Being Nixon: A Man Divided (58 page)

Haig was also convinced that the tape was fatal. He later told Bob Woodward of
The Washington Post
, “You only had to read it once.” At the time, when Haig confronted Nixon with the transcript of the tape, the president protested that he had ordered the FBI to press on with the investigation when the CIA refused to get involved. Nixon
“waved his arm as if clearing off his desk,” Haig recalled to Woodward. Haig swore, “Goddamnit,” to try to make the gravity of the tape “sink in.”
²⁹

On July 27, the House Judiciary Committee voted 27 to 11 to pass the first article of impeachment, charging Nixon with obstruction of justice. Nixon was swimming at a beach near his house at the time. “I was getting dressed in the beach trailer when the phone rang and Ziegler gave me the news,” Nixon recalled.

That was how I learned that I was the first President in 106 years to be recommended for impeachment, standing in the beach trailer, barefoot, wearing old trousers, a Banlon shirt, and blue windbreaker emblazoned with the Presidential Seal.
³⁰

A day later, Nixon returned from California to a capital city feverish with rumor and expectation. On the night of July 30, Nixon couldn’t sleep. He took out a pad of notepaper from his bedside table and wrote the time—3:50
A.M.—
and began listing the pros and cons of resigning. He could see that he was putting the country through an ordeal, that he was crippled politically, but the idea of quitting was horrid to him. From his days sitting on the bench for Coach Newman through the Fund Scandal and the wilderness years in New York, he had built a whole persona around
never quitting
. At San Clemente, he had gazed at a portrait of his mother, remembering what a “saint” she was, but perhaps more clearly the words she had uttered as she lay dying: “Richard, don’t
you
give up. Don’t let anybody tell you that you are through.” As Nixon tried to make rational arguments for and against stepping down, his basic instincts kicked in. Shortly before dawn, Nixon turned the notepaper over and wrote on the back, “End career as a fighter.”
³¹

His staff had other ideas, however. Jim St. Clair, a trial lawyer hired by Nixon to argue his case before the House, had read the transcript of the June 23 tape and agreed with Buzhardt that Nixon
needed to resign. St. Clair and Buzhardt had become anxious about their own exposure, fearful that they would be accused of obstruction of justice if Nixon did not quickly turn over the tape. Nixon turned to Haig for his opinion. “Mr. President,” Haig said, “I am afraid that I have to agree with Fred and Jim St. Clair. I just don’t see how we can survive this one.” The president nodded “almost imperceptibly,” Haig recalled.
³²
By this point, Haig wanted Nixon to go. He was weary of serving as “Acting President,” and he had been jolted by the “smoking gun” tape. “He felt disquieted, sick, misused—like finding out your wife has had an affair,” recalled Haig’s personal assistant, Charles Wardell.
^33
,
*
¹

Nixon’s mood had been swinging between despondency and eerie calm. In an oral history for the Nixon Library, Haig recalled an astonishing scene as Nixon entered his final days in office. Haig claimed that Nixon told him, “In the army, you open the drawer, and you put a pistol in, and you close the drawer, and you leave, and the fellow takes care of himself. I’m beginning to think maybe you better put that pistol in my drawer.” Haig “didn’t know what to say,” he recalled. “We weren’t joking or kidding. He hadn’t had a Scotch. So I told the doctors to be careful what they gave him.”
³⁵

Nixon’s reason began to push back against his instincts. On Thursday, August 1, the president calmly told Haig that he had decided to resign. “His manner was cool, impersonal, matter-of-fact,” recalled Haig. Nixon said, “Al, it’s over. We’ve done our best. We haven’t got the votes. I can’t govern. Impeachment would drag on for six months. For the sake of the country, this process must end.” He told Haig to signal Gerry Ford to be ready.
³⁶

But Nixon still had to tell his family. He began with Julie, who came by his room at the Executive Office Building on the morning of August 2. Wearing a soft cashmere smoking jacket, sitting in the comfort
of his favorite easy chair, he told Julie “in a low, steady voice that he had no support left, that he would have to resign,” she recalled.

“My heart racing, I hurried across East Executive Avenue in the hot, hazy air,” Julie recounted. She was on her way to find her mother. “I felt as if my heart would break. I could hardly bear to tell her the fight was over, just as my father could not.”

Nixon had not told Pat of his decision. Julie found the First Lady in her bedroom, “which Lady Bird Johnson had decorated, and which Mother, in her practical and saving way, had not changed. As a result, the room was not a reflection of her,” Julie wrote, adding a note of self-abnegation to the pitiful scene. The loyal daughter continued:

Now she stood near the door, as if she had been waiting for something to happen or for someone with news. I told her immediately that Daddy felt he had to resign. A look of alarm spread across her face and she asked, “But why?”

I answered something like, “He has to for his own good or he’ll be impeached.”

Her mouth began to tremble. We embraced for a moment, our arms around each other very lightly, barely touching, knowing that if we drew any closer we would both break down and not let go. When I stood back I saw that Mother had tears in her eyes. For me, those tears that she shed so briefly were the saddest moment of the last days in the White House.

When Julie left, Pat went upstairs, found boxes, and started packing. She called Clement Conger, who worked with her on White House restoration projects and was helping her order new White House china, a cobalt blue plate with fluted edges. “I won’t explain, Clem, but don’t go ahead with the porcelain,” she said, in a wavering voice. “Call it off.”
³⁷

Tricia arrived from New York in mid-afternoon. At LaGuardia airport, she had been heckled and booed. She found her father in the Lincoln Sitting Room, seated with his feet up on the ottoman. He was
fussing with his pipe. Calmly, he explained the June 23 tape to her. She put her arms around him, kissed his forehead, and burst into tears. “You’re the most decent person I know,” she said.

Tricia, unlike Julie, almost never cried. “But when Daddy said, ‘I hope I have not let you down,’ the tragedy of his ghastly position shattered me,” she wrote in her diary.

One by one—Pat, Tricia, and Julie; their husbands Ed and David; and Bebe Rebozo—assembled in the Lincoln Sitting Room. The small, now-crowded air-conditioned room was cheerfully, if bizarrely, warmed by firelight even though it was a hot, humid August night outside. Manolo handed out transcripts of the June 23 tape and the discussion began. Tricia and Julie adamantly opposed resigning. Their husbands were less sure. Bebe said little, and Pat said almost nothing. “I am not sure she even looked at the transcript,” Julie recalled. But the First Lady’s opinion, when voiced, was clear and no different from her position all the other times she had seen her husband wobble. He should not give up, she said. He should fight to the finish.

“Was it worth it?” Nixon asked. His family told him what he needed to hear, and then they left him as they had found him, alone.

“My family’s courage moved me deeply,” Nixon recalled in his memoirs.
³⁸
He had intended to resign that Monday, when the tape transcripts were to be released to the public, but now he decided to wait. He wanted to see the reaction. He was clinging to hope. Later, William Safire would write:

Nixon’s last year in office was spent playing for time, hoping for a break, delaying as long as he could, always living with the knowledge that his guilt could be established, thinking he was watching a bad movie, and saying to himself, “Wait—it’ll get better,” as it got worse.
³⁹

The endgame began on Monday, as soon as the transcripts of the tapes were released at a 4
P.M
. press briefing. Nixon took his family
on a cruise aboard the
Sequoia
so that they wouldn’t “have to endure the ordeal of watching the evening news broadcasts,” Nixon wrote. “Everyone valiantly tried to make the evening as happy as possible….They talked about everything but what was on everybody’s mind.”

After dinner, as the yacht turned and headed back up the Potomac, under bridges that were crowded with newsmen and photographers—“we were the subject of a death watch,” Julie recalled—Nixon went below and lay down. He put up his swollen leg and tried to close his eyes. A few minutes later Rose appeared to read her shorthand notes of a conversation with Haig, who had been watching the news back at the White House. “Just tell them that this thing is coming about the way we expected,” Haig had told her.
⁴⁰

Back at the White House, sleep would not come. At 2
A.M.
, Nixon returned to the Lincoln Sitting Room. No fire had been laid, so he tried to build his own, and he promptly set off the fire alarm. At 3
A.M
. he returned to bed. “We had passed through the first firestorm, but it was still raging,” he recalled. “I knew that it would be following me for the rest of my life.”

A cabinet meeting the next day was “tense and subdued,” Nixon recalled. When the president started talking about long-range economic planning, the latest attorney general, William Saxbe, interjected, “Mr. President, don’t you think we should be talking about next week, not next year?” Nixon looked around the table. No one said a word, Saxbe recalled.
*
²
The president picked up his papers and left the room.
⁴²

The good-byes, the last-minute pleas and placations and lamentations had begun. Staffers greeted him with an unnaturally cheery, “Good morning, Mr. President!” when he walked by; the Secret Service agents looked on edge. Worried that the president might do
something desperate, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger passed the word that all commands to the troops from the White House must pass through him; years later, Deputy National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft scoffed at Schlesinger’s melodrama, saying that “Nixon wouldn’t even have known how to give the orders.”
⁴³

Nixon called Haldeman, who was making an eleventh-hour plea for a blanket pardon for all Watergate defendants, with amnesty for draft dodgers thrown in for equity’s sake. Haldeman sounded just as detached as if he was discussing revenue sharing, Nixon recalled. “As he talked my mind wandered back to the campaign days and the White House days, when his proud and brusque way of dealing with people had aroused fear in some and inspired loyalty in many others.” Nixon said good-bye without giving Haldeman an answer, which, Haldeman knew, meant no.
⁴⁴

At midday on Tuesday, Nixon told the faithful Rose that he was resigning. He picked up his yellow pad and wrote on the top, “Resignation Speech.” In her diary that night, Tricia wrote: “Rose in tears this afternoon told us (Mama, Julie, me) in the solarium that Daddy had irrevocably decided to resign…We must not let him down.”

On Wednesday afternoon, Senator Barry Goldwater appeared with a solemn delegation of Republican lawmakers. They had come to try to force him to resign—unaware that he had already decided. “I don’t have many alternatives, do I?” asked Nixon. The senators said nothing. “Never mind,” said Nixon. “There’ll be no tears from me. I haven’t cried since Eisenhower died.”
⁴⁵
Kissinger appeared, and Nixon and he wondered what Chairman Mao must be thinking.
⁴⁶

Across the globe
men and women were watching and wondering at the news emanating from the capital of the world’s greatest democratic republic.

During the Saturday Night Massacre, Nixon’s envoy to China, David Bruce, had written in his diary, “In Peking, while Washington burned, we fiddled…and saw our unhappy domestic political scene as through a glass darkly. We might as well be…isolated on another
planet.” Learning of Nixon’s resignation on August 9, Bruce wrote simply, “Hosanna.”
⁴⁷
In New Delhi, when Ambassador to India Patrick Moynihan got word, he wrote in his diary, “Nothing to do, so I got everybody out of bed and told the Marines to double the guard….Three Presidents destroyed. Kennedy by an assassin’s hand, Johnson by the hand of his enemies, Nixon by his own hand. I should think my string has run out.”
⁴⁸

On Wednesday night,
the family, joined by Rose, assembled in the White House Solarium. Entering the room, Nixon noticed that his wife sat up straight on the edge of the couch and “held her head at the slightly higher angle that is her only visible sign of tension, even to those who know her,” he wrote. She came over and kissed her husband. “We’re all very proud of you, Daddy,” she said. Nixon loved to stage-manage photos of himself and his family and large groups generally, and he had brought along the White House photographer, Ollie Atkins. “I could see from Mother’s expression that she was upset,” wrote Julie. “Softly, she explained to Ollie that no one really felt much like posing. But my father interrupted. He had requested the picture, he said, ‘for history.’ ” At first, Julie tried to hide behind her mother so her tears wouldn’t show. The group ate dinner in silence.
⁴⁹

At 9
P.M.
, Nixon called Kissinger. The White House operator found the secretary of state dining with Joe Alsop. “Could you come over right away?” Nixon asked. The president was a “basket case,” Kissinger later told friends. In his memoir, Kissinger recalled finding the president “slouched in the brown-covered chair, his legs on the settee, a yellow pad in his lap—a last crutch at the moment of despair.”

Nixon wanted to know: What would history say of him? Kissinger answered that history would say that he showed courage. “Depends who’s writing the history,” Nixon answered. For over an hour, they revisited their triumphs and tribulations. At one point, Nixon padded down the hallway to find the bottle of cognac they had
cracked when Kissinger reported the breakthrough to China. They raised a glass, two rivals and comrades in dramatic times. Kissinger began to weep. Nixon broke down, too.