Watergate, page 53
For more than fifty minutes, Nixon said he accepted blame for the climate in the White House that precipitated Watergate, but reemphasized his message from the August 15 national address that he was a man in the dark, betrayed by those around him. He held forth on the accused—saying that Haldeman and Ehrlichman were “two of the finest public servants” and that “they will be exonerated”—and stated that, if Mitchell was telling the truth that he’d withheld knowledge of the cover-up from the president simply because Nixon had never asked about it, “I would have expected Mr. Mitchell to tell me in the event that he was involved or that anybody else was.” For further emphasis, Nixon added, “I regret that he did not, because he is exactly right—had he told me, I would have blown my stack.”
As soon as the press had a chance to raise their hands, nearly all the questions dealt with Watergate.
James Deakin, of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, pressed Nixon on whether he’d broken his oath of office by authorizing the Ellsberg burglary. Nixon dismissed the idea, saying the Supreme Court had said that the president had the inherent power to protect national security. “I should also point out to you that in the Kennedy years and the Johnson years through 1966, when burglarizing of this type did take place—when it was authorized on a very large scale—there was no talk of impeachment,” Nixon said. “It was quite well known.”
In Washington, the House Judiciary Committee chair Pete Rodino watched the press conference with growing fury and dread; the president was continuing to lie and obfuscate, throwing around the already dismissed notion that the Ellsberg burglary had any tie to national security concerns.IV The president’s tone-deaf stonewalling seemed unlikely to stave off worsening political trouble. The chairman wanted nothing more than to avoid impeachment, but he feared Nixon had chosen a path that all but guaranteed it.V
The climate only worsened when Helen Thomas filed another UPI column on August 26 full of dishy details from Martha Mitchell, who had been deeply angered by Nixon’s remarks. When she’d tried to confront him by phone, White House operators had refused to let her speak to the president, so instead, she called Thomas in the middle of the night. Martha said she wished the Ervin Committee would call her as a witness, because she’d seen campaign documents outlining “Watergate-style operations,” and knew that Nixon’s denial about being informed of the operations was untrue.
“I saw the leather-bound campaign strategy book,” she said. “It included the whole procedures of everything that has happened.” She claimed that she was being kept from testifying by her husband, who hoped that if she kept silent Nixon would give him executive clemency. She explained the great toll the scandal had taken on their lives and marriage, decrying “what Watergate has done to our lives. We have been suffering.”
Suffering indeed. One friend described their New York apartment in those final days of August and first days of September as “Tennessee Williams on Fifth Avenue, only worse.” After another major row, during which Martha shattered a large mirror, John Mitchell gathered what he could while she slept and left Martha for good. He moved out of their apartment and into the Essex House hotel. Divorce proceedings began shortly thereafter. In the weeks ahead, Martha combed through their apartment, uncovering various campaign and White House documents that she turned over to reporters—all of which, she said, bolstered her claims that the whole Nixon enterprise was corrupt.
Martha and John never saw each other again.
* * *
In late August, Judge Sirica’s order on the executive privilege question came down, a surprising twist that broadly embraced the idea that the president was not above the law, but stopped short of insisting he turn the tapes over to prosecutors. “The court, however, cannot agree with [the president] that it is the executive that finally determines whether its privilege is properly invoked. The availability of evidence, including the validity and scope of privileges, is a judicial decision,” he said in his argument. “The grand jury has a right to every man’s evidence and that for purposes of gathering evidence, process may issue to anyone.”
Instead of delegating the responsibility to the grand jury, Sirica ordered the tapes to be turned over to him. He would listen and determine what was privileged and what wasn’t.
The judge’s approach didn’t sit well with either party—Cox saw an endless court battle over the standards and judgment Sirica would use in determining the relevance of various tapes, while Nixon’s team maintained it cost the president the confidentiality he required to conduct the nation’s business and secure its interests.
“It’s a disaster,” Kreindler complained to Cox, after retrieving a copy from the courthouse. “Sirica tried to walk a tightrope.”
“—And he knocked both parties off,” Lacovara interjected.
The president’s team, in San Clemente, where Nixon was still on his summer escape from the capital, announced quickly, “The President… will not comply with this order.” Nixon would appeal.
Both sides began to ready new legal briefs.
I. Ehrlichman says that Nixon told him in their final conversation in early May, “I’m going to have to get rid of him. They’ve got the evidence. Agnew has been on the take all the time he’s been here.”
II. Sinatra’s friendship with Agnew would loom as one of the odd sideshows of the bribery scandal; the vice president made several trips west that summer and fall to relax, golf, and commiserate with his famous friend, and Agnew would later dedicate his scorched-earth memoir of his resignation, Go Quietly… or Else, to the Chairman of the Board.
III. Haig’s memoirs, which mostly cover a period after the end of Nixon’s White House recording system, are particularly suspect in certain exchanges. When his accounts are cross-referenced with the few conversations that overlap before Butterfield’s July revelation of the tapes, Haig appears to deliver especially self-serving and personally sympathetic versions of conversations with the president.
IV. The references to the Ellsberg burglary’s “national security” ties likely were actually less about the psychiatrist break-in and more about the Plumbers’ work exposing the Moorer-Radford spying efforts on the National Security Council, a scandal the White House still seemed desperate to bury.
V. Rodino was hardly alone in his frustration with the Nixon press conference. The White House refused to offer any proof of Nixon’s statement, and attorneys general for both Kennedy and Johnson rejected the assertion that presidents had behaved like that before. Hoover, yes, had carried out extensive eavesdropping, but never the presidents. The New York Times editorial page savaged the performance, saying, “It is hard to imagine any Presidential statement more calculated to undermine public confidence in the integrity of government than this blunderbuss intimation, unsupported by any evidence, that Mr. Nixon’s predecessors issued orders wholesale for burglaries in the name of ‘national security.’ ”
Chapter 37 “An Upheaval in Washington”
Washington had always been a city that lived on news, a city carved from the wilderness with no purpose other than to serve as the seat of government, its geographic location part George Washington’s belief that the Potomac River ran as the grand gateway to the west and part delicate negotiation between the northern and southern states. Its growth had been shaped by three major events—the Civil War, the Great Depression, and World War II—but it had been decades since the city had been tested by a scandal of Watergate’s longevity or magnitude. Not since the Teapot Dome debacle of the Harding years had the presidency been so enveloped by a cloud. “Watergate has been hard on the Washington nervous system,” Elizabeth Drew observed in the fall of 1973, as the city wrestled, week by week, with the implosion of its carefully constructed sociopolitical fabric. When the fall’s edition appeared of the capital’s haughty, long-established, and anonymously compiled social register called the “Green Book,” it was as if a hurricane had torn through the social ranks—gone were the Haldemans, the Ehrlichmans, the Deans, the Magruders, and even the Stanses, “an upheaval in Washington officialdom unprecedented without a change in administration.”
After nearly two weeks away, Nixon had arrived back at the White House on September 1 amid that shift, struggling to balance the nation’s agenda with the new realities of his own administration. His first meeting was a two-hour, closed-door session with his embattled vice president. Nixon was torn over how to handle the situation; Agnew was his connection to the most rabid and hard-line GOP conservatives, what George Will had called the “constituency of the discontented,” a population the president couldn’t afford to lose or alienate himself from if he hoped to survive Watergate and serve out his term. Still, he was annoyed that the man hadn’t offered to resign. Nixon, after all, had been in Agnew’s same position in the 1952 presidential race, offering to step down when his secret fund controversy—the scandal that led to his defining and career-saving “Checkers” speech—threatened the Eisenhower administration. “[Agnew] has never said, ‘I want to do what’s best for the country,’ ” Nixon groused to Haig.
The next order of business was his first fall press conference, on September 5, which would likely be a circus in the wake of a new report that a California grand jury investigating the break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office had returned four sealed indictments; reporters were speculating that the targets were Ehrlichman, Krogh, Liddy, and Kissinger’s aide David Young.
Despite the president’s efforts to focus on other issues during the event—agriculture prices, the nation’s pinched money supply, the federal budget, instability in the Middle East, and a coup in Chile—the inevitable first question came, from UPI’s Helen Thomas, about Agnew. Over the next forty minutes the questions circled back to the president’s finances and Watergate. “That’s the fifth one,” Nixon groused as yet another reporter asked about the tapes, ignoring his attempts to redirect to the minimum wage, oil and the Middle East, taxes, better schools, and better housing.
Despite the press attention, Haig and the president’s team still didn’t yet see a major shift in the polls. The president’s message, that the nation needed to press forward and couldn’t continue to “wallow in Watergate,” actually seemed to be resonating; just 9 percent of the public said the scandal was their top concern, while more than two out of five—42 percent—instead pointed to inflation and the high cost of living. “Barring some new sensational revelations, it would appear that the tempest of publicity devoted to Watergate has passed its peak,” pollster Thomas Benham wrote to Haig in an analysis. “Concern over the economy is much more fundamental to public attitudes and represents a more long-term threat to the president’s standing with the public.”
On Monday, September 10, Nixon sat down with the House leadership for breakfast, trying to appear confident that the worst of the scandal was now behind him. They ate sausages and eggs, talked golf, and passed around cheap cigars. TIME magazine reported that the morning seemed “the first faint stirrings of concerned men ready to sit down together and trying to make things work.” (A photo of the breakfast ran in the New York Times alongside two separate stories with revelations about the administration’s illegal bombing of Cambodia and the Kissinger wiretaps.) That day, the White House delivered a lengthy message to Congress that amounted effectively to a second State of the Union for the year, outlining its desired legislative agenda and top areas of policy concern. Nixon addressed the nation on the radio to ask again that “we get on with the business of government.”
As he projected an image of calm control to the American people, Buzhardt and Haig set in place a plan that would deal yet another blow to the delicate balance of the capital. In a meeting with Spiro Agnew, they announced the White House’s final position: Resign, the sooner the better. Agnew’s lawyer interrupted them. The vice president, he said, didn’t deserve to sit through such an insulting presentation.
Agnew stood up and left.
* * *
For Charles Alan Wright’s forty-sixth birthday in September, his University of Texas colleagues gave him a gift: a brass plate that read “Buzhardt, Garment and Wright, Counselors at Law.” It was a small plaque for a small defense team, one that increasingly seemed outmatched in the Watergate battle and lacked even the basic specialty required by the case. “There was, sad to say, not a single experienced criminal defense lawyer in the ‘firm,’ ” Garment reflected later. They were an odd group of three men who never would have partnered together on the outside. As Garment recalled later, Buzhardt was “hunched over and skinny as a split rail, his face pinched by bad dentures and a consequently restricted diet” of soft foods. His forced monasticism contrasted sharply with Wright, who was “tall and slender, and [who] looked like a Texas sheriff who had happened to take a sabbatical at Cambridge,” living for evenings of rich food and Scotch. “He was a superb lawyer and knew it,” Garment recalled.
Wright was learning daily how different the law was when your client was the president; the team was being supervised by a non-lawyer, Al Haig, who they clashed with constantly—at least until they all commiserated about their shared Sisyphean struggle. (“The friction between us was constant, despite some synthetic middle-of-the-night Jack Daniel’s warmth,” Garment recalled.) And then there was the client himself: Wright’s professional reputation was such that his clients often gave him free rein to make—and win—their case. Now he grimaced as every piece of paper “ground out of my typewriter” was carefully reviewed by Nixon. “If it is the President of the United States who is your client, on great state issues of this kind, lawyers don’t have the freedom to drop a brief, send it to the printers and file it in court on their own authority,” he explained to one interviewer.
It was also a very different court experience, with an unforeseeable amount of high-stakes wheeling, dealing, and negotiating with the other side—and nowhere was that becoming more apparent than in the complicated process of determining the necessity of the Nixon tapes in formal proceedings.
In mid-September, after hearing in-person arguments (Wright maintained that there was no scenario in which Nixon could be made to turn over the tapes), the appeals court made the unusual but unanimous decision to ask the parties to try to work out an agreement between themselves. They were given a week; if they couldn’t agree, the appeals court would then step in and issue its ruling.
Over that seven days, Cox and Buzhardt traded a few options, each weighing for the public reaction and political benefits of a compromise. As the deadline approached, Buzhardt offered to submit written, third-person summaries of the tapes, with some direct quotations. Cox maintained the original material was preferred. Negotiations continued with little progress.
On Thursday the 20th, Cox arrived at the White House at 11 a.m. with a final offer in his pocket: partial transcripts double-checked by a respected third party who could testify that the remaining portions were irrelevant. Cox wanted William Rogers, the secretary of state who had just stepped down, or J. Lee Rankin, another former solicitor general, to take on the evaluation, but kept those names to himself when Nixon’s team said they’d considered a similar concept. They mentioned retired chief justice Earl Warren or retired Kentucky senator John Sherman Cooper as options, both of whom Cox agreed could work. As the meeting ended at 1 p.m., he laid his six-page proposal on the table, saying it was open to negotiation and discussion.
An hour later, Buzhardt called Cox with an outright rejection. Nixon’s team argued that the White House had already bent over backwards to accommodate the Watergate requests, “recognizing the unique character of Watergate,” but that they would never delegate the president’s “constitutional duties and prerogatives” to Cox and the courts. “That would move beyond accommodation to irresponsibility,” they argued. The president, they said, “is accountable only to his country in his political character and to his own conscience.” The strong response, the special prosecutor knew, would have been the same regardless of the details of his proposal. His presentation “had been complicated enough so that any person making a good faith effort to consider it would have needed more than 45 minutes,” Doyle later recalled. “The abrupt rejection made it clear that Cox had never been even close to reaching an agreement with his White House counterparts.”
With no agreement in sight, the appeals court would now have to weigh in. The details of the September negotiations and the proposed compromise never became public, setting Washington and the country up for a surprise October twist and a constitutional crisis of the president’s own making. Behind the scenes, however, nearly everyone saw the confrontation looming. Richardson, after parrying the presidential complaints all summer, warned Cox, “I’m afraid that there is going to be an explosion. It will be bad for you, bad for the president, and bad for the country.”
* * *
Still smarting from Haig and Buzhardt’s suggestion that he step down, Agnew soon found that he and the Watergate burglars had something in common—they were, by and large, on their own. “Don’t I get a presumption of innocence? I didn’t suggest he ought to resign over Watergate,” Agnew fumed.
The vice president, the Justice Department, and the White House continued to work hard, but unsuccessfully, on a plea bargain. Agnew explained that he would plead no contest to tax charges, but would refuse any deal that included bribery or extortion, but the attorney general and the prosecutors all believed Agnew’s betrayal of the public trust was so egregious—the criminality so flagrant—that it demanded public accountability. Public pressure grew on Agnew and the White House—it was simply untenable for both the vice president and the president to be under simultaneous investigation.
