An hour later the second team entered the Watergate Hotel. Their mission, to shift the night’s drama from tragedy to farce. A group of young and highly competent men meticulously cleaned and reconstructed the offices of the Democratic National Committee to make them look only mildly ransacked and then stood in the middle of the suite and waved flashlights around until, at 2:30 in the morning, the police were finally called. They disclosed their names and handed over their surveillance equipment, cameras, emergency cash, and at least one incriminating phone number and then proceeded to deny everything. The curtain on the final act of my low-comedy political demise had risen, and the masquerade, the bizarre double game whose story has been told and retold, was afoot.
I egged them on, all of them. “Come and get me,” I said. The ones whose phones I’d tapped, whom I’d lied to, slandered in the press, stolen votes from. I’d spent a lifetime making enemies, and here they were. They were coming for me and they were going to have themselves a grand feast.
But Richard Nixon would fight them first. I brazenly declared my innocence. I lied. I told them it was a matter of national security. I threw John Dean to the wolves, and then the rest of them, denying their friendship, loyalty, credibility. I pleaded for time and clemency. I cursed them. I’d go kicking and screaming, ducking and dodging and, ultimately, crying. I’d go out like a Nixon.
It took them a year. In July 1973, they began asking for the tapes. What tapes? No one had any tapes. Well, in fact, everyone had tapes. Johnson did, Kennedy did. We all made them. And no, they couldn’t have them, subpoenas be damned. I invoked executive privilege. The tapes were a sacred trust, to expose them would compromise anyone’s ability to speak with the president. The court told me to give them the tapes. We appealed, lost, appealed again. I wouldn’t go quietly. I couldn’t.
Four years later I would sit for my interview with David Frost. We had scarcely met before we were thrust together under the lights, and he smiled, mousy and sharply discerning. He asked, for his very first question, why I didn’t destroy the tapes. Pat Buchanan had told me to destroy them, everyone had. I was startled and very nearly told the truth, at least part of it, which was that I deserved them. I deserved to be brought before the judgment of history and damned in my own voice.
But I did not necessarily want what I deserved, not yet. In October I fired the special prosecutor, and in response, the attorney general and his deputy both resigned, the famous Saturday Night Massacre. They called it the most poorly judged act of my political career. They hadn’t seen anything yet.