A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (147 page)

Congressional testimony, on July 13, 1973, revealed that all of the working conversations in the Oval Office were tape recorded. If there was a smoking gun implicating Nixon, lawmakers might be able find it. Paradoxically, Nixon had ordered the original taping system, which Johnson had installed, taken out, only to have replaced it later when he grew concerned that his Vietnam policies might be misrepresented.

A massive battle over the tapes and/or transcriptions of the tapes ensued, with Nixon claiming executive privilege and the Congress demanding access. The courts sided with Congress after a prolonged battle. On October 30, 1973, rather than surrender the tapes, Nixon fired the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. He had first ordered the attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to sack Cox, but Richardson refused and then resigned. Then the deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus, refused to fire Cox, and also resigned. This Saturday Night Massacre produced outrage in Congress and glee in the media, which now had Nixon on the ropes. A grand jury indicted Nixon’s close associates Chuck Colson, Haldeman, Erlichman, and the physically ailing former attorney general John Mitchell in hopes of obtaining evidence on Nixon himself, none of which was forthcoming.

Aware that he had no support in Congress or the media, Nixon tried one last appeal—to the American people. In a televised speech Nixon looked into the camera and said, “I am not a crook,” but the public abandoned him.
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An ABC poll conducted within days of the speech found that almost 60 percent of Americans did not believe “much of what the president says these days.”
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The House of Representatives then voted overwhelmingly to conduct an impeachment investigation. The Judiciary Committee, which would handle the case against Nixon, was dominated by Democrats (21 to 17). But possibly the most dangerous foe was a man on the committee staff named John Doar, a liberal Republican, who despised Nixon and planned to “deluge the committee in a blizzard of documentation [while working] with a few select members of the team…to make sure that they reached the only acceptable objective, the removal of Richard Nixon from the White House.”
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Doar empowered a young lawyer, Hillary Rodham, to explore the history of impeachment, specifically to find a loophole around the “high crimes and misdemeanors” phrase so that the committee could impeach Nixon over the bombing of Cambodia. She soon fed Doar a stream of position papers, arguing against limiting the investigation to criminal offenses as contrary to the will of the framers of the Constitution—a stunning recommendation, given that twenty years later, her husband and his advocates would be arguing just the
opposite,
that
only
“criminal” offenses could be grounds for impeachment.
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Hillary Rodham’s zealotry was unnecessary. Doing the math, Nixon knew that 18 of the Democrats would vote for articles of impeachment no matter what the evidence. All 21 did. Article II charged him with illegally using the powers of the executive, using the Internal Revenue Service to harass citizens, using the FBI to violate the constitutional rights of opponents, and knowing about—but taking no steps to prevent—obstruction of justice by his subordinates.
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Unlike Bill Clinton, twenty years later, who had a Senate disinclined to depose him, Nixon lacked a block of Senate support. To make matters worse, Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, had resigned in October 1973 after being indicted for bribery (while governor of Maryland) and after copping a plea to one charge of tax evasion.
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To replace Agnew, Nixon had appointed Michigan Congressman Gerald Ford, a moderate of the Rockefeller wing of the GOP and a person sure to draw little criticism from Democrats.

With the Middle East in turmoil, oil prices rose sharply in 1973. Inflation soared, and the economy—Nixon’s one hope of holding out against Congress—went into the tank. The House, preparing to vote on articles impeaching Nixon, was invested under the Constitution with the
sole
duty of establishing whether or not the actions constituted “high crimes” and whether they, in fact, violated the Constitution. If the House voted in favor of the articles (as it clearly would, in Nixon’s case), the Senate would conduct a trial (requiring a two-thirds vote to convict) supposedly based
solely
on guilt or innocence of the charges, not on the seriousness of the charge. Key Senate Republicans, including Barry Goldwater and Howard Baker, told Nixon that many Republican senators were going to cross the aisle to vote against a Republican president.
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Out of options, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, and Gerald Ford immediately became president. One month later, Ford issued a full and complete pardon for Richard Nixon. By then, Nixon had reached the apex as the liberals’ most hated target in America.

Richard Milhous Nixon made one last comeback. Over the years his reputation abroad and his firmness and flexibility in dealing with the Soviets and Chinese had made him a valuable resource for world leaders. He wrote books, gaining a reputation that might leave some to think that the Richard Nixon of August 9, 1974, and the Nixon of April 22, 1994, the day he died and drew praise from a throng of world leaders and past presidents, were two different people.

More than a few Washington analysts have suggested that the honor given Nixon at his funeral stuck in the craw of others who had held the highest office, including Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, both of whom had expended considerable effort on their own legacies. After a monstrously failed presidency, Carter became a regular on the international peace circuit, finally winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. Clinton, both during and after his presidency, deliberately shaped his policies and even specific actions with an eye toward how history would remember him. It was high irony indeed that by the time of his death, Richard Nixon had achieved broad-based respect that he had never enjoyed in life—and that he had lived long enough to make sure that five living American presidents attended his funeral and, even if unwillingly, paid homage to him.

Malaise and Recovery

H
aving endured one of the most socially destructive decades in the nation’s history, having lost a war for the first time, followed by the humiliation of a president’s resignation, the United States arguably was at its lowest ebb ever in 1974. Births out of wedlock increased at epidemic levels, the economy stood on a precipice, and leadership was nowhere to be found—politically, morally, or culturally. Other civilizations had fallen from a golden age into the depths of tyranny and decline in a few years. Would the United States of America?

The constitutional crisis the United States had just weathered would have extracted a painful toll without any other new pressures. But war, hatred, and conflict never take a vacation. As world leader, the United States found itself continually involved in hot spots around the globe. Not only did the communist bloc sense America’s weakness, but so did a wide range of minor foreign enemies, including small states that saw opportunities for mischief they otherwise would not have considered. As always—at least since the 1920s—the single person upon whom much of the world looked for a sign of American resolve and strength was the president of the United States.

Gerald Ford, Caretaker

Not many people wanted the job Gerald Ford inherited when Richard Nixon climbed aboard the official helicopter that took him into political exile on August 9, 1974. Ford immediately and seamlessly, under the terms of constitutional succession, moved into the Oval Office, as had Lyndon Johnson just over a decade earlier.

Nixon selected Gerald Ford in the wake of the Agnew scandal precisely because of Ford’s milquetoast personality. A former star football player at the University of Michigan, Ford displayed little of the ferocity or tenacity in politics that was demanded on the gridiron. A lieutenant commander in the navy, Ford had returned to civilian life to win a seat in the U.S. Congress, which he held for more than twenty years. His congressional career featured service on the controversial Warren Commission that had blamed the JFK assassination on Lee Harvey Oswald.
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He advanced to the position of minority leader, but he surrendered ground willingly and posed no obstacle to the Democratic majority. Ford struck many people as possessing only mediocre intelligence—Johnson said he was “so dumb he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time”—and he was notoriously clumsy because of an inner ear condition.
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This malady made him a target for every comedian on television, most notably Chevy Chase, whose
Saturday Night Live
skits featured the president stumbling and smacking people with golf balls.

Nevertheless, Ford had several attractive qualities, not the least of which was his personal honesty, a trait virtually no one doubted. After the lies of the previous fourteen years, the nation, like Diogenes, was seeking an honest man. And after a decade of turmoil, Ford’s bland personality provided much-needed relief from the intensity of a Nixon or the egomania of a Johnson. Once in the presidency, Ford’s unconfrontational nature ironically left him with few allies. Some conservatives abandoned the GOP, leaving the amiable Ford as alone politically in the White House as his predecessor. He also offended those out for Nixon’s scalp by pardoning Nixon for “any and all crimes” on September 8, 1974. Since Nixon had not been indicted for any crimes, not only did this prevent the attack dogs in Congress from continuing their harassment of the former president in private life, but it also took Nixon off the front pages of the newspapers. Most of all, it denied the media a chance to gloat over what journalists saw as “their” victory over Nixon.

Later, when commenting candidly about the Nixon pardon, Ford explained that he was stunned at the amount of legal work that he, the new president, would have had to participate in if any cases against Nixon went forward. The subpoenas for documentation alone, he noted, would have absorbed all of his staff’s time, and he could not spend 99 percent of
his
time on the affairs of one man. Critics, of course, claimed that Nixon had brought Ford in as a quid pro quo, that knowing his own resignation was imminent, Nixon protected himself with a pardon deal. Such a scenario fits neither Ford’s personality nor Nixon’s own perceptions of the state of things when he had chosen the vice president.

None of Nixon’s associates received pardons. By 1975, almost forty administration officials had been named in criminal indictments, including John Mitchell, John Erlichman, H. R. Haldeman, and G. Gordon Liddy. Charges included violations normally associated with the mob: fraud, extortion, illegal wiretapping, destruction of evidence, and obstruction of justice.
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It was a record for corruption and criminality that exceeded everything in the past, with the exception, perhaps, of Grant’s administration. Ford and Congress slowly uncovered violations of practice and law by both the FBI and the CIA, with the latter organization coming under new restrictions in 1974 that would subsequently prove short-sighted and, indeed, deadly. Meanwhile, public confidence in the office of the presidency had plummeted: a poll of that year revealed that more than 40 percent had “hardly any” confidence in the executive branch of government.
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North Vietnam immediately sensed a vacuum in American leadership. Already Congress had chipped away at the powers aggrandized by Kennedy, Johnson, then Nixon, and indeed all three presidents had overstepped their constitutional bounds. Congress placed several limitations on the executive, including the Jackson-Vanik and Stevenson Amendments of 1973–74, the Arms Export Control Act of 1975, and most important, the War Powers Act of 1974. The latter required a president to notify Congress within forty-eight hours if troops were dispatched overseas, and it allowed a window of only sixty days for those troops to continue operations without congressional ratification. These restrictions rightly attempted to redress the imbalance that had accumulated during fourteen years, but in many cases the laws hamstrung legitimate actions by presidents to deal with incidents long before they became major conflicts.

Congress also sought to seal its victory over the presidency through the budget process. Staff numbers exploded, and the House International Relations Committee staff tripled between 1971 and 1977. Overall, the ratio of unelected officials in Washington to elected representatives reached a stunning 5,400:1. Worse, it put Congress in the driver’s seat over Vietnam policy. Congress had already slashed military aid to South Vietnam. Once the North realized that Ford either could not or would not revive a bombing campaign, the South was ripe for a new invasion, which occurred in January 1975. ARVN forces evacuated northern provinces and within a matter of weeks, the communists surrounded Saigon. News footage showed American helicopters lifting off with U.S. citizens as helpless Vietnamese were kept off the choppers at gunpoint. Those images did not move Congress, where lawmakers repeatedly denied or ignored Ford’s urgent requests to act. More than a hundred thousand Vietnamese “boat people,” desperate to escape communism, took to the seas and suffered at the hands of pirates and the elements. Eventually, thousands of these Vietnamese immigrated to such far-flung locations as Los Angeles and Galveston, where they reestablished themselves to dominate the artificial fingernail businesses in the former (more than 50 percent of all nail salons were Vietnamese owned) and the fishing trade in the latter. They were fortunate. Of those who remained behind, more than a million were killed by the communist invaders during “reeducation” programs.

Dwight Eisenhower, lampooned by critics for espousing the domino theory, suddenly seemed sagacious. No sooner had the last Americans left Vietnam than a new communist offensive was under way in Cambodia. After the communist Khmer Rouge organization under Pol Pot conquered the country in April 1975, it embarked on a social reconstruction of the country unmatched even by Mao Tsetung’s indoctrination camps. More than 3.5 million people were forced out of cities into the countryside while communists rampaged through towns throwing every book they could find into the Mekong River. Sexual relations were forbidden, and married people could not talk to each other for extended periods of time. In mass public executions, entire families died together in the city squares. Although the western media ignored the developments, statistics eventually found their way into print. Almost 1.2 million Cambodians, or one fifth of the total population, were slaughtered in the “killing fields.”
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Laos, it should be noted, had already fallen. By the end of the 1970s, the only domino left was Thailand, and it certainly would have collapsed next if Soviet support of the North Vietnamese had not suddenly dried up. But in 1979, North Vietnam broke with the Cambodian communist government, reinvaded Cambodia, and united it with the North Vietnamese dictatorship.

Middle East Instability, Economic Crisis

On top of the collapse of Vietnam, the erosion of American credibility internationally also harmed the nation’s ability to maintain order in other Middle Eastern countries, with severe consequences for the economy. Understanding the events in the Middle East requires a review of the creation of the state of Israel in 1947. Following the revelations of the Holocaust, the European Jewish community revived demands for a Jewish state located in Palestine. In the Balfour Declaration, the British (who had governed the region after World War I through a mandate from the League of Nations after the partition of the Ottoman Empire) promised the World Zionist Organization a Jewish home in the traditional lands established in the Bible. Unfortunately, the British had also secretly guaranteed the Arabs the same land in return for an Arab uprising against the Turks. During the interwar period, the British curtailed Jewish migration to the region, which remained under the local control of Arab mufti.

For centuries, Jews in Europe had attempted to blend in, adopting local customs and languages and participating in the economic and political life of the European nations. Despite frequent and consistent anti-Jewish purges in almost every European country, the Jews remained optimistic they would be protected by democratic governments. Hitler changed all that. Jews concluded that no nation would ever protect them, and that their only hope of survival was through an independent Jewish state. Some European leaders agreed, and after the evidence of the Holocaust surfaced, Britain especially loosened immigration restrictions into Palestine.
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In America, a large, successful Jewish community had come into its own in the twentieth century. Roosevelt was the first to tap into the Jewish vote, which could swing such states as Illinois and New York.
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Chaim Weizmann of the World Zionist Organization, after encouraging words from British (and Jewish) leader David Ben-Gurion, appreciated the political pressure 5 million Jewish voters could bring, directly targeting American Jewish support after 1942.

Harry Truman played a key role in the formation of Israel. Roosevelt’s State Department opposed the plan, but Truman distrusted the “striped-pants boys” as he called them. Thus, when the newly formed United Nations General Assembly voted for the formation of a Jewish and an Arab state in territory formerly under the British mandate, it marked one of the rare times in the entire history of the United Nations that its membership substantially agreed with the American position. It is inconceivable that the tiny nation could have appeared at any other moment. Certainly, after 1947 the Soviets never would have permitted it, nor, of course, would the Arabs. Britain backed the plan only to the extent that it relieved the empire of her “Jewish problem.” Except for Truman, American leaders opposed the formation of Israel. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal complained that Jews exercised an undue influence over American policy. When Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, Truman quickly accorded her diplomatic recognition over the protests of the State Department and the Pentagon.