On January 20, 1973, Richard Nixon was inaugurated for his second term as U.S. president. Speaking in front of twenty thousand spectators and tens of millions of TV viewers, the sixty-year-old Nixon was on top of the world. There was something for everybody in the inaugural speech. For anti–Vietnam War liberals, Nixon spoke about being on the “threshold of a new era of peace.” Conservatives were treated to a line that anticipated the Reagan Revolution: “Government must learn to take less from people so that people can do more for themselves.” Nixon, having trounced George McGovern in the 1972 election by a margin of 520 electoral votes to 17, even brazenly appropriated the most celebrated phrase from President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 address and made it his own. “In our own lives, let each of us ask not just what will government do for me,” Nixon said, “but what can I do for myself?”
Although the euphoric Nixon was hatless on his inauguration day and the temperature was in the low forties, storm clouds were gathering in the distance. Just twelve days earlier the trial of the five burglars arrested at the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee, as well as two accomplices, had begun. All of Nixon’s men were under legal duress. Howard Hunt pleaded guilty on January 11. Only four days later Bernard Barker, Frank Sturgis, Eugenio Martinez, and Virgilio Gonzalez did the same. That was the beginning of the end for the Nixon administration; the investigation would intensify further over the next eighteen months, consuming everything in its path. As The Nixon Tapes: 1973 demonstrates, the president, before his second term ever began, was hostage to the Watergate crisis.
Nixon’s fall from grace has been referred to as a Shakespearean tragedy. Because Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon, we may never learn the full truth of Watergate. Yet it is unlikely that Nixon could have gone to trial, whether in the Senate or as a result of a later criminal or civil case. Classified information would have had to be made public, which would have been unacceptable to the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other government agencies. Nixon had to be pardoned.
A Nixon show trial would also have been damaging to the presidency as an institution. After Harry Truman’s death in December 1972 and Lyndon Johnson’s a month later, Nixon went through Watergate alone. While Nixon’s predecessors would not have defended abuses of power, they could have launched a bipartisan defense of the presidency, executive privilege, and Nixon’s secret tapes. After all, Nixon’s predecessors had also secretly taped, and their tapes remained their personal property, just as Nixon had expected his tapes to remain when his system was installed.
But because of Ford’s act there was no trial. Instead, there was a series of proxy trials for the rest of the 1970s, the most significant being the Church Committee and U.S. v. Gray, Felt, Miller. These proceedings—during which virtually every living high-ranking figure testified—focused on a quarter-century of abuses of governmental power, including assassinations of foreign leaders, wiretapping, domestic surveillance, and illegal invasions of Americans’ privacy. As of this publication, despite numerous Freedom of Information Act requests, the Church Committee records remain sealed.
When listening to the Nixon tapes of 1973, it is impossible not to hear growing paranoia in the president’s voice. Nixon’s greatest downfall, in fact, was his lack of trust in subordinates. If he had had a more trustworthy staff, he wouldn’t have created the White House Plumbers Unit, which set him apart from the opposition research teams of Kennedy and Johnson. If Nixon had simply used the FBI, CIA, and NSA the ways his predecessors had, his tally of law-breaking offenses wouldn’t have been so substantial. Indeed, his lack of trust in those three national security agencies led directly to the creation of the Plumbers on his authority, derived from the Huston Plan (which had been created by the leaders of the FBI, CIA, and NSA in coordination with the White House).
Even with the publication of this volume many mysteries regarding Watergate remain unsolved more than forty years later. Who ordered the break-in? What were the burglars looking for? Why did so many have FBI or CIA backgrounds? Ideally in the coming years, a large number of the remaining Nixon tapes, as well as other records currently restricted from public access, will finally become available. Judge John Sirica tried to get answers to some of these questions, getting to motive, but in one case the testimony of the government’s star witness, Al Baldwin, remains sealed. “The question will arise, undoubtedly,” Sirica said, “what was the motive for doing what you people say you did.”
One of the great tragedies revealed in this book is the refusal of Dean Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman to level honestly with Nixon following the break-in when the crisis was still manageable. The White House staff’s instinct was to keep details from Nixon in order to protect him, but they ended up fatally wounding his presidency. Nixon should have put his advisors in a White House conference room and told them to reveal the complete story of the Watergate break-in. Instead, as is made clear in this book, the first time Nixon did this was March 22, 1973, and by then everyone was turning on each other. By April, every major White House figure had a defense attorney, and many were cooperating with the prosecutors.
From the final batch of Nixon tapes released by the National Archives in August 2013, featured in this book, it is abundantly clear that the Watergate break-in was part of a much larger coordinated effort related to domestic intelligence. This effort was based on the Huston Plan, a forty-three-page report that was cobbled together by an ad hoc committee formed from the intelligence agencies and chaired by J. Edgar Hoover. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we know more about NSA abuses of power today than in the Nixon era. The Huston Plan and related correspondence remain classified as “Top Secret.”
An overall impression this book offers is that Nixon didn’t really care about Watergate, since he wasn’t directly involved in the break-in or the planning of it. But he cared an awful lot about what Watergate might uncover—and almost did: the seventeen Kissinger/Haig wiretaps beginning in 1969 designed to stop leaks related to U.S.-Soviet arms talks; the Huston Plan; and the military spy ring overseen by Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Thomas Moorer, which uncovered a pattern of thefts of highly classified documents from Henry Kissinger’s briefcase. The full details of these remain classified today and involve the most top-secret levels of the intelligence community. Nixon alluded to their importance in his 1975 grand jury testimony, which was made public only in November 2011.
In 1973 historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. published his classic The Imperial Presidency, warning of an Executive Branch run amok, willing to shred the Constitution in order to acquire power. What Nixon most worried about being uncovered during the Watergate crisis of 1973 was not his high crimes and misdemeanors, or even the “imperial presidency” itself, but a kind of shadow government—similar to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex”—a partnership between the White House and intelligence agencies that had been growing since the beginning of the Cold War, nurtured by leaders of both political parties.
During the spring of 1973, one of Nixon’s last hopes was that William Sullivan—the former FBI chief of domestic intelligence who was in line to replace J. Edgar Hoover until they had a falling-out during the fall of 1971—would protect his presidency. Sullivan knew all about the seventeen Kissinger/Haig wiretaps, the Huston Plan, and the military spy ring. Therefore, Nixon, a gambler, bet that making Sullivan the head of the FBI in 1973, to replace L. Patrick Gray, would protect him, his secrets, and the presidency. Sullivan’s name has popped up over the years, but never with proper historical context. What Nixon didn’t realize was that Sullivan—the only high-ranking liberal Democrat at the FBI—had turned on the White House by May 1973. Since he died in a hunting accident in 1977, Sullivan could not be called to testify and tell his side of the story during U.S. v. Gray, Felt, Miller.
The last thirteen months of Nixon’s presidency were never taped. We have no real-time record of Vice President Spiro Agnew’s resignation, the Yom Kippur War, the Washington Energy Conference, House Republican leader Gerald Ford becoming vice president, or Nixon’s historic trip to NATO and the Middle East during the summer of 1974. Yet, there are plenty of interesting foreign policy moments on the tapes from January to July 1973 that are included in this volume. The 1973 Superpower Summit in Washington, DC, when Nixon hosted Leonid Brezhnev on American soil for the first time, was a historic breakthrough in the realm of détente. The Soviet leader loved the time he spent one-on-one with Nixon in the Oval Office, at Camp David, and in a mock cabinet meeting. To use Nixon’s phrase, Brezhnev “slobbered all over” him. On the People’s Republic of China (PRC) front the appointment of liaison officers—the precursor to ambassadors—in 1973 was a major diplomatic breakthrough. The PRC appointed Huang Zhen and Nixon went with veteran troubleshooter David K. E. Bruce. This volume illuminates how U.S.-China relations matured following Nixon’s dramatic 1972 trip. Had Nixon not resigned in disgrace in August 1974, the establishment of full diplomatic relations probably would have occurred earlier than it did (though the deaths of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, both in 1976, could have slowed those efforts).
Nixon’s economic policy is also showcased in 1973. With George Shultz as secretary of the treasury, the gold standard was ended for good in the spring. People had two years to trade in dollars for the equivalent in gold. Since then, our currency—the world’s currency—has been backed by nothing except the paper it is printed on (and the reputation of the United States). Nixon set this new financial paradigm in motion—the creation of the modern financial system.
The vast majority of people recorded on the Nixon taping system did not know they were being recorded. The existence of the taping system was disclosed on July 16, 1973, by Alexander Butterfield during testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, as part of the Watergate investigation. “Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president?” thirty-year-old Republican counsel Fred Thompson asked. It was an unexpected question. Under oath, Butterfield had no choice but to answer honestly. “I was aware of the listening devices. Yes, sir,” he answered. The testimony changed the course of the Nixon presidency and American history. As Senator Howard Baker said, the purpose of the Senate investigation into the June 17, 1972, Watergate break-in and subsequent White House cover-up was to find out “what the president knew and when he knew it.” The tapes provided a way to answer those questions accurately, but they needed to be intact. On the reel for June 20, 1972, the recording was erased at a crucial point, an action for which Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, largely took responsibility.
When taping began, the system was always supposed to be Nixon’s strength, his ultimate trump card. Only he knew the full score—the complete record of what was said in his presence. When the Watergate investigation reached Nixon’s inner circle, his tapes could be used to refute the charges against Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. But what Nixon didn’t expect is that his tapes went from a strength to being his ultimate downfall. The problem was, once White House counsel John Dean made accusations regarding what Nixon said during one-on-one meetings, the only way to challenge Dean’s exhaustive testimony before the Ervin Committee was to dig deep into the tapes. As Nixon did so, he concluded that while the tapes highlighted weaknesses in some of Dean’s facts, they were far more damaging to Nixon than they were to his accusers.
“Would you rather have a competent scoundrel or an honest boob in office?” Nixon’s Watergate counsel, J. Fred Buzhardt, asked. “You can make a strong argument that for a president in this day and time you don’t want a babe in the woods. He’s got to deal with some pretty rough-and-tumble people.”
The American people had chosen Richard Nixon twice, in 1968 and 1972, even though both times they would be surprised by the pragmatic opportunist they got. For better or for worse, more than four decades later, Nixon continues to defy easy categorization. We honor him for his shrewd diplomacy with China, on the one hand, and loathe him for the Watergate debacle, on the other. He occupies a complicated place in our national public consciousness. To borrow a line from Nixon himself, we will always “have Nixon to kick around.”