Being Nixon: A Man Divided (52 page)

It is hard to explain this failure of judgment, the most critical mistake Nixon ever made. Favoring hush money over full disclosure was a moral lapse, regardless of whether Nixon had committed a crime, but the reasons for his actions are complex and not easy to sort out. It is generally true, as his defenders have argued, that Nixon was continuing to view his problems as political when they were by now legal—criminally so.
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But this explanation begs deeper questions. Nixon suffered from a blind spot brought on by mixed motives, some of them decent but ultimately fatal to his presidency. His need to put a positive spin on calamitous events is in some ways admirable, but in this case he was fooled, or he fooled himself. His analytical powers, his early warning system, failed. He saw Dean’s “cancer on the presidency” warning as just one more crisis to be bluffed and battled through. And he was further done in by his incapacity to deliver bad news to the people who most needed to hear it.

The next day,
on the afternoon of Thursday, March 22, Nixon brought together Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Dean in his Executive Office Building hideaway. Mitchell had flown down from his law firm
in New York. It was the first—and only—time the president invited the main actors in Watergate to face each other in his presence. The four men had met in Haldeman’s office beforehand. There had been “nervous pleasantries and indirect ribbing, but no confrontation,” Dean recalled. “It was as if four men were discussing adultery; each knew the others were cheating, each was reluctant to admit it first.”
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The conversation was no more forthcoming in Nixon’s presence. There were jokes about a “modified, limited hang-out” (Ehrlichman the phrasemaker, again). “Anticipated Armageddon never happened,” wrote James Rosen, Mitchell’s biographer and Watergate historian. “Instead, after strained pleasantries, the session swiftly degenerated into the kind of aimless, purposeless colloquy Nixon favored.”
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Nixon made no attempt to get to the heart of the matter—who was responsible for the Watergate break-in and cover-up and who should bear the blame. After a while, Nixon cleared the room to meet alone with Mitchell.

It was the last time the two old friends would meet during Nixon’s presidency. Nixon immediately journeyed into the past, recalling how Ike had forced the resignation of Sherman Adams, his chief of staff, for taking illegal payments. “Now let me make this clear,” said Nixon. “I don’t want it to happen with Watergate.” Eisenhower, in Nixon’s view, had made a mistake, one that Nixon would not repeat. He grew impassioned: “I don’t give a shit what happens. I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up or anything else, if it’ll save, save the plan,” Nixon spluttered. Then he calmed down: “And I would particularly prefer to do it the other way, if it’s going to come out that way anyway. And that’s my view, that with the number of jackass people that they’ve got that they can call, they’re going to….” Nixon paused and rephrased his thought. “The story that’ll get out, through leaks, charges, and so forth, innuendo, will be a hell of a lot worse than the story they’re going to get out just by letting it out there.”
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Having come out on both sides—for covering up and coming clean—Nixon did not choose either. Rather, he continued to wander into his own past. “Eisenhower—that’s all he ever cared about. Christ. ‘Be sure he was clean.’ ” Nixon began to think back to his own humiliation in 1952, the Fund Crisis and the agony of the Checkers Speech. Nixon would not be a self-protecting prig. “I don’t look at it that way,” he said to Mitchell, who as usual said very little. “And I just—that’s the thing I am really concerned with. We’re going to protect our people if we can.”
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The next morning,
Friday, March 23, Judge Sirica informed his crowded courtroom that he had a “surprise.” He began to read aloud a letter to him from one of the Watergate burglars, James McCord, the former CIA man and security chief for the Committee to Re-Elect: “There was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent….”

Reporters began to run for the phones. “Bingo!” exclaimed
Washington Post
editor Ben Bradlee.
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Watergate was no longer just a “Washington story.” In his memoir, Bradlee recalled, “I was so damned excited I couldn’t sit down. I called Mrs. Graham….”
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Nixon was in his study in Key Biscayne. “Bombshell,” he dictated to his diary. Nixon tried to rationalize the news that the cover-up had broken. “I suppose this is something that had to be expected at some point,” he continued. But the news that McCord was talking to the prosecutors, even if what he had to say was mostly hearsay from Liddy, galvanized Nixon’s aides. For months, Ehrlichman had been maneuvering against his old rival Mitchell, hoping to get “the Big Enchilada,” as Ehrlichman called the former attorney general, to take the fall.
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Nixon finally seemed ready to go along, though grudgingly.
“From a combination of hypersensitivity and a desire not to know the truth in case it turned out to be unpleasant, I had spent the last ten months putting off a confrontation with John Mitchell,” Nixon recalled with rare self-candor. “Now it seemed impossible to avoid.” For the sake of everyone else, Mitchell would have to admit guilt for the break-in and cover-up.

But, as ever, Nixon could not stand to deliver the news himself. He sent Ehrlichman, armed with a little speech the president had prepared, to face Mitchell: “I told Ehrlichman to tell Mitchell that this was the toughest decision I had ever made—tougher than Cambodia, May 8 [mining Haiphong Harbor], and December 18 [the Christmas bombing] put together. I said he should tell Mitchell that I simply could not bring myself to talk to him personally about it.” He added a vow that Mitchell “would never go to prison.”
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As it turned out, Mitchell would not admit anything (and indeed, may have been innocent of ordering the actual break-in, though he was more generally culpable).
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Mitchell did say that Dean had talked Magruder into perjuring himself, Ehrlichman reported to the president. “And what does Dean say about it?” Nixon asked. “Dean says it was Mitchell and Magruder,” Ehrlichman answered and gave a wry smile. “It must have been the quietest meeting in history, because everybody’s version is that the other two guys talked.”
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On March 28,
Nixon’s osteopath, Dr. Kenneth Riland, arrived at the White House to treat the president and his retinue of patients on the White House staff and found Henry Kissinger in a state of high agitation. Sitting on Riland’s “treatment table,” Kissinger poured out a gossipy and mean-spirited tale to Riland, which the doctor recorded in his diary:

He says…the President is concentrating entirely on Watergate and he, Henry, is doing the entire foreign policy. He told me confidentially that Bob Haldeman is crying his eyes out and Henry went to him and said, “You better find out who the top
man is and stop this thing.” Well, quite frankly, Henry thinks it goes right on up to and including the President; and he says the President is too greedy. I can hardly see that, but perhaps he’s right; anything can happen.

Nixon, on the other hand, was cool, or pretending to be so, when Riland treated him after Kissinger. Riland had learned to read Nixon, or so he thought. In May 1972, as Nixon was gambling the Moscow Summit by mining Haiphong Harbor, Riland had recorded, “I am beginning to recognize when he’s under pressure. He underplays all his actions, whistles, lets me take the initiative regarding conversation….” Now, with his presidency shaken and his aides panicking, “Nixon does not appear worried or excited or upset,” Riland wrote in his diary.
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But the president was masking his anxiety, which showed up in other, familiar ways. In January, Riland had prescribed a stiff dose of pharmacology to battle Nixon’s insomnia. “He is still unable to sleep and continually looking for a new pill,” Riland had recorded on January 24. “I again suggest Valium 5 mg. a half hour before bed and a Seconal before retiring.” Now, two months later, Riland wrote, “I discussed his sleeping pills, and the valium is working, but he still says he can’t sleep, and I’m beginning to understand why.”
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The bad news
kept breaking. On Sunday afternoon, April 15, after the White House worship service, Richard Kleindienst, Mitchell’s successor as attorney general, appeared at Nixon’s hideaway in the Executive Office Building. Kleindienst was red-eyed from staying up all night and near tears. His voice choked and broke as he told the
president some alarming information. John Dean had gone over to the other side. He had gotten himself a white-collar crime lawyer—one, it turned out, with close connections to the Kennedys
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—and had gone to the prosecutors hoping to make a deal. He would tell all in exchange for immunity from prosecution. The White House counsel was accusing Haldeman and Ehrlichman of obstruction of justice.
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Dean was telling prosecutors that Ehrlichman had told him to “deep six” materials from Hunt’s safe after the break-in and informing them of the $350,000 authorized by Haldeman to pay legal fees and hush money. Trying to appear unperturbed, Nixon asked what the evidence was.

Later that afternoon, Kleindienst returned with Henry Petersen, a career government lawyer who ran the Justice Department’s criminal division. Petersen was wearing a smudged T-shirt, sneakers, and blue jeans; he had been working on his boat when Kleindienst summoned him on a Sunday afternoon. The Justice Department official acknowledged that the evidence against Haldeman and Ehrlichman was not solid. But he said, “The question isn’t whether or not there is a criminal case that can be made against them that will stand up in court, Mr. President. What you have to realize is that these two men have not served you well. They already have, and in the future will, cause you embarrassment, and embarrassment to the presidency.”

Nixon resisted. “I can’t fire men simply because of the appearance of guilt. I have to have proof of their guilt.”

Petersen “straightened,” Nixon recalled, and said, “What you have just said, Mr. President, speaks very well of you as a man. It does not speak well of you as a President.”
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In late March,
as Watergate was erupting, Nixon had met with all the White House secretaries on “Secretaries’ Day.” He spoke for twenty minutes, without notes, about how he would be lost without them. “He was warm, witty, relaxed,” observed Douglas Parker, a young White House lawyer.
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Some eighteen months earlier, Jim Schlesinger had seen the same personable Nixon at a speech at the
opening of a power plant in Walla Walla, Washington. “He spoke off the cuff and he was relaxed and delightful,” recalled Schlesinger. “I thought, here was the man from Yorba Linda, this must be how he feels with his own people, real Americans.” But on the plane, Schlesinger watched uncomfortably as the First Lady tried to “be affectionate with the president, and he just brushed her off,” recalled Schlesinger.
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That was not so unusual. Schlesinger and other cabinet officers did not see the quiet moments of tenderness that the Nixons hid. At Nixon’s second inaugural in January, the solicitor general, Robert Bork, had thought that Pat’s face looked like a “death mask.” It did not go unnoticed by the press that Pat failed to kiss her husband at the swearing in.
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But the reporters did not see the First Couple holding hands behind the podium. In his diary that night, Nixon expressed relief that the First Lady had not embarrassed him with a public display of affection—and he recorded his pride that she had refused a Secret Service order to sit down in the open-top limousine when some spectators along the parade route began throwing garbage.
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At Key Biscayne over Easter weekend, “my father was more tense and uncommunicative than I ever remembered him,” Julie recalled. “He had withdrawn into his own world and away from the family.” Pat, meanwhile, “spent most of her time reading in a lounge chair beneath several palms, a small oasis of escape in our yard.” Later, Julie confided to Bill Safire:

He didn’t try to cheer Mother up, and that was very rare. In Key Biscayne, around 5 in the afternoon he’d go for a swim, and came back not saying anything, and after dinner he was feeling low. You know how Mother is, always thinking of other people, she wanted him to know that we were with him all the way, but he was just closed off.

I felt he wasn’t giving her enough credit for having such confidence in him, so during a movie I sat next to him and said, “Mother’s trying so hard to make things right, and you don’t
realize it. It’s hard for her too.” He just said, “I guess so,” and all through the movie I felt horrible that I had blurted that out, he didn’t need any more burdens from us, but then after it was over he turned to me and said, “You’re right, it’s hard for her too. I’ll try.” And he did.

Pat “felt helpless,” Julie recalled. “She had long ago come to understand that my father did not want his family to be involved in his political decisions. He liked to tackle problems by turning them over and over again in his mind until they became digested and resolved. It was a solitary process, and because both my parents were very private people, their relationship was a delicate, private one that did not allow for much second guessing.”
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Pat and the girls did try subtle—or not so subtle—forms of suasion. They had conducted a quiet but persistent campaign to undermine Haldeman because they believed that the chief of staff had isolated the president—from his own family, among others. In January, after the staff lodge at Camp David had been rebuilt, Pat and Bebe Rebozo, “knowing that words of criticism would not be as effective with my father as a firsthand view,” decided to show the president the new lodge, Julie recalled. The huge living area, with its cathedral ceiling, had been reserved for senior staff by Haldeman. The room was empty. Then the First Lady and Rebozo showed Nixon a small room, “just crowded to overflowing with the doctors, military aides, and helicopter pilots,” Julie recorded in her diary.