Jaworski’s ability to cover for him on the wiretaps. In this case, he altered a government document—a form of obstruction of justice—to misdirect the prosecutors. Instead, he tried to direct them to Butterfield. By creating the fake memo and giving it to Jaworski, Haig showed just how much he still feared being dragged into a deeper investigation into the wiretaps, which were becoming part of the developing second article of impeachment for abuse of power. If, following James St. Clair’s argument that impeachment was the only avenue to use against an incumbent president, Nixon was impeached and convicted of abuse of power, then as a newly private citizen he could be indicted and tried for the same crimes. And those who aided Nixon in that impeachment-worthy conduct, starting with Haig himself, could be prosecuted for those crimes, too. It was the second time Haig had given Jaworski a misleading document. The first was in November 1973, when he and Buzhardt gave him the Buzhardt report on the military spy ring.
The Judiciary Committee had bigger issues to handle than Haig, and the panel’s two top lawyers, both picked with the guidance of Haig’s advisor, Morris Leibman, let the issue slide. It all went into the category of more evidence of why Nixon could not be trusted. No one raised a possible tie to Haig, because he had drawn attention away from his role in the wiretaps and put it on Kissinger.
An exhausted Nixon, discouraged by not hitting a home run in the Soviet Union, returned to Key Biscayne late on July 3. Haig stayed there with him as the president spent four days watching events from afar and trying to recharge his batteries. Since June 1 Nixon had spent only ten nights in Washington. Nursing his swollen, phlebitis-ridden leg, Nixon tried to get better by taking trips on his boat and a helicopter flight to Palm Beach to Mar-a-Lago, the home of heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post and the future home of another president—Donald Trump.7 Nixon had barely more than a month left as president, and although he said nothing about it publicly, he wavered between thinking he could survive and waiting for the end to come. “Having survived this long I am convinced that we can see it through to the end—however the end comes out,” he wrote in his diary.8 The president returned to Washington late on July 7, in time for the Supreme Court arguments the next morning by St. Clair and Jaworski in the tapes case.
Each side’s arguments surrounded a simple question: Was the president above the law? Either he had to obey a legally binding subpoena to produce evidence in a criminal procedure or he did not. And if he did not, then he could essentially act with impunity. St. Clair contended that Nixon was not “above the law. Nor does he contend that he is. What he does contend is that as President the law can be applied to him in only one way, and that is by impeachment.”9 Of course, by trying to keep the tapes out of the hands of the special prosecutor and the Judiciary Committee, Nixon wanted to limit the evidence that could be used against him.
Jaworski’s argument was just as simple. “This nation’s constitutional form of government is in serious jeopardy if the President, any President, is to say that the Constitution means what he says it does and that there is no one, not even the Supreme Court, to tell him otherwise,” Jaworski told the eight justices. William Rehnquist, a Nixon appointee who once worked in the Justice Department for John Mitchell, had recused himself. The White House, Jaworski claimed, had waived its privilege to keep the tapes when Nixon permitted the release of some aides’ testimony and edited transcripts of the tapes in the major April 30 release.10 When Haig let Jaworski listen to tapes and gave him evidence in the White House Map Room, he had blown the president’s defense against releasing the tapes.
The tapes that Nixon had already turned over continued to cause him problems. On July 9 the Judiciary Committee released a 131-page list of differences between the transcripts released by the White House in late April and the transcripts created by the committee, which said it used sophisticated new technology to decipher the confusing passages of the tapes.11 While the committee’s transcripts provided no significant factual departures from what the White House provided, the new list only deepened the existing impression that Nixon was continuing his cover-up.
Nixon and company decamped from Washington on July 12 and headed to San Clemente for a two-week stay. Haig thought the weather and scenery “combined to restore Nixon to something like inner tranquility.”12 Nixon, however, described the same trip differently, writing that he learned on the flight west that John Ehrlichman had been convicted of perjury and conspiring to violate the civil rights of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist when he approved the White House Plumbers’ break-in at his office. “I was deeply depressed by the tragic irony of this development,” Nixon wrote. “Ellsberg, who had leaked top-secret developments, had gone free. Ehrlichman, who was trying to prevent such leaks, had been convicted.”13
Nixon’s description of the Ehrlichman conviction showed how little he truly understood what had happened. Ehrlichman had been denied a chance to use White House records, including his taped interview of military spy ring leader Robert Welander, to defend himself courtesy of Haig and Buzhardt, who had urged Nixon to claim executive privilege for those records. That decision was made to protect Haig, not Ehrlichman, whom Nixon browbeat to find new ways to destroy Ellsberg’s reputation. Nixon did not know about the break-in at Dr. Lewis Fielding’s office, but he had urged the Plumbers to break into other offices that summer of 1971. That included an order to firebomb the Brookings Institution in search of information that would implicate Nixon in the sabotage of the Paris peace talks in 1968. Ehrlichman was going to prison because Nixon had made it inevitable.
Joseph Califano’s work as Haig’s informal advisor and conduit to Leon Jaworski picked up added urgency on July 17. That day Jaworski asked Califano to meet him, so Califano walked to the prosecutor’s office on K Street. There, Jaworski told him that John Connally, one of Nixon’s closest confidants, was in deep trouble and faced indictment for perjury and obstruction of justice. The conversation showed the interlocking relationships between Califano, Jaworski, and their associates. Edward Bennett Williams was Connally’s lawyer and Califano’s law partner. Connally, a former Texas governor, was a longtime associate of President Lyndon Johnson, Califano’s old boss and Jaworski’s patron. Haig had used Connally to ask Jaworski if he was interested in being the special prosecutor.14
Jaworski told Califano that the case against Connally looked airtight, but Califano said he felt confident that Williams, perhaps the nation’s best criminal defense attorney, would get Connally acquitted. But Connally was just the opening for Jaworski’s main topic: Haig and the imminent demise of Richard Nixon. “I am convinced that Nixon is guilty of a significant number of crimes: the most obvious, obstruction of justice and subornation of perjury,” Jaworski said. He then told Califano of his frequent meetings with Haig and how Haig almost cried when Jaworski delivered him some bad news. “Haig and Nixon are calling every single shot,” Jaworski said.
Jaworski told Califano about when he told Haig that the grand jury had named Nixon an unindicted coconspirator and Jaworski had offered to keep the news secret in exchange for eighteen of the sixty-four tapes he wanted. “A few days later,” Califano wrote, “Haig called Jaworski back and said that he and Nixon had listened to every one of the eighteen tapes for two full days and nights. ‘Haig told me,’ Jaworski said, ‘there’s no way the President will give up those tapes.’”
Jaworski claimed that he had done everything he could to keep the grand jury from indicting Nixon. Only a legal opinion that a sitting president could not be indicted stopped the grand jury. Once Nixon left office, it was only a matter of time before he was indicted.
Califano said that Haig thought he was trying to save the presidency. That could be, Jaworski answered, but he told Haig that he might actually be destroying the presidency by fighting to keep an obviously guilty Nixon in office. Haig, too, could face possible charges, Jaworski said, because it might not be “possible for anyone to serve Nixon at this point without becoming involved in obstruction of justice.” Califano realized that Jaworski wanted Califano to pass the word to Haig that he needed to get Nixon to resign before Haig himself “got into criminal trouble.”
By this time, Haig had long known that Nixon had obstructed justice with Haldeman thirteen months earlier. He had helped the military spy ring that stole White House secrets and likely leaked them to the press and then given Jaworski a misleading report on the spy ring. He had been a key part of the secret group that supported the FBI wiretaps and passed a fake memo about the taps to Jaworski. Much of what Haig had done as chief of staff was meant to cover his tracks. Now the Watergate special prosecutor, whom Haig had helped through careful releases of White House documents, was telling Haig’s longtime mentor that he needed to advise Haig to prepare Nixon to resign. “Joe, let me discuss a hypothetical case with you,” Jaworski said. “If we assume that one of the main reasons the President is not resigning is his fear of criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits, then what should I do if he approaches me for a deal in return for his resignation?”
Califano assumed Jaworski really wanted to know if his other clients, the Washington Post and the Democratic Party, would support such a deal. He responded that he could not guarantee that no one would sue or keep pushing existing lawsuits. Califano also expressed confidence that the Judiciary Committee would do the right thing and vote for impeachment.
Jaworski worried about younger Americans who could not understand why Nixon still remained president. Many of them, he continued, also thought Spiro Agnew had gotten off too easily when he traded resignation for a no contest plea and no prison time for bribery.
“There are strong arguments for accepting the President’s resignation and assuring him he will not be indicted for crimes committed,” Califano said. “But the orchestration of any such arrangement is of critical importance.” Califano also said he was concerned that Nixon would pardon Haldeman and John Ehrlichman to keep them from spilling Nixon’s secrets in court. Congress could prevent that by giving Nixon immunity from prosecution if he resigned.
Jaworski cautioned that they were only discussing a hypothetical situation, but the hypothetical was quickly becoming a reality. Haig would soon start working on what Califano and Jaworski had discussed: getting Nixon to resign with the knowledge that he would not face devastating legal action that could bankrupt him and possibly put him in a prison cell.
In the Judiciary Committee, both sides started their final arguments on July 18. St. Clair argued that no smoking gun existed to warrant impeaching Nixon for the Watergate cover-up and obstruction of justice, which were the core of the first article of impeachment. St. Clair, however, erred when he attempted to introduce part of a March 22, 1973, tape that Nixon had refused to turn over to the committee despite a subpoena. Angry members of both parties complained that Nixon could not refuse to honor a subpoena and then try to defend himself by using information targeted by that subpoena.15 In California, Nixon thought St. Clair had done a “brilliant job.”16
Nixon also knew that the odds were leaning against him. He needed three of the committee’s southern Democrats—Walter Flowers of Alabama, Ray Thornton of Arkansas, and James Mann of South Carolina—to vote against impeachment with a unified bloc of committee Republicans. That became less likely when John Doar, the majority counsel, presented a detailed “summary of information” and twenty-nine proposed articles of impeachment. Over 306 pages Doar laid out the majority’s rationale for impeaching the president, including his multiple campaign abuses, his involvement in the Watergate cover-up, and his abuse of power, which included his use of surveillance tactics, such as the FBI wiretap program, overseen by Kissinger and Haig.17
Making matters worse for Nixon was his knowledge that the June 23 tape was on the verge of exposure. If he lost the case in the Supreme Court, that tape would have to be turned over to Judge John Sirica, the committee, and Jaworski. “Of course, how we handle that tape is a very difficult call because I don’t know how it could be excerpted properly,” Nixon wrote in his diary on June 21.18
On July 23, after the closing arguments of all the committee lawyers and St. Clair, the three southern Democrats all said they would support impeachment. Compounding Nixon’s woes was the announcement that day by a conservative Republican on the committee, Larry Hogan of Maryland, that he too would support impeachment. Few in the White House considered Hogan at risk of defecting. “I told Haig bitterly that if this was the result of our hands-off strategy, we could hardly have done worse by outright lobbying,” Nixon wrote. “I said that we had to do something to try to get at least one of the Southerners back.”19
Nixon had Haig call Alabama governor George Wallace, a Democrat, but one sometimes sympathetic to Nixon. Just days earlier, a press report had claimed that the CIA, in coordination with Nixon, had been involved in the 1972 assassination attempt against Wallace, so instead of getting through to Wallace, Haig was told by the governor’s secretary that Nixon had to call the governor directly. Nixon did, and Wallace told him that he would try to lobby Flowers into supporting Nixon but that he, Wallace, would not support him either. “Well Al,” Nixon said, “there goes the presidency.”20
Nixon knew he faced a choice: Should he keep fighting impeachment in the House and then a trial in the Senate, or should he resign? He had talked more about resigning over the last few weeks with Haig and Ron Ziegler, but Nixon knew that Haig believed that resignation “would mean a dangerously easy victory for the radicals—not just over me but over the system.”21 Haig was already working on a possible resignation, shaped by his talks with Califano, that would enable Nixon to escape prosecution, just like the deal Haig had pressured Spiro Agnew to accept the previous fall.
At 10:00 a.m. in Washington (7:00 a.m. in California), the Supreme Court issued its ruling in the tapes case. All eight justices voting, including three of the Nixon appointees, ruled that Nixon had to turn over the sixty-four tapes that Jaworski wanted. Haig gave the news to Nixon, who cursed the men he had put on the court—Warren Burger, Harry Blackmun, and Lewis Powell—who had voted against him.22
Nixon and his team digested the Court’s ruling throughout the day on July 24, searching for any way they could possibly disregard the order and keep the tapes, because Nixon knew complying with the order meant his presidency was over. He knew what he had said on June 23, 1972, with Haldeman, knew it had been recorded, and knew that it showed he had authorized the obstruction of justice. “There may be some problems with the June 23 tape, Fred,” Nixon told Buzhardt.23 In Washington, Buzhardt went to the vault that held the tapes and removed the one from June 23. He spent two hours listening to the tape, complete with Nixon’s jibes against Jews and gays, and heard what Nixon already knew: the president had ordered the Watergate cover-up. Buzhardt called Haig and St. Clair in California, where it was around 9:30 a.m. “I told them that in my judgment it was all over,” Buzhardt said. “The June 23 tape clearly contradicted material we had submitted to the House Judiciary Committee. I told Al that in my opinion the tape was conclusive evidence. It was no longer a question of the President leaving office, but how he was leaving.”24
Buzhardt and Haig were playacting. They had known for months that Nixon was guilty, perhaps as early as May 8, 1973, when Nixon had first told Haig about the White House tapes. Now came the time for them to determine how the president would leave office, either through an impeachment and Senate trial, which threatened to expose Haig’s and Buzhardt’s own problems, or through resignation, which would let them avoid the untidy complications of an evidence-producing trial. After all, Haig and Buzhardt had not only concealed their involvement in the military spy ring and its cover-up, as well as Haig’s deep ties to the FBI wiretaps, but also covered up their knowledge of the smoking gun tape. They, too, had obstructed justice by not providing the special prosecutor, the Senate Watergate committee, and the House Judiciary Committee the evidence that proved Nixon’s guilt. To protect themselves Nixon had to resign, and they had to make it happen.
That conclusion, said White House aide Jerry Jones, was “inescapable.” Nixon no longer had the votes in Congress to survive.25
Nixon went through the motions of being president, although he knew his early exit from office was inevitable. He traveled north to Los Angeles for a speech before he flew back to Washington in time for the final committee votes on impeachment. On July 27 the panel voted 27–11 for the first article of impeachment. Six Republicans joined all twenty-one Democrats. That included freshman M. Caldwell Butler of Virginia, whose wife read him passages of All the President’s Men as he considered his vote.26
The Judiciary Committee voted 28–10 in favor of the second article of impeachment—abuse of power—on July 29. The article encompassed a range of Nixon’s misdeeds, but it particularly included his use of surveillance techniques and the FBI wiretaps, which started in May 1969. After Nixon, only Kissinger, Haig, and Haldeman had more exposure to the legal problems stemming from those taps, and Haldeman had more pressing issues to deal with: his criminal case would soon go to trial. Haig was set to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on July 30 about Kissinger and the taps. Before that, however, he had to cope with the immediate threat of the Supreme Court’s order to produce the tapes to Sirica’s court and the committee. Haig asked Buzhardt to create a transcript of Nixon’s talks with Haldeman on June 23, 1972, and Buzhardt came upon the section in which Nixon, based on the belief that it was his good friend John Mitchell’s recommendation, told Haldeman to ask the CIA’s leaders to tell the FBI to stop its investigation of the Watergate break-in. “After reading this document, I knew that the clock had stopped in Richard Nixon’s White House,” Haig wrote. “What the tape showed was that the President had been aware at a very early stage of a disposition among his subordinates to cover up White House involvement in the burglary, that he had shared in this disposition, and that he had given the order that legitimized, in the minds of his underlings, everything that they subsequently did to cover up the Watergate crimes.”27
This eloquent description of Haig’s discovery of the smoking gun tape is a fanciful lie, one disproved by the White House tapes and Haig’s actions. Vernon Walters had come to the White House on May 11, 1973, with written records of his conversations with Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean about the attempts to use the agency to block the FBI’s Watergate investigation. Haig already knew about the White House tapes by then, because Nixon had told him. He also knew from sitting with Nixon and Haldeman on May 11 that Nixon had directed Haldeman to meet with Walters to stop the investigation. Haig knew about the cover-up then, knew about the tapes that would prove it, and only professed shock on July 29 that his long-held knowledge was finally going to be public.
Haig sat on his knowledge of Nixon’s imminent exposure on July 30 when he went to Capitol Hill to testify before the Foreign Relations Committee about the wiretaps. He had to distance himself from the orders to eavesdrop on members of Nixon’s own administration while avoiding any irreparable damage to Kissinger, whom the majority of committee members regarded as the savior of U.S. foreign policy. For three hours, Haig sat with Buzhardt beside him and answered the questions in closed session.28
With his testimony before the Senate over, Haig turned his focus to negotiating Nixon’s resignation. The trick was persuading Nixon that he could leave office without facing criminal charges that could have him in court for years. Already, Jaworski had set the stage for a combination resignation and pardon that would also eliminate the potential of criminal charges for Haig for obstruction of justice. St. Clair was finally given a copy of a transcript of the June 23 tape, which eliminated any doubt he had about Nixon’s guilt. He told Haig and Buzhardt that they could wait no longer to give the tapes to Sirica, because any delay in turning over evidence could put St. Clair at risk of obstruction of justice charges, which Haig and Buzhardt faced, too. Haig and Buzhardt then told Nixon they had to release the tape, and once Sirica got it, the whole world would know about it in days, maybe hours.
Haig was running out of time.
Over the next nine days, Haig would engineer Nixon’s removal from office, completing the slow-motion coup that began when Haig returned to the White House on May 3, 1973.
On July 31 Haig told Kissinger about the smoking gun tape, which would force Nixon to quit. Kissinger had long anticipated Nixon’s departure.29 For months he had criticized and undermined Nixon; his catty remarks about a “nonfunctional” president had echoed around Washington for almost a year. Kissinger, Haig told him, had a constitutional role to play, and he needed to help shepherd Nixon through the transition. In his memoirs, Haig denied that he asked Kissinger “to nudge the President toward resignation,” but Kissinger was already thinking in those terms.30 Kissinger also had his own skin to save; the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was still trying to determine if Kissinger had lied about his role in the FBI wiretaps. Kissinger needed little persuading that Nixon had to go.
Haig told other staff members that it was over for Nixon and that impeachment and a criminal trial would damage the democracy and ruin Nixon: “By resigning, he might preserve his health, some fragment of his reputation, and the possibility of winning back the good opinion of his fellow citizens.”31 But Nixon’s resignation was even better for Haig. An impeachment proceeding and trial in the Senate, followed by a criminal trial, would expose Haig’s role in the military spy ring and how he helped Kissinger pick who would be wiretapped. Haig’s career, which now dangled in limbo with Nixon, would truly be over.
Early on the evening of July 31, Haig called Robert Hartmann, Vice President Ford’s chief of staff. Stocky and abrasive, Hartmann was a former Los Angeles Times reporter who went to work for Ford while he was a House member.32 Hartmann also considered Haig a legendary brown-noser and opportunist who used Nixon to gain more power. Haig told Hartmann he needed to schedule a private meeting with Ford for the next day. Haig said he would come by Ford’s office in the morning. Hartmann suspected something was wrong, so he recommended that Ford have him there as a witness.
Nixon had slightly more than a week left in his presidency. Only his children believed he could withstand what looked like a certain impeachment. He knew he had to resign, but the politician who had risen from rural southern California and overcome such unlikely beginnings resisted simply leaving the White House for an uncertain future filled with criminal trials and civil suits. He needed a graceful escape, which Haig was trying to find.