Watergate, page 60
Haig exhaled. “Remember the key words in any news conference are that you’ve got the right to take the president to court,” he said.
“I’ll remember,” Jaworski replied.
* * *
As much as Ford was well liked by his Democratic colleagues, it wasn’t entirely clear to all of them that they should rush through a new vice presidential nomination. With Agnew gone, their own speaker, Carl Albert, would ascend to the presidency if Watergate ended up felling Nixon. Albert had made clear he would entertain neither the idea nor the talk of his ascendance beyond his current role, not least of all because he hated the Secret Service who now attended to him wherever he went. Ford’s confirmation, he ordered, must move ahead as quickly as possible to enable serious consideration of an impeachment inquiry. One representative, Maryland’s Clarence Long, joked, “While Ford voted wrong most of the time, at least he was decently wrong.”II
Despite the overwhelming support, the House leadership was still unsure how or even who should take up the impeachment question. Many on Capitol Hill seemed to want Congress to appoint its own special prosecutor, but there were real doubts among colleagues whether Pete Rodino, who had taken over the Judiciary Committee after the surprising primary election defeat of its chair, Manny Celler, had the stomach for the politics of it all. He was cautious by nature—as O’Neill would say later, “He doesn’t like to move until he knows where he’s going”—and his fellow members worried he lacked the will to take on the executive branch. As an alternative, Representative John Moss petitioned for the House to set up its own select committee, as the Senate had with the Ervin Committee, and various members recommended themselves or others to lead it.III
Albert and O’Neill’s decree came down: Rodino would be in charge. At the end of October, on a strictly party-line vote, 21–17, the House Judiciary Committee granted its chair subpoena power to pursue the president—the same subpoena power that thirteen months earlier Wright Patman had been denied. Similarly, the Democrats voted down awarding the GOP’s ranking member joint subpoena authority. This would be a Democratic show alone, run by Rodino and O’Neill.
The chairman brought together the Democrats of the Judiciary Committee to outline a plan for the months ahead, which included confirming Ford as rapidly as possible. His committee counsel, Jerome Zeifman, immediately started trying to recruit investigators from Congress’s Government Accounting Office. Rodino told the press, “I have initiated a broad scale investigation to be conducted by an expanded staff that will be assembled immediately.”
The president now faced an even more empowered and independent prosecutor, an impeachment inquiry on Capitol Hill, and perhaps, worst of all, back on his heels, he was facing his integrity under ongoing assault in court. The Washington Post’s Senate writer, Spencer Rich, captured the “gloomy” mood of the president’s own GOP on Capitol Hill as the confirmation hearings for Gerald Ford began in the Senate, saying that Nixon faced “a massive hemorrhaging of support.”
On November 1, attempting to minimize the ongoing damage, Nixon announced the nomination of Senator William Saxbe as the new attorney general, and Bork, still serving in the acting capacity, announced the selection of Jaworski.IV
Sixteen months after the burglary, after Earl Silbert, Wright Patman, Ted Kennedy, John Sirica, Sam Ervin, and Archibald Cox had all trod the ground, Leon Jaworski and Pete Rodino picked up the baton for the final lap.
I. The entire controversy frustrated Nixon no end—he felt his lawyers and the press had misconstrued the whole problem. He jotted himself four notes on the side of a briefing paper: “There were no missing tapes / There were never any / The conversations in question were not taped. / Why couldn’t we get that across to people?”
II. Ted Sorensen, the Kennedy speechwriter, went so far as to offer a twenty-page “contingency plan” for Albert’s presidency, including thoughts on his inaugural address and recommendations for Albert’s own vice presidential pick.
III. Behind the scenes, the White House encouraged friendly oil industry voices from Oklahoma, the home state of the House speaker, to lobby Albert and engineer a special committee that might have enough conservative Democratic voices to save Nixon. “Carl Albert didn’t appreciate being pressured, and when the calls started coming, he realized he didn’t want any part of a special committee,” O’Neill recalled.
IV. Saxbe, Nixon’s outspoken fourth attorney general, would serve in the role for just over a year. He would find himself largely a spectator to the events of 1974. While his desk at the Justice Department contained a direct line to the president, he found Nixon all but unreachable. “I never could get through to Nixon, so that became a dust-collector,” he wrote in his memoirs.
Chapter 44 “I am Not a Crook”
When one looks back on the Watergate era, there are a number of key moments that alter its entire trajectory, the roots of diverging trails that, if they had been traveled any differently, might have changed the course of our future. One of those moments began on Friday, November 2, not in a courtroom, an executive office, or a closed-door meeting, but in a newspaper editorial calling for the president’s resignation. Its author, Joe Alsop, was one of the capital’s social fixtures and stalwart traditionalists, who had all but browbeat Kay Graham at parties for a year about his belief in Nixon’s innocence. “The time has come for President Nixon to offer his resignation,” he wrote, saying he’d “reached the foregoing conclusions with extreme reluctance.” That such a figure had undergone such a distinct change of heart demonstrated how far Nixon’s credibility had fallen—so quickly—and signaled a broader opening of the floodgates. The New York Times’ James Reston echoed the same demand, and Massachusetts’s Edward Brooke became the first Republican senator to support the idea publicly. Within twenty-four hours, the editorial pages of papers as varied as the New York Times, the Denver Post, and the Detroit News were all in agreement: the President of the United States was no longer fit to serve in his post. TIME even broke a fifty-year streak of avoiding editorials, adding its call for his removal from office. “Richard Nixon and the nation have passed a tragic point of no return,” the magazine’s editors wrote. “He has irredeemably lost his moral authority, the confidence of most of the country, and therefore his ability to govern effectively.”
Nixon had tried to escape the outrage in Florida, boating in Key Biscayne with Bebe Rebozo and Bob Abplanalp, but Watergate followed him south. On Saturday the 3rd, after carefully weighing their options all week as one bad story tumbled into another, Buzhardt and Garment finally took an Eastern Airlines flight to Miami to urge the president to consider resigning. Over the past few days, Garment had tried to put things in perspective by cataloging nearly two-dozen different scandals dogging the president—all sketched out on a yellow legal pad, from ITT to the milk producers and more. “The totality spelled a vast and, I thought, fatal erosion of presidential authority,” he recalled.
Aside from the practical details of so many investigations, the two lawyers had grown increasingly concerned about the president’s behavior in the preceding days. He continued to drink, derail meetings, and suggest troubling “solutions” to his current predicament: In one conversation with Buzhardt, Nixon casually noted that rather than report one recording “missing,” he could just re-create the conversation from existing notes. The lawyer was stunned. “We knew Nixon’s suggestion was talk from a desperate man about a collateral issue, but we were also weary from months of legal tightrope walking,” Garment recalled.
Saturday night, Buzhardt and Garment met with Haig and Ziegler in one of the staff villas. The mood was dark, and the message to Haig was clear: We’re getting dragged into this cover-up ourselves, the arc of Nixon’s presidency seems clear—he wouldn’t survive the full second term—and it didn’t seem impossible that everyone in the villa might face an obstruction of justice charge. The focus needed to be on how to gracefully move the president out, and when—after all, Gerald Ford still hadn’t been confirmed as vice president. “Everything after this is a damage-limiting operation,” Garment warned.
Ziegler and Haig rejected the resignation recommendation out of hand. Haig argued the groundwork wasn’t right: “Nixon wasn’t ready. The country wasn’t ready. There were too many crises in the world. Ford was not yet up to the job,” Garment recalled. “All true, we conceded, but Nixon had to prepare for what was coming.” They asked for a chance to present their argument to the president directly; Haig objected, but agreed to bring it up himself with the president. The next day, he met with Nixon and after returned to the villa with a clear message: “The president doesn’t want to see you.” (Nixon recalled in his memoirs only getting a “diluted report” of Haig’s meeting, so it’s not clear how much he understood what his lawyers hoped to accomplish.) For Garment the meeting marked the end of his wholehearted commitment to the president; he would “gradually phase out of Watergate” in the weeks ahead, unable and unwilling to continue the fight. “I had outlived my usefulness,” he explained later.
As Nixon recalled, “That weekend in Florida was a new low point for me personally.” But he would fight on, with a plan for a new phase. “We will take some desperate, strong measure, and this time there is no margin for error,” he told Ziegler. That week, they would launch what the press quickly dubbed “Operation Candor,” a public relations campaign par excellence that would convince the nation of Nixon’s innocence.
* * *
Monday morning, November 5, Leon Jaworski arrived in Washington to start his new job, landing at Dulles International Airport and telling the reporters who met him that he was confident in his ability to be independent. His wife had shared her own thoughts when the Washington Post reached her by phone after his appointment: “It’s a terrible job. I just feel sorry for him.”
The sixty-eight-year-old Jaworski came from the opposite end of the American establishment. He’d grown up on the frontier, the son of a buckboard-riding preacher and missionary in Texas, and entered law school at just sixteen, soon becoming the youngest person ever admitted to the Texas bar. He had started his career defending bootleggers amid Prohibition in the 1920s, and by the time Haig called him, Jaworski was the force behind one of the nation’s top law firms—Fulbright and Jaworski. He commanded great respect at home in Houston and in legal circles around the country, and his respect for the primacy of the law was unquestioned.
Despite the reputation for integrity, the remaining members of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force wondered how a Texan “good ole boy” might mesh with the Ivy Leaguers Cox had built around him. They all assumed that Nixon’s team was shoving Jaworski on them to wrap up the case with minimum fuss or complication. Jaworski’s sterling credentials were actually a source of suspicion, not reassurance. “It was a bad omen that the President was able to snag such a prestigious person to play the role of fixer,” Ben-Veniste and Frampton later recalled thinking.
At the first staff meeting, Jaworski assured his new team that he saw no reason to make any immediate changes. “I have accepted an awesome task, a gigantic one, and I have no full answer why I did,” he explained. “I have not been precluded from taking any action against the president that I consider necessary. I have the right to move immediately if I choose.” He closed with a half-compliment, half-admonition: “I begin by believing in you, and I hope that will be a two-way street.” He looked out at the crowd, taken aback at how young the faces were staring at him. He realized with a start that the feeling was likely not mutual—there is a generation chasm here, not just a gap, he thought, a feeling that would only grow as he tried to maintain control. It would fall to deputy Hank Ruth to bridge the divide.I
Right away, Ruth propelled Jaworski through back-to-back briefings on seemingly every corner of the many cases, task forces, and prosecutions underway. On his second day, Jaworski met for an off-the-record chat with CBS’s Dan Rather, whom he’d known back in Texas. “Dan, I’m impressed by two things: One is the professionalism of this staff; the other is the evidence,” he said. To the team’s amazement, Jaworski stuck by his promise of consistency. As Doyle recalled, “They had waited for his reinforcements [from Texas] to arrive and soon began to realize that Jaworski was indeed the lone stranger who rode into town at high noon.”
As one of his first new investigative steps, the prosecutor sent four fresh requests for additional tapes and documents on behalf of the ITT investigation, the Plumbers team, and the burglary task force, totaling together more than twelve pages. His aggressiveness quickly signaled to the team a willingness to go toe-to-toe with the president—if anything, he acted even more aggressively than Cox and won their admiration.
When weeks passed without a response to the new demands, he pressed Buzhardt in a follow-up letter. “Your failure to respond is delaying and in some instances impeding our investigations,” he wrote. “In light of past experience, I believe it entirely appropriate to ask you to acknowledge each of these requests and explain your current position.” Still no response came, so Jaworski called a friend who had been brought in to work on Nixon’s defense. The two men walked the White House grounds, while Jaworski petitioned him for answers and action. “Somebody better get word to the president that he’s about to end up in more difficulty,” explained the new special prosecutor. He then warned that he would file suit against Nixon in two days unless the materials appeared.II
In less than twenty-four hours, Buzhardt was on the phone laying out a timeline. “How did he sound?” Doyle asked, after the conversation was over.
“He was as friendly as a French pervert,” Jaworski said.
* * *
Across town, as Rodino’s committee buckled down, nearly everyone agreed: Impeachment was a terrible remedy, fraught with peril for the politicians pushing it, hard for the country, distracting for the president, and potentially damaging to the nation’s survival—and yet, still, it seemed to be a necessary step.
In the Senate on November 7, Vermont Republican George Aiken—one of the body’s most respected voices—spoke out about the scandal, warning of the “politics of righteous indignation” creeping in and that the effort to hold Nixon accountable would be a long road by design. The process was not meant to be easy or quick; the Founders had designed a system of laws to guard against waves of reactionism. Congress shouldn’t count on the courts to relieve it of the difficult decision, nor on any mythic special prosecutor “with the virtues of Caesar’s wife and the unfettered authority of her husband,” Aiken said. Nor did Nixon owe the country his resignation; he had been elected to govern and his responsibility was to do just that. Surely the White House had screwed up, he agreed, and “handled its domestic troubles with such relentless incompetence that those of us who would like to help have been like swimmers searching for a way out of the water only to run into one smooth and slippery rock after another,” he said. “The President’s public explanations of the Watergate mess have been astonishingly inept,” but ineptitude was not impeachable. Congress needed to make up its mind to act—or not. There should be no languishing. It was time, he said, to follow the advice given to him by a fellow Vermonter: “Either impeach him or get off his back.”
Over the course of the next week, Congress plunged forward. The same day that Aiken spoke, both bodies of Congress overrode Nixon’s veto on the War Powers Act, which set important limits on a president’s ability to commit the nation’s armed forces to combat overseas. It was the first in nine veto override attempts that year to succeed.
The House also appropriated itself $1 million for the Judiciary Committee’s impeachment inquiry in a 361–51 vote. When Republicans protested that it was far too much money, Tip O’Neill replied, “If it were not for the scandalous action on the part of this administration, it would not cost anything.” Reporters and lawmakers could hardly miss the symbolism that the vote came on the one-year anniversary of Nixon’s 520-vote electoral college landslide. O’Neill had a saying as he’d navigated political life: “Power is when people think you have power.” And people were beginning to see that Nixon’s power was flowing away.
* * *
In the late fall of 1973, Lowell Weicker bumped into his neighbor John Dean outside their townhouses in Alexandria, just after Dean had pleaded guilty to obstruction. Curious for the former White House counsel’s perspective, Weicker asked about the current impeachment drama and the state of his Ervin Committee’s work. “Is there something else?” Weicker said. “Something we missed?”
Dean shook his head. Probably not, he said, before speaking up again.
“Except for the tax fraud.”
Weicker took the bait. After the Chennault Affair, the Huston Plan, the Kissinger wiretaps, and the illegal bombing of Cambodia, the Pentagon Papers and the Ellsberg burglary, ITT and the Dita Beard memo, the Vesco donation, the milk price fixing, the Watergate burglary and cover-up, the campaign “rat-fucking,” and Spiro Agnew’s bribery case, there was still more?
As Weicker’s staff and other investigators began to uncover, Nixon appeared to have been concocting a self-serving scheme to bolster his legacy while minimizing his own taxes. He had followed the example of Lyndon Johnson by donating his pre-presidential papers to the National Archives when he took office—a donation intended to someday become part of his presidential library. Johnson’s move in the 1960s, though, hardly seemed one to emulate: It had spawned outrage after he had claimed a massive tax deduction for the donation, and Congress, angered, had promptly passed a 1969 law banning the practice. Yet Nixon had rushed that year to follow LBJ’s lead before that law took effect, turning over his vice presidential papers to the National Archives, estimating their worth at $576,000 (about $3.6 million in 2021 dollars) and planning to spread the equivalent tax deduction over his years as president.
