Watergate, page 67
Page after page, there was just no sense from the president or his aides that they were disgusted by the burglary or wanted to get to the bottom of it or the subsequent cover-up; instead, they radiated cynicism and callous indifference to nearly everyone and everything, including the rule of law. Their only interest was their own survival. “Not that these conversations seemed diabolical: to the contrary, they revealed incompetent bumbling and an utter failure to comprehend what was happening in the real world,” Ben-Veniste and Frampton recalled. “The level of discourse was appalling.” Others agreed. “Sheer flesh-crawling repulsion,” Joe Alsop wrote, describing his reaction to reading the conversations. The transcripts, Alsop wrote, didn’t read like they were worthy of the White House, they read like “the back room of a second-rate advertising agency in a suburb of hell.” The language—and sheer pettiness—of the tapes surprised even some senior aides, who had never been fully exposed to the darkest version of the president.
There also were indications that the president’s version of events had been altered. The Special Prosecutor’s Office already possessed tapes of eight conversations now released by the White House, and the staff quickly began comparing. “The president’s transcripts of these recordings were so replete with obvious errors that we had no confidence in the remainder,” Jaworski recalled. In fact, the special prosecutor’s staff was stunned at how wrong the transcripts managed to be in nearly every direction. “Some statements were transcribed in such a manner that the substance and tone of the actual conversation were completely misrepresented,” Jaworski said. “Statements on the recordings were omitted in the transcripts. Statements not on the recordings appeared in the transcripts. Statements were attributed to one speaker when they actually were made by another. Statements were marked ‘unintelligible’ in the transcripts when they were clear on the tapes.”
The House committee ran through the same exercise. “Before the end of the day, the word had been passed among most of the committee members that the White House versions were the worst of the lot,” UPI’s Howard Fields reported. Even Judiciary Committee Republicans like Railsback, Cohen, and Fish said they weren’t happy. Hugh Scott, the Senate minority leader, worriedly read through the newly released version of the March 21 conversation and recalled the transcript he’d read in December at Haig’s invitation; much of what he remembered was missing. The transcript ploy seemed impossible to defend. His public statement called the tapes “deplorable, disgusting, shabby, immoral.”
The controversy prompted the House committee to leak the full unexpurgated sentence to the press, the first of what would turn out to be a whole series of releases highlighting how Nixon’s transcripts distorted or minimized key conversations—each simultaneously adding evidence of the president’s misconduct and undermining his ongoing credibility. As Len Garment later recalled, “Nixon released a thousand pages of mumbled plotting, twisting, turning, and double-dealing, all the numbing sleaziness of political men in desperate trouble, the whole mess compounded by countless transcription mistakes, arbitrary omissions, and perhaps worst of all, innumerable references throughout to ‘expletive deleted.’ ”VI
For days, Washingtonians shared their favorite quotes. (“Don’t miss page 503—the president tells Ehrlichman to tell Magruder that he has his ‘personal affection,’ ” one diner stopped to tell Elizabeth Drew during lunch.) Americans immediately filled in “(expletive deleted)” with their own vile curses, often far worse than Nixon’s generally pedestrian “damns,” “Chrissakes,” and “goddamns.”
The cumulative effect was devastating. “What was in the President’s transcripts would overwhelm any strategy that could be devised to hide or distort it. Richard Nixon, it seemed to us, had just committed political suicide,” Ben-Veniste and Frampton recalled. A Harris poll for the first time showed that a majority of the American people favored presidential impeachment.
* * *
As publicly damaging as the transcripts were, there was the even bigger legal problem they presented: They still weren’t what either Jaworski or the House had asked for. “The subpoena was for tapes and we got no tapes,” Rodino said.VII Prosecutors speculated that Nixon’s aggressive misdirection with the transcripts likely stemmed from mistaken hubris—given that the president’s name didn’t appear in the March 1 indictments, the White House seemed to calculate that Jaworski had decided to take no direct action against him.
“We did not subpoena an edited White House version of partial transcripts of portions of presidential conversations. We did not subpoena a presidential interpretation of what is necessary or relevant for our inquiry. And we did not subpoena a lawyer’s argument presented before we have heard any of the evidence,” Rodino told the committee in a rare speech on May 1.
Stopping short of an article of impeachment, the committee ultimately approved a new letter to the president explaining it felt he was in noncompliance. Maine’s William Cohen was the only Republican to support it. The letter, signed by Rodino and delivered to the White House, read in its entirety: “Dear Mr. President: The Committee on the Judiciary has directed me to advise you that it finds that as of 10:00 a.m., April 30, you have failed to comply with the Committee’s subpoena of April 11, 1974.”
Friday night, Nixon led a delegation of party leaders, including his friend Barry Goldwater, to Arizona for a rally. There, he told the crowd, “The time has come to get Watergate behind us and to get on with the business of America,” a call more desperate than hopeful as his options dwindled.
In early May, James St. Clair tried to block Jaworski’s latest subpoena for more tapes by seizing on what he believed was an important technicality: The requested tapes represented “inadmissible heresay,” since Nixon himself wasn’t a member of the Watergate conspiracy. The argument was a clear Hail Mary pass, and Jaworski found himself in a position to respond with equal intensity.
On Sunday, May 5, Jaworski, Lacovara, and Ben-Veniste went to the White House, settling again into the Map Room. The special prosecutor broke the news to Al Haig and James St. Clair that the grand jury had authorized the naming of the president as a co-conspirator. “About fifteen members of my staff have known about this and have kept it quiet out of fairness to the president,” Jaworski said. “Now you are forcing me to come out with it in a hearing.”
He then showed the brief he planned to file, as well as the minutes of the grand jury meeting that had confirmed all believed Nixon to be involved. He offered a compromise: He would drop the subpoena, and thus delay any announcement, if the White House released just eighteen specific conversations from the full list of sixty-four originally requested. All but sputtering, St. Clair asked for a few days to consider the proposal. “This is an attempt to embarrass the president,” he replied, and then implied the compromise seemed like blackmail. The conversation took less than thirty minutes; the lines had been drawn.
Haig too was clearly worried. “I’m not trying to save the president, Leon,” he had said as they left the room. “I’m trying to save the presidency.”
“You may be destroying the presidency,” Jaworski countered. Later, logs would show that within minutes of the special prosecutor’s departure, the eighteen tapes in question were retrieved from their secure storage area.
That very night, Stephen Bull set up a tape recorder for the president; minute by minute, Richard Nixon listened to his June 23, 1972, conversation with Haldeman. It’s unknown whether he had precisely remembered the conversation until then, but in that moment, sentence by sentence, the worst of the cover-up unfolded. The plot was unmistakable, the abuse of power unconscionable. It took only until Tuesday for St. Clair to call Jaworski and declare, definitively, that there would be no further tapes. “The president does not wish to make any agreement,” he said.
In his office, Jaworski hung up the phone and contemplated the message, the timing and subtext of which was crystal clear yet deeply troubling. Nixon had listened to the tapes, and thought they were so incriminating that there could be no further compromise. Jaworski shuddered to think what that must mean they contained, but then realized that Nixon must not have shared that incriminating evidence with his own aides; Haig and St. Clair would never have engaged in an active cover-up, especially at this stage.VIII
Nixon had been backed into his final corner; he would go forward alone. “The mistake may be to assume that there is such a thing as a White House strategy. In the matter of impeachment, there is no White House—there is only the President,” the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Drew wrote that spring. “The President may not have a strategy other than taking it day by day, getting through each dangerous passage as best he can, and hoping for the best. No one really knows.”
The next morning, Nixon spent less than an hour in meetings—half of which was the ceremonial swearing-in of the new treasury secretary—and then cloistered himself for six hours alone in his hideaway office. He had dinner, alone, on the presidential yacht, the Sequoia.
That night, he sent his steak back—it had too much fat.
* * *
On May 9—the day that the pro-Nixon Chicago Tribune broke with the president and called for his resignation—committee members gathered for the first actual impeachment hearings. Walking up to Room 2141, the hearing room for the House Judiciary Committee that spring, the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Drew noticed familiar stanchions and yellow rope greeting her. “One could almost follow the story of Watergate and the impeachment by tracing the route of the yellow ropes,” she observed. They had first appeared the previous summer outside the Ervin Committee. In the fall, they’d been outside the Senate Judiciary Committee, as it investigated the firing of Archibald Cox. Next, they’d been outside the hearings of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee as it conducted confirmation hearings for Gerald Ford. And now they were outside the beginnings of the impeachment hearings.
The hearings began in a very different environment than even just a few weeks before; the miscalculation of releasing the tape transcripts had undermined the president’s already precarious position on Capitol Hill, and even Nixon’s closest allies were eyeing him differently. Rogers Morton, the interior secretary, said in a speech, “We have seen a breakdown in our ethics government which I deplore and which I am having a very difficult time living with.”
Impeachment by design is always a political process, not a criminal one—with no fixed milestones, no formal definable criminal code, and a burden of proof that shifts as power waxes and wanes. As then Republican minority leader Gerald Ford had himself said in 1970, as he’d advocated for impeachment of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.” Guilt versus innocence was calculated not independently, but among a group of jurors—both in the House and the Senate—who faced pressure and possible career repercussions on multiple fronts, at home from their voters and constituents, as well as from their colleagues in Congress.
As Pete Rodino weighed the inquiry’s complex politics, success came down to three conservative Southern Democrats: James Mann of South Carolina, Walter Flowers of Alabama, and Ray Thornton of Arkansas. Impeachment, Thornton explained, was a “safety valve to eliminate any forces which would tend to overthrow or destroy the structure of government itself.” Crimes, whether simple misdemeanors or serious felonies, were not the sine qua non for removing an officeholder; the crimes had to be directly tied to the structure and work of government itself.
Flowers, for his part, was overwhelmed with the idea that he might vote to remove a president—the president!—from office. As he told Elizabeth Drew that spring, “I think of this as a once-in-a-lifetime proposition. I don’t mean to be melodramatic. I feel I just happened to be in the breech when the gun got loaded with this particular shell.” (By late spring, the stress, the sleepless nights, the political uncertainty, all had combined to bring back an ulcer.)
The staff and the committee had to navigate that distinction. “When I was able to hold Mann, Thornton, and Flowers, then I knew it could be done,” Rodino told reporter Jimmy Breslin. “I had to have them. Once I had them I could start to put it together.” Beyond the conservative Democrats, Rodino studiously and artfully courted other moderates, like Maine Republican William Cohen. Impeachment, when and if it came, could not be a party-line vote. It was political, absolutely, but it couldn’t be partisan.
The public who made it past the yellow ropes didn’t get to watch for long. After opening statements from Rodino and Hutchinson, the committee voted to close the remainder of the hearing so it could deliberate and hear evidence in private. The TV lights went dark, the rows of press and public emptied, and at 1:40 p.m., police locked the committee room doors. All thirty-eight committee members were in their seats inside, each now staring at the headphones that had been installed at their desks. St. Clair sat nearby at the defense counsel’s table. Everyone seemed nervous; when Rodino noted to the president’s defense attorney that he should be bound by the same confidentiality rules as the committee members, St. Clair stumbled: “I do, Your Honor—Mr. Chairman, excuse me.”
“We begin at the beginning,” John Doar began, a statement both figurative and literal. “On January 20, 1969, Richard Nixon was inaugurated as the 37th President of the United States.” He proceeded, in a flat almost monotone voice. “President Nixon is a very disciplined President. He likes order and his system of management of the White House clearly reflects that. That will be apparent, members of the committee, as you go through these hearings.”
That first day was a big success, and to celebrate, Doar took committee staffers Maureen Barden and Barbara Campbell out to dinner at Trader Vic’s. Driving through town in the evening, Barden—a New Yorker—realized how little of the capital she’d seen in her months on the inquiry staff. “Oh my gosh. Look at that. That’s beautiful. What is that?” she said, pointing to a garden and fountain outside the window. When he turned to look, Doar was astonished; Barden was pointing out the lawn of the White House, which she had yet to lay eyes on.
* * *
On Friday, May 10, in a private session inside Sirica’s chambers, crowded with prosecutors, White House attorneys, and attorneys for the cover-up defendants, Jaworski handed out a thirty-nine-page legal brief announcing that the grand jury did believe Richard Nixon had been part of a conspiracy and that he would be naming him an unindicted co-conspirator.
Except among the president’s lawyers, there was total surprise. Sirica, shocked that this development had been kept a secret this long already, argued that the discussion should take place in public. Jaworski pushed for discretion a bit longer, backed by various defense attorneys. In the end, Sirica agreed, and ordered that the special prosecutor’s subpoena for the sixty-four tapes be enforced. The damaging news he’d learned, for now, would remain a secret. The situation, he figured, could not get worse: “I figured the president was doomed.”
I. The Arkansas Gazette’s Washington correspondent had Martha prank call his own newspaper, telling the confused night news desk, “Arkansas doesn’t seem to be doing very well with its senators, and I am thinking I might run.”
II. The indictments landed the day before the opening of the baseball season, infuriating Steinbrenner, who in 1973 had purchased the New York Yankees. Rather than celebrating the Yankees-Indians opening game, he found himself announcing he was removing himself from day-to-day management of the team to contend with his case.
III. “Nixon spent hours listening to them, over and over and over again,” his attorney general William Saxbe recalled. “He didn’t have time for me or any other member of his cabinet, for that matter, except for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.”
IV. Woodward and Bernstein’s book, The Final Days, says Nixon called Stans and Mitchell to congratulate them, although there’s no record of any such phone call in the president’s daily diaries for April or early May.
V. A copy was dispatched to Henry Kissinger, then in the Middle East, where he skipped his trip’s planned pleasure reading—including a chess manual and a pornographic novel—to read something arguably even more tawdry: the commander in chief’s private conversations.
VI. Visiting the Special Prosecutor’s Office one day, to listen to some of the tapes to be used against him at trial, Haldeman joked to Henry Ruth, “Do you know how a Polish President would have handled Watergate?” Pausing for the punchline, Haldeman added: “The way that Nixon did.”
VII. Behind closed doors, Rodino was even more blunt. “Rodino said that’s like if a cop pulls you over and he asks you for your driver’s license and you hand him your credit card,” Republican representative William Cohen recalled later.
VIII. Jaworski’s hunch was correct—amazingly, no White House aide had followed Nixon’s lead and listened to the requested conversations. Whatever Nixon had left to hide, it was clear they hadn’t wanted to know.
Chapter 50 The United States v. Richard M. Nixon
With the Supreme Court’s traditional summer recess fast approaching, Leon Jaworski knew that he could not wait for the normal appeals process to unfold. Time was of the essence, and with that in mind, the special prosecutor asked the Supreme Court to review the legality of the subpoena immediately—hoping to avoid an appeal that drifted into October and pushed a trial for the “Watergate Seven” into 1975 or beyond. It was a rare move—the last time the Supreme Court had agreed to such a maneuver was in the midst of the Korean War—and a risky one.
