Watergate, page 63
Days after Kieves created that first card, another equally momentous single piece of paper arrived in Rodino’s office, typed out on official stationery. It was from the House speaker, confirming that pursuant to the passage of H. Res. 702, $1 million had been deposited into the clerk of the House’s account to be allocated to the impeachment inquiry. The House investigation was officially underway.
* * *
As Richard Nixon’s loneliness deepened toward the end of the year, his staff were restless and eyeing the exits, having finally had the chance to grasp the peril that lay within the magnetic reels. Pat Buchanan had listened; Haig had read. Haig had invited Republican senator Hugh Scott to read some transcripts too, mostly to encourage the minority leader to cease talking publicly encouraging their release. Even loyalists like Bryce Harlow and Ray Price were trying to leave the administration, worn down by scandal. A final, humbling insult from 1973 came in the form of TIME magazine declaring Judge John Sirica “Man of the Year,” on the cover of an issue that dramatically outsold the one celebrating Nixon only a year before.
The president spent the weekend before Christmas at Camp David, having driven to the rustic Maryland retreat rather than helicoptering, in order to save gas. Outside of Watergate, the oil embargo following the war in the Middle East had tipped the nation over into an energy crisis—the stock market wobbled and prices were rising. A year earlier, just after his landslide victory, he’d written in his diary, “1973 will be a better year,” but now the end of the year felt more ominous; on December 23, at the presidential retreat, he scrawled across the top of a page: “Last Christmas here?”
After Christmas, frantic to show he understood the hardship, Nixon, his family, and thirteen Secret Service agents flew to California unannounced aboard a commercial United Airlines DC-10, the first and only time a president flew on a commercial airliner, known then by the callsign Executive One. The presidential Irish setter, King Timahoe, came too, for a pet fee of $24.
Once Nixon was sequestered in the Western White House, entire days would pass with no notations on his official schedule. Haig had remained concerned about the president’s drinking and sleeping; the former seeming to start earlier and the latter lasting longer into the morning. On Saturday the 29th Nixon spoke on the phone just three times, for a total of twenty-one minutes; another day during the trip the sum total of his official duties was a single, six-minute phone conversation with Henry Kissinger.
Instead, his final meetings of the year were all about his troubles. Overlooking a gray Pacific, Nixon sat with his friend Bebe Rebozo, who had been hounded through the year over the $100,000 Hughes donation. Rebozo had promised earlier that year that he’d returned the money untouched—his lawyers said the serial numbers of the original donation had matched the bills returned to Hughes—but investigators were still wondering whether it had actually been used to finance illegal activity. The Ervin Committee had grilled Rebozo at least four times, and the IRS spent fourteen weeks auditing him.V (“As we in the family watched Bebe endure the harassment, the attack on him was like attacking one of us,” Julie wrote later.) Despite the difficulties, Rebozo pushed Nixon to stay and fight.
On New Year’s Eve, the president sat alone after midnight, scribbling his woes on a yellow legal pad. “The basic question is: Do I fight it all out or do I now begin the long process to prepare for a change, meaning, in effect, resignation.” The topic had begun to come up, privately, in the president’s conversations with aides, but he wouldn’t seriously entertain it yet. “The answer—fight,” Nixon concluded that night, echoing their advice in the first minutes of 1974.
The idea seemed to enliven him, his pen scratched out line after line: “Fight because if I am forced to resign, the press will become too much of a dominant force in the nation, not only in this administration but for years to come. Fight because resignation would set a precedent and result in a permanent and very destructive change in our whole constitutional system. Fight because resignation could lead to a collapse of our foreign policy initiatives.”
To lead that fight forward, the president knew he needed help. At his boss’s instruction, Al Haig had recruited James St. Clair, one of the most experienced and respected trial lawyers in the country. It was, in some respects, St. Clair’s third pass at the Watergate scandal; Archibald Cox had tried, unsuccessfully, as special prosecutor to recruit him to be his deputy, and more recently he’d been retained briefly by Charles Colson. Now he signed up to take on all three of the president’s own legal fronts: the Senate Ervin Committee, the House Judiciary impeachment inquiry, and the special prosecutor’s investigation. In his pitch, Haig avoided mention of the trouble buried in the transcripts, or the fact that Garment and Buzhardt—St. Clair’s purported predecessors in the role—were removing themselves in part because they considered the political wounds already fatal and resignation the only foreseeable outcome.
St. Clair had been on vacation with his wife when the chief of staff called, and he met with the White House team in San Clemente just after New Year’s. He started in the Executive Office Building on January 4, his new world encompassing a suite in that building and a room at the luxurious Fairfax Hotel. He assembled his own team of seven lawyers; Garment would be eased off the case, and Buzhardt’s role would focus solely on the custody of tapes and records.
There would be no further cooperation, no further candor. Nixon sat down on January 5, at 5 a.m., and added to his New Year’s note. “Above all else: Dignity, command, head high, no fear, building a new spirt, drive, act like a President, act like a winner. Opponents are destroyers, haters. Time to use the full power of the President to fight overwhelming forces arrayed against us.”
I. After auditing seven years of taxes and double-checking every check and expense Ford had paid during that period, the IRS had found only one quibble, disallowing two suits he’d deducted as a business expense during the ’72 Republican convention, an issue he’d settled with a payment of $435.77.
II. The new role changed Ford’s life minimally in some ways: He continued to live in his regular home in Virginia, since Congress had only recently designated for the first time an official vice presidential residence and it was still under renovation. Instead, the Secret Service expanded his driveway in Alexandria, to accommodate the vice presidential limo, and bricked up and soundproofed his garage to serve as their new command post, and the White House Communications Agency electrified his attic to accommodate the new telephone systems it had to install.
III. Jenner’s “defection” understandably bothered Nixon’s defense lawyer, James St. Clair, who grumbled, “We will have to become counsel to the minority, in effect. Someone has to defend the cause and obviously he isn’t.”
IV. Doar liked to recruit the typists from Catholic high schools; he felt that the nuns inculcated a sense of mission and purpose that jibed with his quest for justice and democracy.
V. It wasn’t until January 1975 that the special prosecutor finally cleared Rebozo, after a $2 million government investigation that included more than two hundred subpoenas and the questioning of more than 120 people, 28 of them before the grand jury; no charges were ever brought against him or Abplanalp.
PART V Inferno
1974
Chapter 47 Flutter and Wow
The tapes were just half-a-millimeter wide, a thin strip of magnetic coating atop plastic film. To avoid having to frequently change the reels on the Secret Service’s Sony 800B recorders, locked away in the White House basement, technicians had set the recording speed to an unusually slow 15/16th inches per second. That speed compromised sound quality, muddling and muffling the sounds of history, a trade-off that would forever haunt investigators and scholars.
As the White House, John Doar, and Judge Sirica turned their attention to the tapes, they convened an illustrious group of outside experts—half-a-dozen men with years of industry experience in magnetic tape—to analyze whether the recordings had been tampered with. They met with the panel late one Sunday evening over the winter to discuss their process, gathering at a conference room in a corner of the Executive Office Building so obscure they required guides to direct them. The conversation turned technical fairly quickly, which frustrated and bored the lawyers. “The discussion became more and more arcane—analysis of flutter and wow, spectrographic examination, the capacity for analyzing high- and low-frequency hum,” prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste recalled later. “The scientists became increasingly animated and, absorbed in their own intellectual world, discontinued the simultaneous translation they had been providing for the lawyers.”
As the discussion turned to the finer points of what the scientists referred to as “hum analysis,” both Ben-Veniste and Len Garment, who had remained on the case until James St. Clair could get up to speed, excused themselves from the conference room. Outside in the hallway, they both broke out laughing, their emotions cresting after the month’s overwhelming tension and absurdity. “The American presidency hung in the balance, and we bleary-eyed attorneys were locked away in a chambering of the castle of Dr. Frankenstein, trying to monitor the excited scientists’ audio-gibberish,” Garment recalled.
A few moments later, prosecutor Carl Feldbaum and the White House’s Douglas Parker joined them in the stairwell, their own laughter spreading and building until tears ran down their faces. Doubled-over, Garment jokingly suggested to the prosecutors that rather than spend the weeks ahead learning the finer points of audio analysis, they settle the case right then: Suppose he could deliver a guilty plea from Ron Ziegler and a nolo contendere from Kissinger?
Absolutely not—they wouldn’t settle for less than a future draft pick for vice president, Ben-Veniste and Feldbaum retorted.
Finally, calmed down, everyone returned inside to the industry minutiae; the scientists, still debating, hadn’t seemed to notice their absence. “It was like that with Watergate: Some days were more Buster Keaton than Al Capone,” Garment recalled.
In the following weeks, different reels of tape traveled the country, moving from one expert laboratory to another, each under guard of a team of U.S. marshals and ferried in special antimagnetic containers to ensure no further damage. A member of the special prosecutor’s team, Jim Boczar, and a rotating representative of the White House lawyers also accompanied the tapes and were present for all tests. Most of the testing happened during long overnight shifts, when the needed computers were available for extended sessions, giving rise to Boczar’s team nickname: Dracula.
Analyzing the tapes for tampering, though, was just the first step; the next was deciphering what was on them. One member of the outside expert panel, Mark Weiss, the vice president of acoustics research at the Federal Scientific Corporation, had invented a sophisticated machine that worked to remove distortion and enhance quality, known as a “coherent spectrum shaper”—at the time the world’s most cutting-edge sound analysis tool. The only one belonged to the CIA, and the Special Prosecution Force was stunned when Sirica convinced the agency to lend it out. “Such was the power of the federal judge that the CIA delivered it to the courthouse with no more fanfare than if it had been a borrowed cup of sugar,” Ben-Veniste and Frampton recalled. The oversized machine—which took twelve hours just to warm up—was reconstructed in the jury room, and there Weiss and his assistant carefully tuned it, adjusting circuits and tubes. When he came in to review the setup, Sirica treated it as if he were approaching the Dead Sea Scrolls. As the machine got to work, enhancing and copying the tapes, Boczar and a White House counterpart settled in for another overnight shift. When the work was done, the CIA covertly ushered the contraption out of the building under a gray tarp to avoid prying eyes.
Given the abysmal quality of the underlying tapes, simply hearing them was not enough; like the White House staff before them, investigators would have to transcribe each recording, a fraught, challenging, and intense process that turned into countless hours of work—archivists would later estimate it took about one hundred hours to transcribe just a single hour of conversation.
Listening to the tapes jarred everyone. The president’s casual and repeated use of profanity stunned Sirica and his clerk. “I came up the hard way, and the language was far from unfamiliar to me. But the shock, for me at least, was the contrast between the coarse, private Nixon speech and the utterly correct public speech I had heard so often,” the judge recalled in his memoir. More shocking, however, was the impression that became clear as they listened to more and more reels: Nixon had never intended to clean up Watergate. They listened in vain for outrage or any remorse at his aides’ actions. “I found the whole thing disgusting,” Sirica concluded. “From that moment on, there was no longer any doubt in my mind that there had been a conspiracy to obstruct justice inside the White House.”
Sirica couldn’t help but wonder how Jaworski would respond—and even more so, how the grand jury would respond when they began to hear the tapes too.
On January 15, 1974, the expert panel released their report, a damning and unanimous conclusion that the eighteen-minute gap on the June 20 tape had been caused by an erasure—or, more accurately, at least five distinct segments of erasure. “The amount of information the experts were able to glean from the June 20 tape was nothing short of astonishing,” Ben-Veniste recalled. Together, they had seemingly excavated every nugget, scrape, or tidbit of information imprinted on the magnetic tape—everything, that is, except what had actually been said during the gap. Explaining their work to Sirica’s court, acoustic expert Richard Bolt said that the panel had put the equivalent of three hundred workdays into examining the tapes in just two months, moving between various labs and settings in Manhattan, Cambridge, Salt Lake City, New Haven, Murray Hill, New Jersey, and Los Gatos, California. The expert examination had been supplemented by an FBI investigation led by agent Angelo Lano, who had gone to Camp David to study the typewriters there and compare them to the IBM Model D Executive used at the White House by Rose Mary Woods. That intel helped confirm precisely how far she’d gotten in her transcription efforts at the presidential retreat. (“It turned out that Rose had told the truth about one thing,” Volner noted later.) Efforts to polygraph three likely erasure suspects—Woods, Haig, and personal aide Stephen Bull—went nowhere.
The panel concluded that the White House’s Uher 5000 machine was the one likely used in the erasures. The acoustic experts had also studied the different “signatures” from the foot pedal and the hand keyboard imprinted on the magnetic tape and were able to determine that the erasures came via the hand keys, not the foot pedal that Woods had testified she’d used. The electromagnetic heads of the Uher 5000 were spaced exactly 28.6 millimeters apart, allowing the experts to match up the corresponding marks on the tape. That alone was significant because October 1, the day Rose Mary Woods was working to transcribe the tapes at the White House, had been the first time any tape had been played on a Uher machine. All previous playbacks, for Nixon and Haldeman, had occurred on Sony machines.
To see the exact moments of erasures, the experts had coated the tapes in magnetic fluid, allowing them to study the minute markings and identify a “quartet signature” of four tiny lines, each less than a millimeter high, that the Uher 5000 tape recorder made each time the erasing function stopped. Across the eighteen minutes of wiped tape, they found signatures of five “stops” and nine “starts,” indicating that four of the erasure attempts were, in turn, erased by later attempts to wipe the tape. While the experts stopped short of saying that the erasures were “deliberate,” since they couldn’t discern the motives of the person doing the erasing, the expert panel told Sirica, “It would have to be an accident that was repeated at least five separate times.”
The conclusion was clear: Either Rose Mary Woods was lying—or someone else had tampered with the tapes without her knowledge or any record in White House files. There was no doubt that Woods’s story of an accidental erasure was simply wrong.
The president’s own remaining allies immediately realized the severity of the report’s implications and consequences; Representative John Anderson, the head of the House Republican Conference, believed Watergate was in its final stages, saying, “This is the most serious single bit of evidence to date. The theory that there has been a conscious effort to conceal evidence is no longer a theory.” Conservative columnist George F. Will compared the Nixon team’s mental gymnastics to preserve his innocence to the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland, who was capable of believing “six impossible things before breakfast.”
In response to the report, Sirica referred the matter to the FBI for further investigation and possible criminal prosecution. In its next issue, TIME ticked off the possible charges: “obstruction of justice, suppression of evidence, contempt of court for failing to produce evidence, and perjury,” but none would come to fruition. Volner, for her part, couldn’t bring herself to recommend perjury charges against Woods, despite the clear and convincing evidence that she’d lied in at least some—if not much—of her testimony. “The White House treated her so shabbily,” Volner recalled. “It was hard not to see her as a victim whose chief crime had been her loyalty to Nixon.”
* * *
The deeper the investigators got into the tapes and transcripts, the more they grew concerned; two other dictation tapes the president turned over, both aimed to mitigate the original missing conversation recordings, appeared to have possible deletions of their own, cutting off mid-sentence. One of the suspicious cutoffs came in Nixon’s own dictation and summary of the March 21 conversation with John Dean; the tape fell silent for fifty-nine seconds just as the president recounted how he told Dean to “hunker down” and avoid any statement about the cover-up, since it would be “too dangerous as far…” The White House aides brushed the concerns aside, saying the cause of the gap was likely due to the uncoordinated Nixon stopping recording while still speaking.
