Watergate, page 68
Jaworski knew that a rejection from the Supreme Court might also come with a verbal slap and delay the scandal for the better part of a year (St. Clair indeed objected to bypassing the regular appeals process, saying it undermined the required “careful reflection and deliberation”), but the Special Prosecutor’s Office raced to file its so-called “writ of certiorari,” with Lacovara delivering it to the Supreme Court clerk just as the doors closed at 6 p.m. The justices took only a day to approve their direct review. “[It was] a truly extraordinary mechanism that the Supreme Court entertains only once every twenty years or so,” Lacovara explained.
The move by Jaworski’s team allowed them to reorient the nation’s viewing of the case and the stakes in a subtle but important way, reducing the president from an “office” to a “man.” When the president argued with Sirica in the lower-level district court, the dispute had been captioned simply and routinely. Now, at the Supreme Court, the special prosecutor renamed the case. “Our goal was to strengthen our constitutional arguments by assuming the mantle of ‘counsel for the sovereign people of the United States’ seeking to enforce the obligation of every citizen,” Lacovara later explained.
And so Nixon v. Sirica became The United States v. Richard M. Nixon.
* * *
Through May, the capital remained tense, watching the impeachment hearings begin on Capitol Hill and trying to discern the worried looks of people heading in and out of private meetings. In the case around the Ellsberg burglary, Judge Gerhard Gesell had recently ruled against Ehrlichman and Colson that there was no Fourth Amendment exception for national security—they couldn’t argue that their breaking-and-entering operation in California had been justified under some hazy hand wave of protecting the country. Rumors of a presidential resignation abounded. During a trip to Buffalo, Gerald Ford’s team were forced to specifically deny a report that the vice president had emerged from a morning meeting with the president and declared that his staff should be on “red alert.”
As much as the administration tried to downplay the resignation rumors, it was in obvious peril. On Tuesday the 14th, Ford—in his ceremonial role as the president of the Senate—met with Mike Mansfield, the majority leader, and Hugh Scott, the minority leader. The two legislative leaders explained that a Senate impeachment trial looked near certain. “Jerry, there’s a better than 50-50 chance that you will be president before long,” Scott said, a statement that worried him as the minority leader almost as much as it worried Ford himself.
Meanwhile the House’s two top Republicans, minority leader John Rhodes—who had taken over the role when Ford ascended to the vice presidency—and conference chair John Anderson, fretted about the party’s electoral prospects and its future. Rhodes, who had suggested resignation might be a possibility following the bungled release of the transcripts, had been pushed hard since by party loyalists to rally to Nixon’s aid, and he feared the utter collapse of the party in the fall’s ’74 midterm elections if they broke with the president. Anderson, however, saw the move as perhaps the only chance for survival amid an angry and disillusioned national electorate.
Behind the scenes, the White House staff began to subtly prepare contingency plans. That spring, Philip Buchen—a former law partner of Ford’s who now worked on his staff—had dinner with Clay Whitehead, the head of the White House’s telecommunications policy team. As they ate and digested the latest scandal developments, Buchen told his colleague, “We have to do some planning for Jerry. We have to face the fact the president may resign.” In the days ahead, they gathered three others—a former Elliot Richardson aide, Jonathan Moore, as well as an assistant interior secretary, Laurence Lynn, and one of Whitehead’s White House assistants, Brian Lamb—and the secret team of five began to plan for the transition none of them hoped for, but that all of them assumed was only a matter of time. They knew that their work needed to remain a tightly held secret—especially from the vice president, who continued to dance around the president’s troubles, trying to be supportive without necessarily lashing himself to a sinking ship. “Time will tell,” he said at one point, when asked if the president had committed impeachable offenses. Time, indeed.
* * *
“If John Doar fit any stereotype, it was that of a meticulous, compulsive librarian,” UPI’s Howard Fields wrote, in an excellent categorization of the impeachment counsel’s personality. As the hearings began, his inquiry staff were spending their nights organizing more than forty identical binders, with all the evidence and material backup for the questioning; they did the process a total of thirty-six times, each time gathering a different “Statement of Information” that outlined a different set of evidence around a different question. Binder after binder, night after night. They were all modeled after the grand jury’s original roadmap—each factual assertion tied to the supporting evidence. Everything was collated and cross-referenced, to both official documents or sometimes even news reporting.
“We truly did nothing but work. And we worked. We worked,” Maureen Barden recalled. Once, when her sister came to visit and the two went out to dinner, Barden fell asleep right at the table. A woman who dated inquiry staffer Larry Kieves was quoted in the newspaper saying, “He’s the most boring person in the world. All he does is work and he can’t talk about that and he can’t talk about anything else.”I
Fortunately, the work was not for nothing. Over nineteen hours in the first four days of hearings, Doar, colleague Evan Davis, and other staff read through page after page of background, established facts, summarized and direct testimony, and documentary evidence. By the end of the first week, committee members had begun to hear—and understand—precisely the presidential patterns of conduct that added up in their minds to impeachment. They listened intently to the tapes, as scratchy and hard-to-discern as they were, but gradually came to be convinced of the thoroughness of the inquiry’s transcripts. “It made the conversations come alive. We got the emphasis, the voice inflections, and the tone of the conversation,” Representative Tom Railsback told a reporter at the time.
All told, for ten weeks, Tuesday through Thursday, the lawmakers heard some 7,200 pages of evidence. For the first time, “Watergate” was being told as a single story, from the burglary and the cover-up to the other scandals that had, until then, technically been unrelated—ITT, campaign finance illegalities, dirty tricks, the milk producers bribery case, and others that converged into a broad, sweeping indictment of Richard Nixon’s abuse of the presidency. There was no particular rhyme nor reason to the House committee’s presentation, other than what evidence was first ready, but the scope of the misconduct could not be missed or explained away. “You go into a grocery store and see a whole section of nice-looking tomatoes. You pick one up, and it’s rotten, on the bottom. You figure, all right, it’s possible to have one rotten tomato. You pick up another tomato and it’s rotten,” Maryland Democratic representative Paul Sarbanes said. “After eight or 10 rotten tomatoes you wonder about the whole grocery store.”
To the committee members, two elements of the investigation’s narrative seemed particularly troubling: First, there was Nixon’s misuse of “national security,” the area where the presidency is typically afforded the most leeway and flexibility. “You would use national security as a cover for things that didn’t have anything to do with national security,” impeachment staffer Evan Davis said. “To use falsely national security as a cover seemed to me a compounding problem to find subversion of the Constitution.”
They were also confounded by the president’s indifference to the legality of his actions and those of his aides. It wasn’t that Nixon had carefully threaded through a gray area in the law; he had charged ahead without caring what was right or wrong. “It’s a compounding fact for finding a constitutional high crime or misdemeanor because it relates directly to the duty to take care that the law has been faithfully executed,” Davis recalled. “Indifference to legality is a particular problem for a President in terms of his role under the Constitution.”
* * *
James St. Clair found himself by early June in an absolutely impossible position—caught amid a weakening public case, a peeved judiciary tired of his delays, and an intransigent and isolated client, leading a restless defense team that wondered how much their client cared about their work to begin with. Most of his junior lawyers had never even met the president. Many days it felt like there were just too many cases involving the president, too many aides in too much trouble.
On Monday, June 3, the White House counsel was in the courtroom of Judge Gerhard Gesell, the D.C. federal judge who would lead the trial of the second “Watergate Seven” and who had ordered White House files be turned over to aid the defense of Colson and Ehrlichman. Nixon had declined, and St. Clair was worried that day whether Gesell might actually find the president in contempt. Instead, he was as surprised as anyone when Chuck Colson said, “I plead guilty, Your Honor.”
The unexpected change resulted from an odd bargaining session over the previous week between Jaworski’s office and Colson, who had gone through what he called a religious awakening amid the case. He now felt weighed down by a guilty conscience, but not for the crime he’d been charged with—he insisted he was not guilty of the existing conspiracy indictment, but he agreed to plead guilty to attempting to obstruct justice by interfering with the Ellsberg trial. “I regret what I attempted to do to Dr. Ellsberg,” Colson said. “All of us who have been involved in this unhappy chapter of history, along with all of those who occupy public office today, have an overriding obligation to do everything in our power to help restore the confidence of the American people in this Government.”
Inside the courtroom, St. Clair handed his assistant a dime and dispatched him to call the White House with the surprise update. Later, when he returned to the White House, he took the fourteen lawyers and staff, all men, who had been working feverishly to hold back the onrushing trouble, for a ten-minute audience in the Oval Office. They chatted awkwardly and then took a group picture. After they were ushered out, Nixon spent an hour meeting with St. Clair before spending another three hours sitting alone.
The next day, news cameras followed Jeb Stuart Magruder as he reported to prison on his perjury plea for what would ultimately be a seven-month sentence. Soon, Herbert Kalmbach followed, beginning a minimum six-month prison term. As Gesell said, “The court recognizes that men of ambition, affected by blind, impulsive loyalty, react to the atmosphere in which they work and which they helped create. But this does not change the individual responsibility of each public servant. Morality is a higher force than expediency.”
* * *
On Wednesday, June 5, the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Jackson and Ron Ostrow confirmed and reported the contents of the mysterious briefcase handed to Judge Sirica back in March. The story that Nixon had been named an unindicted co-conspirator ran on front pages coast-to-coast. The members of the House Judiciary Committee were taken by surprise. (Doar’s staff had known about the vote, but hadn’t told the committee.) Within a day, St. Clair conceded the report was indeed true. “It is going to have a hell of an impact on the Hill,” an anonymous defense attorney for one of the Watergate Seven defendants told the New York Times. “It makes the White House position far weaker in resisting tapes requests.”
Nixon held strong. Sunday afternoon, he addressed a crowd of fourteen hundred at the Shoreham Hotel, a group called the “National Citizens Committee for Fairness to the Presidency,” founded by a Ukrainian-born rabbi named Baruch Korff. Korff and Nixon had met in 1967, and the rabbi had grown an increasingly strong connection to the president, largely in gratitude for his deep, loyal support of Israel. That spring, as Nixon came under increasing threat, Korff had rallied the new citizens committee to boost the president politically and help raise money for his legal defense. In May, as he spent longer and longer stretches alone, Nixon had met with Korff in the Oval Office, speaking for ninety minutes as part of what Korff hoped would be a book project to save the presidency. “I am not the press’s favorite pin-up boy,” Nixon told the rabbi. “If it hadn’t been Watergate, there would probably have been something else. So now they have this. But I will survive it and I just hope they will survive it with, shall we say, as much serenity as I have.” Now the Shoreham Hotel crowd was about as warm a reception as Nixon would see that year, a chance to take a victory lap. The speakers stressed that the best of Nixon’s presidency remained ahead—there was so much still to do with the final 965 days in the White House.
As the president himself told the crowd, “The cause you have worked for, my friends, is not simply for a man, but the cause you have worked for and are working for is much bigger than one man or one President. The cause you are working for is for this office, which is so important—actually which is indispensable—to what we want to build, we as Americans: a peaceful world for our children and our grandchildren and for those of others who have been our friends, and even those who have been our adversaries and our enemies.”
The brave statements of fortitude and resilience increasingly belied the lonely paralysis that gripped the White House. Inside, the president’s work had all but stopped; more and more, Al Haig had come to serve as something like a prime minister or “deputy president,” ensuring that the multitudes of paper required to run the U.S. government continued to churn, even if the man in charge had all but ceased participating in his own administration. “Nixon was a haunted man,” an aide told journalist Teddy White. “[He was] able to focus only on foreign affairs, which both intrigued and distracted him.”
On June 10, the president left on a whirlwind, fifteen-thousand-mile trip, spanning five Middle East nations: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, and Israel. At a first stop in Austria, he complained of an inflamed leg, and his personal physician, Major General Walter Tkach, diagnosed a blood clot. The physician recommended immediate cancellation of remainder of the trip and that the president be hospitalized overseas; continuing the trip might very well kill him. When he was stable, Tkach offered, he could return directly to the United States. Nixon rejected the idea out of hand. “The purpose of this trip is more important than my life,” he said. At home in Washington, he was a defendant and co-conspirator, but overseas, he was still clearly the president—the commander in chief of a great nation, campaigning for peace as vigorously as he’d ever campaigned for election. A quick honorable death overseas, in service of world peace, looked better than a slow political death at home.
Day after day, Tkach and another physician watched, worried, as Nixon gritted his way through obvious pain. At every stop, he seemed to ignore advice, standing for long stretches and walking at length, including touring the Giza pyramids with Anwar Sadat while in Egypt. “The president has a death wish,” Tkach told fellow staff. He returned from the Middle East only to leave three days later for more diplomatic maneuvers, this time in Brussels and the Soviet Union, for a major summit with Brezhnev—what the White House would call “Summit III,” to discuss nuclear weapon limitations and other subjects. He flew back across the Atlantic on June 25, his leg still elevated for its crushing pain aboard the plane.II
* * *
While Nixon was overseas, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s first-person account of their hunt for the truth about Watergate arrived in bookstores, in time for the second anniversary of the break-in. Instantly, All the President’s Men became a national sensation, selling out its entire 75,000-copy initial printing—Simon & Schuster was quick to reprint another 135,000 copies—and it spent fifteen weeks on the bestseller lists. The reporters’ simple retelling of the saga, one that focused on their own roles at the expense of all other players and investigators—the name of FBI case agent Angelo Lano, for example, is never even mentioned—set records for sales, resales, and subsidiary rights. The proceeds—the $1 million paperback sale, the $30,000 magazine excerpts to Playboy, the myriad foreign translations, $100,000 from the Book of the Month Club, and the $450,000 movie sale to Robert Redford—suddenly made Woodward and Bernstein wealthy in a way that was all but unimaginable for two reporters whose combined annual salary in June 1972 had been about $30,000. The book also served as a crib sheet for Americans just as the scandal reached its pinnacle; a Wall Street Journal reviewer praised it as “a great guide for people like me who still have trouble figuring out where Ehrlichman begins and Haldeman ends.”III
The publication—and specifically, the excerpt in Playboy, which was the first word on the subject—revealed that the Post reporters had an apparently high-level inside source they called Deep Throat, a fact that astounded and fascinated readers and kicked off immediate, fevered speculation about the anonymous source’s identity.
Woodward had actually hoped to identify Felt in the book, but the former FBI deputy angrily rejected the proposition when Woodward called. “He exploded. ‘Absolutely not,’ ” Woodward recounted later. “ ‘Was I mad to even make such a request?’ ” Felt hung up, telling Woodward never to contact him again, so the reporter instead used the paper’s internal nickname. The literary device began a parlor game that would continue for decades and yield not just articles but entire books, college classes, and more investigations that parsed the finest details of the book, Woodward’s background, and the Watergate bread crumbs to figure out who “he” could be. Key suspects included Al Haig, Pat Buchanan, John Dean, and Patrick Gray, although a pantheon of less well-known players were also “outed” by sometimes even authoritative researchers: David Gergen, Fred Fielding, John Sears, and Diane Sawyer, among others.
