Alexander Haig kept the appointment he had made the previous day to see Vice President Ford on August 1, but when he arrived at Ford’s office on the second floor of the Old Executive Office Building, he was surprised to see Robert Hartmann, Ford’s chief of staff, there, too. Neither chief of staff liked the other. Haig thought Hartmann abrasive and in over his head.1 Hartmann considered Haig an obsequious schemer who tried to limit Ford’s access to the president. Haig wrote in his memoirs that Nixon had told him that morning that he knew he had to resign and that he wanted Haig to give that message to Ford. However, Haig declined to tell Ford about Nixon’s declaration with Hartmann in the room. Instead, Haig told them that Nixon’s moods changed with each minute, shifting from wanting to fight to accepting that he would be removed from office. Haig said nothing about Nixon’s alleged decision to resign and ended the meeting.2
Minutes later, as Ford was on his way to the Senate, Haig called back. Hartmann could only hear Ford’s side of the conversation, which was a series of “uh-huhs.”3 Haig said he needed to see Ford privately, and they scheduled a meeting for 3:30 p.m., without Hartmann.
Shortly before the second meeting with Ford, Haig talked to Fred Buzhardt, who told him the president could be pardoned for crimes for which he had not yet been indicted.4 That meant Nixon could legally be pardoned for anything. Armed with that legal opinion, Haig arrived on time for his second meeting with Ford. Alone, he told the vice president about the contents of the June 23 “smoking gun” tape and that Nixon might resign as early as the next day. There were six options, Haig told Ford, which included Nixon pardoning himself, then resigning; Nixon pardoning all the Watergate defendants, then himself, and then resigning; and finally, Nixon resigning and then being pardoned by his successor. Haig did not tell Ford which White House lawyer had given him the legal opinion. “As I saw it, at this point, the question clearly before me was, under the circumstances, what course of action should I recommend that would be in the best interest of the country?” Ford told the House Judiciary Committee on October 17, 1974.5
Neither Ford nor Haig admitted that during that second meeting a deal was struck that Nixon would resign, making Ford president, and then be pardoned by the new president. But Nixon’s decision to resign was not absolute. He wavered between fighting to the end, which meant impeachment and conviction in the Senate, which his family wanted him to do, and resigning, which Haig wanted. Also, the contents of the June 23 tape were still known to only a small number of people. There was still no public outcry about the obvious obstruction of justice recorded in that conversation. From his second conversation with Ford, Haig knew that the soon-to-be president understood the stakes, that he had the legal authority to pardon Nixon for crimes for which he had not been indicted, and that Nixon needed some assurance that he would not face ruinous legal battles as a private citizen if he decided to spare the nation the drama of an impeachment and trial by resigning.
Haig wanted to leave no traces of his meeting with Ford, so he told Ford’s secretary to write the name of Rogers Morton, the interior secretary, in the appointment calendar instead of his own. During the meeting with Haig, Betty Ford, the vice president’s wife, called, looking for her husband. A Ford aide went to the waiting area outside Ford’s office and saw a surprised Haig emerge. “What are you doing here?” Haig demanded, as he quickly scurried away. Inside Ford’s office, the aide told reporter Seymour Hersh, he encountered a stunned vice president staring out his window at the West Wing of the White House and contemplating the gravity of what Haig had just told him.6 Haig talked to Ford one more time on August 1, calling him late at night at his home in Virginia to tell him that nothing had changed. “The situation is as fluid as ever,” Haig said.
“Well,” Ford replied, “I’ve talked with Betty, and we’re prepared, but we can’t get involved in the White House decision-making process.”
“I understand,” Haig said. “I’ll be in touch with you tomorrow.”7
In just a few hours, Haig had received a legal opinion from his collaborator in the White House, Buzhardt; met secretly with Ford and told him he could pardon Nixon before he was even indicted; tried to hide his meeting by using someone else’s name in the appointment log; and then left, claiming that he and Ford had not cut a deal for Nixon to resign in exchange for a pardon from Ford.
They had little time in which to act. The House scheduled its impeachment debate for August 19, by which time the details of the June 23 tape were sure to be public.
On the morning of August 2, Ford met with James St. Clair to discuss the likelihood of Nixon’s impeachment and conviction in light of the June 23 tape. Ford told St. Clair about Haig’s guidance concerning the legal options for a pardon, advice that a surprised St. Clair said did not come from him. Ford told the Judiciary Committee that he then decided that he would not make any recommendations to Nixon about resignation or impeachment.8
Hartmann and John Marsh, a former House member from Virginia and a longtime Ford friend, told a different story. They met with Ford after he talked with St. Clair, and the vice president told them that he had called Haig, not that Haig had called him, and that Ford had told Haig, “Betty and I talked it over last night. . . . We felt we were ready. This just has to stop; it’s tearing the country to pieces. I decided to go ahead and get it over with, so I called Al Haig and told them they should do whatever they decided to do; it was all right with me.”9
Hartmann and Marsh jumped all over Ford, telling him he had made a huge mistake in saying anything like that to Haig. They summoned Bryce Harlow, Nixon’s longtime aide and also a Ford confidant, who said Ford had to call Haig back and disavow what he had told him earlier. This account differs in meaning from what Ford told the Judiciary Committee in October. “I decided I should call General Haig the afternoon of August 2,” Ford testified. “I did make the call late that afternoon, and told him I wanted him to understand that I had no intention of recommending what the President should do about resigning or not resigning, and that nothing we had talked about the previous afternoon should be given any consideration in whatever decision the President might make.” Ford said Haig agreed.10
Years later, St. Clair told Hersh that he did not recall talking with Ford about the June 23 tape or a presidential pardon. Instead, St. Clair said, they discussed reports that the Nixon White House was involved in the May 1972 shooting of George Wallace. “I couldn’t figure out what he was doing,” St. Clair said of Ford.11
What Ford was doing, whether he meant it or not, was giving Haig the impression that he had reached a deal in which Ford would pardon Nixon if he resigned. Ford certainly did not rule out that possibility.
Also that day, Jaworski’s office said it was investigating Alexander Butterfield for possible charges for altering a memorandum related to the FBI wiretaps.12 Butterfield had testified in July that the altered memorandum excised a reference to Haig and had been turned over to Jaworski by Haig and Buzhardt. When he was shown the memo during the impeachment hearing, Butterfield said he had not altered the memo. He later suspected that his old friend Haig had been behind the alteration.
On August 3 Senator Robert Griffin of Michigan, a Republican ally of Ford and a longtime Nixon supporter, wrote the president to tell him that he would vote to convict Nixon in the Senate if the president failed to honor a subpoena for the tapes.13 It was another indication of just how much support Nixon had lost among congressional Republicans, and it led him to consider how much money he stood to lose if the House impeached him and the Senate convicted him. By resigning, he could save at least $60,000 in annual pension benefits. Since he had had to borrow money to pay his back taxes, Nixon had lost a considerable part of his net worth in 1974, and he now stood to lose more.
After his meetings with Haig and St. Clair, Ford left Washington for Mississippi and a series of fund-raisers and appearances for Republican candidates, including Trent Lott, a freshman member of the Judiciary Committee. Lott was a solid “no” vote on any of the impeachment articles. Ford said he thought the House would vote to impeach Nixon but that he personally did not think the president had committed impeachable offenses and that he had no idea how a Senate trial would end.14 Given what he later told the Judiciary Committee in October, Ford had to know that he was not telling the truth. He already knew from Haig and St. Clair that the smoking gun tape would devastate Nixon’s defense and force him from office if he did not resign.
Nixon went to Camp David for the weekend and summoned Haig, St. Clair, and other staffers for a five-hour meeting on Sunday, August 4. Resignation hung in the air. By now, the White House insiders all knew about the June 23 tape and what it meant for impeachment in the House. Nixon still remained unsure, wavering in meetings between fighting and resigning. Haig knew fighting meant more problems than it was worth and urged Nixon to resign. Nixon also determined that he would release the June 23 tape transcript to the public and take his chances that the American people would cut him some slack.15
Haig had to preserve his deniability. Before the White House released the June 23 transcript on the morning of August 5, Haig called Jaworski, with St. Clair on the line, to let him know what was coming.
“I wanted you to be aware of it before the fact, Leon,” Haig said.
“What is it, Al?” Jaworski asked.
“Well, we were reviewing the tape recordings we are going to send you and we found one that’s significantly different from the others,” Haig said.
“In what way?” Jaworski asked again.
“It’s some conversations between the President and Haldeman on June 23, six days after the Watergate break-in,” Haig said. “They talk about getting the FBI out of the investigation by using the CIA—having the CIA say it was a national security matter. . . . We didn’t know it, Leon,” Haig continued. “He didn’t tell us about it. He didn’t tell anyone. St. Clair and I have been pushing him to come out with a statement saying he was the only one who knew about it. That he didn’t tell any of his attorneys and that’s why St. Clair made misleading statements to the Judiciary Committee.”
“I told him he was going to have to reveal this publicly or I was going to resign,” St. Clair interjected. “The advice I’ve been giving him didn’t take any of this into account, Leon. And the positions I took before the Committee didn’t either.”
Jaworski told St. Clair he would have a problem if Nixon did not disclose the tape right away.
St. Clair said Nixon might be able to explain some of the tape away to minimize some of the damage, “but I have no idea what the full effect will be.”
Haig said he did not think Nixon was focused on the importance of the tapes.
“But the President reviewed those conversations on Monday, May 6—after I offered to drop my subpoena if you would deliver just eighteen of the tapes,” Jaworski said. “Isn’t that true?”
“That’s correct,” Haig said. St. Clair agreed.
Then, Jaworski said, Nixon had to know what was in the tapes.
St. Clair said he was getting the tapes to Judge John Sirica.
Haig jumped in. “I’m particularly anxious that you believe me, Leon,” he said. “I didn’t know what was in those conversations.”
“I remember, Al, that you told me you couldn’t see why I wanted those tapes because there wasn’t anything of value in them,” Jaworski said.
“That’s right,” Haig responded. “And that’s what I believed!”16
Somehow, Haig got word of his ignorance of the tape to the press, too. The Times reported that Haig and St. Clair learned about the tape over the weekend, which, of course, was untrue.17 By his own admission, Haig had known about the tape at least by July 24. In reality, he had known for more than a year, but he, too, would face possible obstruction of justice charges if it was revealed that he knew the truth about Nixon and declined to tell authorities. So he kept up the fiction that he, the architect of Nixon’s defense and the de facto president for the last fifteen months, had been in the dark. Jaworski had to be skeptical of Haig’s claims of ignorance. In July he told Joseph Califano, Haig’s friend and advisor, that Haig’s defense of Nixon was pushing him close to obstruction of justice charges. After all, Haig controlled the White House. He had picked an old associate, Buzhardt, as Nixon’s chief Watergate defender. He had unfettered access to the tapes and knew they existed two months before Butterfield told the Senate about them. Haig prevented St. Clair and his defense team from access to the tapes. No one had more access to the evidence that would prove Nixon’s guilt or innocence. No one had more influence over Nixon’s defense.
It is possible that Jaworski knew all along what was on those conversations, given the circumstances under which he was hired. His cooperation with Haig throughout his tenure as special prosecutor focused on Nixon and getting him out of office. No longer did Haig have to worry about the prosecution team ranging far afield and stumbling onto his connection to the wiretaps and the spy ring.
Ford returned to Washington at 2:45 p.m., and Haig went to see him immediately. “He looked more haggard than he had before, and I remember thinking that I’d never seen a man so physically and emotionally drained,” Ford wrote of Haig, who told Ford that Nixon was releasing the June 23 transcript. Haig continued, telling Ford that most Nixon aides wanted him to resign, while a core group, mostly his family, wanted him to fight. Nixon, according to Haig, wavered between the two options. “I can’t tell you with any certainty what’s going to happen in the next seventy-two hours,” Haig said. “I don’t know myself. It could go either way.”18
Whatever Nixon had dreamed of when he allowed the release of the smoking gun tape did not happen. His closest allies ran to the exits. Griffin called for Nixon to resign. Charles Wiggins of California, one of Nixon’s staunchest defenders on the Judiciary Committee, said he would vote to impeach him.19
Amid the frenzy of August 6, as Nixon convened his cabinet and vowed to remain until the bitter end, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted unanimously to clear Kissinger of possible perjury about his role in the FBI wiretaps, declaring, “There are no contradictions between what Dr. Kissinger told the committee last year and the totality of the new information available.” “He is needed,” said Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. “His role is good. He’s a tremendous national asset.”20 It was almost a willful sense of denial, but in the face of Nixon’s inevitable departure and replacement by Ford, Kissinger offered the one source of stability for the future. He had to remain.
Not satisfied with engineering a pardon for Nixon, Haig spent much of August 7 working to get pardons for the president’s top aides, who were either in prison already or facing certain conviction and imprisonment. Charles Colson, one of Haig’s closest allies on Nixon’s staff, received a call from his attorney, who told him Haig was talking to Ford “and getting pardons for everyone.”21 Haig met with Ford early in the morning of August 7, another meeting that went unrecorded in Ford’s logs. He told Ford that it was time for him to prepare to be president. They worked out the details of the transition, and the issue of pardoning Nixon, while they said little about it publicly, remained fresh from the discussions on August 1. Just how many pardons would come remained unclear, but Colson and others believed they would get a reprieve. “It was not in the President’s personal self-interest to walk out of the White House with his own pardon buttoned up but not that of his aides,” Colson told reporter Seymour Hersh. “It wasn’t just because the boss wouldn’t want to leave the wounded on the battlefield, but also because he was worried about being torn up. They’d walk all over him.”22
Haldeman thought Haig had engineered a pardon for him and everyone else. Haldeman called his former colleague John Ehrlichman and said it looked like they had a deal for pardons. Later in the day, he called Ehrlichman back and said Haig told him everything had collapsed. Hersh noted Haig’s inconsistency. Colson certainly believed Haig was trying to get pardons, while Haig told Jaworski the next day that he had opposed them. Len Garment, one of Nixon’s trusted advisors in the final days, argued vehemently against them, saying that pardoning Nixon himself would be acceptable but that leniency for all would be a “bizarre and unacceptable act.”23
Ford knew his time was coming. He told the Times that day that he was prepared for whatever might occur. He declined to say whether he would name former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller as vice president, as his close friend Melvin Laird had already suggested.24 The wily Laird, who had spied on Nixon while serving as his defense secretary and then covered up his spying with Haig and Buzhardt, was already working on a Ford administration before Nixon was even gone.
As Nixon pondered whether to resign, Washington simmered with speculation about his options for avoiding prosecution. Once he resigned, Congress could pass a resolution granting him immunity from prosecution. Many of Nixon’s rivals wanted him out of office far more than they desired seeing him in prison. He could also grant himself a blanket pardon and then resign, or Ford, as the new president, could pardon Nixon. Haig had told Ford about all these options during their second meeting in August 1, but it was the final option—a pardon from Ford—that had the most momentum.
By the night of August 7 Haig knew that Nixon would announce his resignation the following evening. He scheduled a lunch at his home in northwest Washington with Jaworski. Haig told his sparring partner and frequent collaborator that Nixon would resign officially at noon on August 9. Part of the resignation would involve Nixon taking all of his documents to California with him, a deal that Jaworski reported to his subordinates would involve “no hanky-panky.” There was no doubt that someone in the White House had tampered with the tapes, Haig told Jaworski, but he identified no suspects. He also said Nixon would not pardon any of his aides and that the president was not asking for any special treatment himself. But Nixon did not have to ask. Haig and Jaworski, either directly or through intermediaries such as Califano, had already done that for him. Haig then returned to the White House and told a nervous Nixon that he had nothing to fear from Jaworski because he could resign without fear of prosecution and could take his documents with him.25
As essentially the acting president for fifteen months, Haig knew better than anyone what lay hidden in Nixon’s files. He knew what he had told Nixon in private and what others said about him, including in the military spy ring investigation. Those documents, which Haig and Buzhardt had kept from the Watergate defendants for their trials, were in danger of surfacing if they drifted from Nixon’s control either to the incoming Ford team or, worse, to Jaworski and his band of ruthless prosecutors.
Nixon went on television from the Oval Office on August 8 and announced his resignation. “I would have preferred to carry through to the finish whatever the personal agony it would have involved,” Nixon said, “and my family unanimously urged me to do so.” But, he said, he realized he could not stay.26 In less than twenty-four hours, it would all be over. The constant drama of new revelations, the fears that something new would appear and cast the president into another crisis, and the stress of new threats from outside would end for those remaining inside the White House.
Just hours before Nixon was scheduled to leave at noon on August 9, Jaworski met with his staff. He told them that Nixon would take “some things” with him and that Haig had said “there will be lawyers at San Clemente who will know about” the various requests by prosecutors for documents.27
Sweaty and nervous, his family crying as they stood beside him, Nixon addressed his staff in the White House East Room. He then walked through the crowd assembled on the South Lawn, followed his family aboard his military helicopter, turned in the doorway, and raised his arms over his head, making the V for Victory gesture that had become his trademark. He then ducked inside. That image, frozen in time by the legion of photographers capturing the moment, showed the relief on Nixon’s face as he ended his turbulent presidency.
Minutes after Nixon flew away, first to Andrews Air Force Base and then aboard what was still Air Force One for a few more minutes, Ford took the oath of office and addressed the nation he now led. “Our Constitution works,” he said. “Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.”28 He then walked into what was now his office. Shortly afterward, an anonymous memo appeared asking Ford to acknowledge Haig’s role as chief of staff.
Jerry Jones, one of Haig’s closest deputies, called Haig an American hero for what he had done during the final days: “He held that government together. And he negotiated the deal with Jaworski. And he negotiated the deal with a somewhat perhaps, majorly incapacitated president. And he kept the train on the tracks. Al Haig, if he never did another thing in the history of the United States, he is absolutely a hero and should have been recognized as the hero he was.”29
Nixon’s final speech as president, a sad and moving talk to his White House staff, did not admit to any wrongdoing, which killed his chances at getting a resolution granting him immunity. Ford’s new presidential staff also opposed a pardon. Jerry terHorst, Ford’s press secretary, said in his first briefing that he did not see how Ford could pardon Nixon, basing his opinion mostly on what Ford had said during his confirmation hearings the previous winter.30 But Nixon stepped aboard that helicopter on the White House’s South Lawn expecting some kind of deal.
Nixon was gone, but Haig remained chief of staff and determined to shape the new Ford administration. He ordered Jones to write a memorandum for the new president, just hours into the world’s most demanding job, that would give Haig the same control in the Ford White House that he had while working for the debilitated Nixon. “Haig had me stay up all night,” Jones said, “writing for Ford a document which would outline to him how the White House should work, which was the strong chief of staff White House. Haig took it in the first or second day Ford was there, and ran that at Ford.” But Ford was not as pliable as Nixon in his final months as president. “[Haig] went in there and he lost it, and he immediately resigned, and he told me that Ford said to him, ‘Now Al, isn’t that a little bit hasty?’ He thought he had Ford needing him so badly that he could beat him. So what he did, when he did the resign bit that Kissinger always was pulling on Nixon,” Jones said.31
In California a distressed Nixon, stripped of almost all vestiges of the power once at his disposal, fretted about his future. The initial comments from terHorst about Ford not granting Nixon a pardon worried the now ex-president. “The issue of, one of the things that got Nixon to step down, was that if he was impeached, he would lose his pension,” Jones said in a 2009 oral history interview. “And so, if he resigned, he would keep his pension. That was one part of the deal. Then there was the question of would there be a trial post-resignation and would he be sent to jail. And he was sitting there caught on that one. ‘Well, God, don’t want to do that.’ So, if I were guessing, what Haig says is, ‘Hey, there’s a deal here if you’ll pardon him, he’ll leave now so we don’t have to go through all this.’ Now, whether Vice President Ford said ‘yes’ or ‘no’, whether Haig said it in those terms or not, my guess is he led Nixon to believe that Ford would save him. And whether Ford actually said he would do it or whether Haig read from their conversation that he would do it, I think Nixon thought so. Then we began to get the phone calls from San Clemente after Nixon was there and President Ford was in the office about, ‘Where in the hell’s my pardon?’” Haig received multiple calls, Jones said, because Nixon “was distressed and frantic.”32 In San Clemente, aide Steve Bull watched Nixon try to reach his former chief of staff and be left hanging: “I really lost it with Haig the day after Nixon resigned. It was in California. He put in a call to Al Haig, who was too busy getting ready for Gerald Ford’s first social event at the White House to talk to him. Nixon no longer mattered to him.”33
Haig knew the risks of having Nixon alone in California and facing potential prosecution, Jones said. Shortly after Nixon left, Haig called Jones to his office and asked, “Jerry, what do you think about a pardon?” Jones said Ford could not run the country with Nixon’s uncertain fate looming over everything.34
Haig’s version of the events tied to the pardon in August and September 1974 bears little resemblance to the accounts of the others involved. “Where Nixon’s pardon was concerned, I played no role at all,” Haig wrote in his memoirs. Like so many other passages in that book, Inner Circles, it is a carefully crafted lie. “Certainly I never discussed the issue with Nixon, on the telephone or otherwise.”35
While Nixon had gone, his files and tapes remained at the White House, and there was no consensus about what to do with them. Some members of Congress wanted the impeachment process continued, but House Judiciary Committee chairman Peter Rodino declined, saying the committee was not “an investigative body.”36 Others wanted the documents impounded by the National Archives. Nixon had other ideas. He wanted the documents with him in California, and Haig tried to get them. Shortly after Nixon left, Benton Becker, a lawyer who had helped Ford get through the confirmation hearings, saw a large truck being filled with boxes of Nixon’s documents. He asked the air force officer supervising the work what was happening and then ordered him to stop. The officer declined, saying he was acting on Haig’s orders. Becker confronted Haig and then went to Ford, who told Haig to stop the move.37 Becker’s quick reactions undoubtedly saved a vast trove of documents from destruction and stopped Haig’s attempt to hinder future discoveries of his actions.
Nixon remained in San Clemente, but he lacked the papers and tapes he thought were his. He had to wait to see if Ford would follow through on the deal that Ford said he had never explicitly made but that Nixon thought he deserved.
Becker had stopped the loading of papers to be shipped to Nixon, but the issue of what to do with the documents continued to rage. In San Clemente, Nixon fumed, believing he had reached a deal with Jaworski through Haig that he would receive the documents. Nixon knew also that he faced indictment at any moment, and he needed the documents to prepare his defense. Nixon, influenced by Haig and Buzhardt, had denied that right to his subordinates who had been indicted, often by claiming national security. But Haig and Buzhardt wanted Nixon to have the documents in California, because giving the papers to him would get them out of Washington and the hands of people who might look at what Haig really knew, not his false claims to Jaworski. “Al Haig would have been most happy if all those tapes were out of the White House in the hands of Richard Nixon, presumably for some big bonfire in San Clemente,” Becker said. “Because in my view, Al Haig demonstrated, at least to me, in my view, that’s what he really wanted.”38 On August 14 terHorst told the White House press corps that the agreement that made Nixon’s resignation possible called for him to get his tapes and documents. Democrats and commentators immediately cried foul, demanding that the agreement be changed or killed entirely. The next day, terHorst recanted, saying the deal was off. Buzhardt, whose legal opinion was behind the deal, resigned immediately.39
Nixon declined mentally and physical over the next two weeks. The phlebitis that had so worried Haig and others left him weak and vulnerable. Those who saw the exiled president were struck by the thinness of his arms and legs and the depth of his depression. Nixon also knew he faced an imminent indictment from one of the grand juries working with Jaworski. He had narrowly evaded indictment with seven of his closest associates on March 1, and now, stripped of the protection of the presidency, he was exposed and deeply vulnerable.
Nixon kept in close touch with many of his former aides, including Len Garment, a former law partner. On August 27 Garment went to an unlikely advisor—Abe Fortas, the wily Memphis lawyer who was one of Lyndon Johnson’s closest advisors, as well as a former Supreme Court justice whom Nixon had forced off the Court in 1969.40 Fortas, however, knew the law and, even better, how Washington worked on its most fundamental levels. Garment said they needed to put Nixon out of his misery, and Fortas agreed. Garment then called Haig and asked if they could propose to Ford that he grant Nixon a pardon. “Yes,” Haig said. “It’s time to get something in.”41
Meanwhile, Jaworski was talking to Nixon’s new lawyer, Herbert “Jack” Miller, a former Maryland politician and a Republican, but one close to the Kennedy family and Democrats. His hiring gave the White House and prosecutors a new conduit through which they could deal with Nixon. His other legal advisors, Buzhardt and St. Clair, had remained at the White House with the new president and then left midway through August. Jaworski asked Miller if he would file an argument that Nixon could not receive a fair trial because of overwhelmingly adverse publicity. Jaworski did not want to indict Nixon and be blamed for doing something that would kill him. He knew just how bad Nixon’s health was at the time.42
Jaworski’s request to Miller was a setup. He knew Nixon could not get a fair trial anywhere in the United States. “I knew in my own mind that if an indictment were returned and the court asked me if I believed Nixon could receive a prompt, fair trial as guaranteed by the Constitution, I would have to answer, as an officer of the court, in the negative,” Jaworski wrote. “If the question were then asked as to how long it would be before Nixon could be afforded his constitutional rights, I would have to say in fairness that I did not know.”43
And did it even matter? Jaworski had accomplished what Nixon’s enemies and some of the president’s own staff wanted. Jaworski had forced Nixon to resign without compromising many of the national security secrets he and Haig valued. He did not feel compelled to put the ex-president in prison, and he certainly did not want him to die there.
By the week of August 28, Ford realized he had to do something. Whether this was part of a preapproved plan made to secure Nixon’s resignation or not, Ford knew events were converging in a way that made a pardon inevitable. Jaworski had subpoenaed Nixon to testify in the cases against his seven former aides, but Nixon could not testify without access to his documents back in the White House. Ford thought those documents should belong to the government. His attorney general, William Saxbe, said tradition dictated that the documents were Nixon’s property. A bill in the Senate by Birch Bayh, an Indiana Democrat, would deed them to the government if it was passed and signed by Ford in time. The momentum was pushing Ford toward a pardon.
On August 28 Garment passed Ford his memo supporting a pardon. “For President Ford to act on his own now would be strong and admirable, and would be so perceived once the first reaction from the media passed,” Garment wrote. “There would be a national sigh of relief.”44
Haig met with Ford while Garment and Philip Buchen, Ford’s attorney, debated their next step. Haig, Ford said, was for the pardon, but he never overtly said so. He told Ford it was his decision, but their earlier meetings had led Ford to believe that Haig believed the pardon was the right thing to do. Haig then told Garment that the lawyers were going over his memo, which would delay any official decision. Garment thought Haig was signaling to him that the pardon was on its way.
Ford took another step to a pardon that evening in his first news conference. Asked if he would consider a pardon, Ford said, “Of course, I make the final decision. And until it gets to me, I make no commitment one way or the other. But I do have the right as president of the United States to make that decision.”
Was he ruling it out?
“I am not ruling it out,” Ford said. “It is an option and a proper option for any president.”45
Ford returned to the Oval Office angry that so many questions dealt with Nixon and Watergate. He felt he would never be his own president if he did not resolve Nixon’s fate. “The impending criminal prosecution of his predecessor held profound implications not only for Nixon and the cover-up defendants but also for Haig, Buzhardt, Kissinger, and everyone else with whom Nixon worked closely while and after the tape machines were running—including Ford,” author Barry Werth wrote.46 Ford had to find a way out of the worsening dilemma.
He needed his own secret conduit to Jaworski to determine what the special prosecutor had planned, Ford told Buchen. “Well, there is one person you can trust,” Buchen answered. “How about my approaching Benton Becker?”47
Becker, a former member of the Kennedy Justice Department, had grown up in Washington and practiced law in Maryland. He had helped prepare Ford the previous fall for his vice presidential confirmation hearings, which was when he had first encountered Haig. Becker had told the chief of staff not to pass along to Ford confidential information from the FBI background checks. Becker had a healthy distrust of Haig based on that first encounter and on Haig’s attempt earlier in August to hustle Nixon’s papers and tapes back to San Clemente without Ford’s knowledge or approval.
On August 29 Ford told Haig, Buchen, Hartmann, and Kissinger that he was inclined to offer Nixon a pardon. He swore them all to secrecy and instructed Buchen to tell Becker to find the legal precedents to justify it.
In a memorandum he wrote after Nixon’s pardon, Becker said he went to his old law firm’s library to start researching.48 In the books of old Supreme Court decisions, he found a 1915 case, George Burdick v. United States, that provided the legal rationale he needed. Burdick, an editor for the New York Tribune, had published a series of stories about immigration and bribery in New York. A federal grand jury was investigating whether any Treasury Department officials were leaking information, and they subpoenaed Burdick, who refused to testify, citing his First Amendment free speech rights and Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. In order to eliminate the Fifth Amendment concerns, President Woodrow Wilson granted Burdick a pardon so that he would not be prosecuted for anything he said in court. Burdick refused, saying that accepting a pardon would mean acknowledging guilt, and he was not guilty of anything. The judge in the case jailed Burdick for contempt of court, and Burdick sued, taking the case to the Supreme Court, which ruled 8–0 in his favor. To be effective, Justice Joseph McKenna wrote, “a pardon . . . must be accepted,” because it “carries an imputation of guilt; acceptance a confession of it.”49 To Becker, that meant Nixon did not need to make any statement of contrition for his role in Watergate and the other offenses for which he almost impeached. He needed only to accept the pardon and its implicit acknowledgment that he was guilty.
On Labor Day, September 2, Buchen and Becker met with Ford and told him the legal support for a pardon.50 Ford was no longer just considering a pardon; he wanted to do it, if he could. Becker and Buchen spent the rest of the day and the next trying to determine what they could do, and then they met on September 4 with Jack Miller, Nixon’s new lawyer. In Miller’s room in Washington’s Jefferson Hotel, about four blocks north of the White House, Buchen told Miller about the pardon. At the top of their list was working out an agreement to give Nixon access to his papers without worrying that he would destroy them once they arrived in California. Meanwhile, Jaworski tasked his deputy, Henry Ruth, to research a pardon, and he produced a memo that showed ten possible violations of the law. But Ruth also concluded, as Jaworski had believed, that it would be more than a year before Nixon could face trial.51
Becker met with Ford and Haig around 4:00 p.m. on September 5 and reported the details of his meetings with Miller. Once again, Becker’s account contradicts Haig’s claim to have had no role in the pardon. “Near the end of the conversation,” Becker wrote, “the President advised that the Bird had expressed concern for himself and others with regard to a public disclosure of all tapes.” Becker said in 1992 that he referred to Kissinger in the memo as “the Bird” because he was not sure who would read the memo later. “Although not personally incriminating, those tapes were potentially embarrassing to individuals remaining in Washington after the Nixon resignation.” Ford also told Becker, contrary to what Buchen had told him earlier, that any agreement with Nixon should keep the tapes secret for fifty years. Becker disagreed. Becker then flew to California, landing after midnight at the marine air base at El Toro. A car drove him to San Clemente, where he met with Ron Ziegler, who had been briefed on Becker’s mission by Miller. Later, Becker realized that Haig had also briefed Ziegler by telephone, so Ziegler knew Ford wanted to pardon Nixon.
Armed with that information, Ziegler said, “I can tell you right now that President Nixon will make no statement of admission or complicity in return for a pardon from Jerry Ford.”
Becker paused briefly, then said, “Mr. Ziegler, I’ve never been to San Clemente before and for that matter I don’t work for the government, so I’m a bit confused. Can you tell me how to reach the Air Force pilot that brought me here, so that I could instruct him to take me back to Washington?”
A long silence followed.
“I’ll also need a car and driver to take me back to El Toro,” Becker said.
Miller, who was there with Ziegler, jumped in.
It was too late to talk about such important matters, Miller said. We should talk about them in the morning.
The meetings the following day, September 6, went better. Ziegler lost much of the agitated edge he had displayed the previous night. They neared a deal on the documents and the pardon. At one point that day, a reporter in Washington noticed that Becker was in San Clemente and asked Jerry terHorst why. TerHorst asked Buchen, who told him Becker was negotiating what to do with Nixon’s documents.
The three negotiators reached the point of Nixon’s statement. Ziegler handed Becker a document that blamed world pressure, Nixon’s overreliance on his staff, and his focus on the United States’ role in the world. He took no personal responsibility for anything. In response, Becker told Miller and Ziegler that Nixon would be better off with no statement at all. They finally got a statement in which Nixon said, “I was wrong in not dealing with Watergate more forthrightly and directly, particularly when it reached a judicial stage.” That, Becker believed, was “an acknowledgment of obstruction of justice by President Nixon.”
Ziegler then ushered Becker into Nixon’s office. Becker, who had never met Nixon before, was shocked. The president’s arms and legs were so thin that they made his head look disproportionately larger than the rest of his body. “He was old,” Becker wrote. His jowls were larger than life, his wrinkles like canyons. Nixon’s attention focused, then drifted away. Uncomfortable with the pardon, he tried small talk, asking Becker how well he thought the Redskins would do in the upcoming season. Nixon wanted to give Becker a souvenir, but he had none left. Finally, Nixon reached into a drawer and pulled out two small white boxes. One contained a signed presidential tie pin, while the other held two cuff links. “From my personal jewelry box,” Nixon told Becker. “I thanked him and took the boxes noting that he was inches away from tears,” Becker wrote.
Becker flew back to Washington, arriving there at 5:00 a.m. on Saturday, September 7. He met with Ford that day. Becker also talked to Haig, who read the proposed statement from Nixon and asked Becker if he had “put a gun to President Nixon’s head. To Al Haig that acknowledgment by President Nixon represented an admission far beyond any statement of contrition or complicity that he had heretofore made.”52
At noon on Sunday, September 8, Ford said he would pardon Nixon. “During this long period of delay and potential litigation, ugly passions would again be aroused, our people would again be polarized in their opinions, and the credibility of our free institutions of government would again be challenged at home and abroad,” Ford said on television from the White House.53 He then left the White House to play golf.
The initial reaction was terrible; phone calls to the White House were immediate and outraged. Many Democrats and commentators thought Ford had allowed Nixon to wriggle out of justice. Haig was relieved. So too was Kissinger. TerHorst resigned in protest, no doubt angry that he had been lied to.54 One month into his presidency, Ford had a crisis.
For Haig, however, it was mission accomplished. He had shepherded Nixon from office, a resolution that Haig had attempted to hasten months earlier but one that left him free of exposure of the criminal problems that had plagued many of his colleagues from the White House. Fifteen months earlier, Haig had left the army to help Nixon at the White House. He knew of Nixon’s guilt almost from the beginning and had obstructed justice by not disclosing that guilt to the prosecutors. Haig compounded that obstruction by engineering a continued cover-up of the military spy ring through misleading stories by his collaborator Bob Woodward at the Washington Post and with Fred Buzhardt, his hand-picked attorney to handle Watergate issues. He gave false information about the spy ring to Leon Jaworski, who helped him protect alleged national security secrets as he bore down on Nixon. Haig had forced Spiro Agnew to resign as vice president, engineered the selection of Gerald Ford to replace him, worsened Nixon’s political problems through the Saturday Night Massacre (disclosures about erased or missing White House tapes), and eventually left Nixon exposed and with no options other than to resign. Jerry Jones, Haig’s former aide, was right: Haig had done a masterful job in Nixon’s final months in office, but it was all in service of himself and his ambition.