Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (80 page)

August 5
In another televised address, Nixon releases transcripts of a conversation with chief of staff H. R. Haldeman. The transcript shows that, six days after the break-in, Nixon ordered a halt to the FBI investigation of the affair. Nixon concedes that he failed to include this information in earlier statements, what he calls “a serious omission.” This is the “smoking gun” that everybody has been looking for. Following the speech, Nixon’s remaining congressional support disappears.

August 8
President Nixon announces his resignation, effective noon the following day. The decision comes in the wake of his revelation three days earlier, after which key Republican congressmen told him he would probably be impeached and convicted.

August 9
President Nixon formally resigns and leaves for California. Vice President Gerald Ford is sworn in as president.

August 21
President Ford nominates Nelson Rockefeller, the wealthy governor of New York and a three-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, as his choice for vice president.

September 8
President Ford grants Richard Nixon a “full, free and absolute pardon . . . for all offenses against the United States which he . . . has committed or may have committed or taken part in while President.”

1975

January 1
Four of the former White House staffers charged with obstruction are found guilty. They are H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, and White House attorney Robert Mardian. A fifth, Nixon assistant Kenneth Parkinson, is acquitted. The Watergate charges against Charles Colson are dropped after he pleads guilty to crimes connected with the Ellsberg-psychiatrist break-in. A seventh defendant, Gordon Strachan, is tried separately.

1976

In the presidential election, Jimmy Carter narrowly defeats President Ford. Besides the economic problems facing the country, Carter’s victory is widely attributed to the post-Watergate atmosphere of cynicism and a very specific rejection of Ford for his pardon of Nixon in September 1974.

The final accounting of the Watergate affair produced an impressive list of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” as the Constitution labels impeachable offenses. Some of them seem laughably innocuous in retrospect. But others were offenses against the law, against individual citizens, and against the Constitution itself. The Watergate “rap sheet” breaks down into five general categories, as follows:

1. BREAKING AND ENTERING

In the wake of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg became the prime target of the “plumbers.” One of the group’s first missions was to break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist and steal Ellsberg’s confidential medical records. Although they got in, they were unable to find any incriminating or embarrassing material about Ellsberg.

Some of the same team members later planned the break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices to install listening devices. This job was ordered by White House officials and with the knowledge of some of the president’s closest advisers.

2. ILLEGAL CONTRIBUTIONS

A secret slush fund, controlled by Attorney General John Mitchell, was set up to finance a campaign of “dirty tricks” against key Democratic Party figures. Some of this money was used to pay the Watergate burglars for the job and later to keep them silent.

The slush fund was built out of illegal campaign contributions solicited by Nixon officials from some of the country’s largest corporations, who thought they were buying “access” to the president. Other contributions were made to derail criminal investigations or antitrust activities going on in the Justice Department.

3. DIRTY TRICKS

Like the “plumbers,” the dirty tricks team was set up in the White House for the purpose of damaging and embarrassing key Democrats. In fact, the Democrats didn’t need any help—they were doing just fine by themselves. The activities ranged from ordering pizzas delivered to Democratic campaign offices to forging letters that were used to discredit and embarrass Democratic leaders like Senators Edmund Muskie and Henry Jackson.

Using material he culled from the Pentagon Papers, E. Howard Hunt forged cables that implied that President John Kennedy ordered the toppling and assassination of Vietnam’s prime minister Diem in 1963. Hunt then tried unsuccessfully to plant these cables with major news magazines.

An “enemies list” was created, an extensive collection of opposition politicians, entertainers, newsmen, and other prominent public figures deemed disloyal by the White House. The list was used to target the people that the White House wanted to “screw” through the use of selected federal agencies. The list included Jane Fonda, Bill Cosby, and CBS newsman Daniel Schorr.

4. COVER-UP/OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE

White House officials, from the president down to lower-echelon staffers, ordered the payment of hush money from the campaign slush fund to the Watergate conspirators. These men also orchestrated the cover-up of White House involvement in the conspiracy.

President Nixon secretly pledged clemency to the Watergate burglars in return for their silence.

L. Patrick Gray, acting head of the FBI and in line for appointment to the permanent job of director, turned over FBI files on Watergate to White House staffers.

Nixon ordered ranking CIA officers to dissuade the FBI from investigating Watergate.

Incriminating evidence in E. Howard Hunt’s White House safe was removed and destroyed.

Two of the White House tapes subpoenaed by the special prosecutor were discovered to be missing. Another tape contained a crucial eighteen-minute gap, the result of a deliberate erasure.

5. MISCELLANEOUS OFFENSES AND REVELATIONS

Nixon had used more than $10 million in government funds for improvements on his private homes in Florida and California, ostensibly in the name of “security.” (The House did not include this charge as an impeachable offense. It was deemed a personal offense rather than an act against the state.)

Nixon had taken illegal tax deductions on some papers donated to a presidential library.

The illegal secret war against Cambodia was revealed.

What was the real payback for these abuses? President Nixon resigned in disgrace. But he was quickly pardoned, guaranteeing that his pension checks would keep coming. Within a short time, Nixon was “rehabilitated” by his party and the press, gradually easing his way back into a new role as “elder statesman” and foreign policy expert. Nixon died in 1994 and was eulogized by Democratic president Bill Clinton, whose wife, Hillary, had once been an assistant on the House Judiciary Committee and was involved in researching impeachment history for the Committee. (She and her husband would, of course, learn much more about impeachment, along with the rest of the country, in 1998, when Clinton became the second president in American history to be impeached. See Chapter 9.)

Liddy and Hunt both went to prison. Liddy wrote a book called
Will,
which was turned into a television miniseries. He later became a nationally syndicated radio talk show host, appealing to an extremely conservative audience. Hunt continued to write spy novels. John Mitchell was jailed and disbarred. His book was rejected by its publisher. Mitchell died in 1988.

Haldeman and Ehrlichman, the two aides closest to Nixon, also served brief jail terms. Both wrote successful books. John Dean served four months, but wrote
Blind Ambition,
his memoir of the Watergate affair, a best-seller also turned into a television miniseries.

Many of the other minor characters in Watergate served brief prison terms. A spate of legislation addressing the issues of ethics in government, campaign financing, and presidential powers all followed in Watergate’s wake. The ensuing years brought more investigations that further revealed the extent of the abuses committed by the FBI and the CIA in the name of national security. More laws were passed.

Watergate and those revelations cost the Republicans the White House in 1976, when Gerald Ford, the man who pardoned Nixon, was defeated by Jimmy Carter, who ran as an “outsider” pledged to rid Washington of its corruption. New campaign financing laws went into effect, in an attempt to limit the impact of illegal campaign funds. It was assumed that such abuses were now in check and that nobody in the White House could manage such an illegal undertaking again.

How did OPEC cripple America during the 1970s?

The international hot spots during the fifties and sixties were Cold War battles waged in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. But in the late sixties and early seventies, the scene shifted. The Middle East emerged as the world’s most significant flash point, a political and military battlefield in which superpower rivalries took a backseat to an enmity as old as the Bible. As Arabs and Jews struggled over the existence of Israel and the future of the Palestinian Arabs, the United States got caught between a rock and a hard place.

Almost from the moment Israel was born in 1948 out of their war of independence, Israel occupied a singular, untouchable position in American foreign policy. This unique status was based on a tight web of philosophical, religious, social, political, and strategic conditions. After the horrors of the Holocaust, Americans endorsed a homeland for the Jews. Culturally, Americans felt a kinship with Israelis and viewed with admiration the remarkable agricultural, industrial, and economic island they had created in the desert. The Israeli determination to build a nation seemed to mirror the pioneer spirit Americans romantically viewed as their own. The Israelis—many of them transplanted Europeans, along with American Jews—sounded, looked, and acted like Americans.

The Arabs, on the other hand, rode camels, wore funny robes, and carried around mats for praying at odd hours of the day. The typical American view of Arabs as rather backward was seemingly confirmed in a series of brief wars in which Israel easily defeated larger combined Arab armies, expanding its territories with each conquest. While the idea of Israel was widely accepted, the displacement of Palestinians was disregarded.

On the simplistic American scale of good versus bad, Israel was democratic and pro-Western. Strategically, Israel was a reliable client state in the midst of unstable Arab lands. For years, while these Arab states had remained in the control of Western oil companies, the American position was comfortable.

But as time passed, that position was transformed from one of unequivocal alliance with Israel to a more slippery footing, greased by oil diplomacy. Beginning in the 1960s, the Arabs increasingly took control of their valuable resource, and the balance of power began to shift. The seesaw tilting toward the Israelis got its most violent bounce after the October 1973 Yom Kippur War. Again the Israeli army prevailed, but its cloak of invincibility had been torn. While Israel beat back the combined offensive of several Arab states, Egyptian armies crossed the Suez and retook territory in the Sinai held by Israel since the Six-Day War of 1967.

But that was only a small part of the shifting sands of Middle East power politics. In an effort to compel the Israelis to return the lands captured in 1967, the Arab nations cut off oil shipments to the United States, Japan, and Western Europe in a boycott that precipitated the first great “energy crisis” of the 1970s. This boycott was made possible by the enormous reserves of petroleum controlled by the Middle Eastern countries, especially the Saudis, who were members of a group called OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries). Formed in 1960 by the world’s principal oil exporters, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, Iraq, and Venezuela, OPEC lacked economic clout until the 1973 Arab boycott demonstrated its power in a world guzzling oil and dependent on other petroleum-related products. (Besides the obvious gasoline and home heating oil, hundreds of other products, such as plastics, fertilizers, paint, and ink, are petroleum based.)

In the United States, the boycott caused mayhem. A series of energy-saving measures were instituted, from Sunday closings of gas stations to a rationing system based on license plate numbers (plates having even numbers could buy gas one day; odd-numbered plates could buy it the next). Speed limits were lowered; environmental standards were relaxed; a new generation of gasoline mileage targets were set for automakers. American car companies, which had ignored the market for inexpensive, fuel-efficient cars pioneered by the Europeans and Japanese, soon found their once imperturbable empire crumbling around their expensive, gas-guzzling showboats. Overnight, a generation unaccustomed to the kind of sacrifices made during the Depression and World War II reacted angrily to the idea that a bunch of Arabs could shackle that great American freedom—owning and driving a car. As gas lines lengthened, frustration boiled over into fistfights and even gas-pump homicides. A bit of the American fabric was unraveling.

After the Arab boycott was lifted in March 1974, the future was altered. Having tasted power through the boycott, the OPEC members realized the control they actually possessed. Preboycott oil prices of about $3 per barrel rose to nearly $12 in 1974. The end of the boycott did not bring a return to the old pricing system. Oil prices stayed high, controlled by Arabs who could make the oil flow in a gush or just a trickle. The non-Arab OPEC members, such as Venezuela and Nigeria, were quite content to allow the prices to go as high as the Arabs wanted. American oil companies eagerly seized on the perception and reality of higher costs to force their prices up as well, bringing new profits to the oil companies at the expense of the American economy.