The Arrogance of Power (81 page)

By the spring of 1973 Mitchell's patience had been strained to the limit. His inebriate wife, Martha, had been prone to sensational outbursts since the Watergate arrests, hinting to reporters that she was privy to dark secrets, claiming her husband was being made a scapegoat. So bizarre a figure did she cut, though, and so well known was her weakness for the bottle, that she caused only limited damage.

In April, John Mitchell had a scotch-laced conversation with White House correspondent Winzola McClendon, one she did not publish at the time. “Richard Nixon,” Mitchell said, “is lucky she [Martha] hasn't blown it all the way.” Ehrlichman, he went on, had run “a whole espionage operation.” Dean was an honest man whose function had been merely “to protect people in the White House.” It was a rare lapse, never repeated. Mitchell would die in 1988 without having betrayed Nixon.

On April 17 the president offered the Senate committee some partial concessions. There had been major developments in the case, he said, and no one should be granted immunity from prosecution. He would allow White House staff to testify. As Nixon spoke, a reporter noted, his hands were shaking.

The gravest blow to the administration, and to Nixon's confidence, was now imminent. The advice from the Justice Department was that the available evidence compromised both Haldeman and Ehrlichman and that they should resign. The president “knew by now that he had no running room left,” Len Garment recalled in 1997. “He described his feelings to me, rehearsing what he was going to say to Bob and John, that losing them was like losing his right and left arms. . . .”

Nixon's two closest aides were brought up to Camp David by helicopter and given the news separately. Nixon looked in “terrible shape,” Haldeman thought. He “began crying uncontrollably” in front of Ehrlichman.

The president came closer to accepting his culpability that day than he ever would again. He said he was “really the guilty one,” Haldeman's diary entry shows. “He said he's thought it all through, and that he's the one that started Colson on his projects. He was the one who told Dean to cover up, he was the one who made Mitchell Attorney General and later his campaign manager and so on. And that he now has to face that and live with it. . . .”

As he and Haldeman stood on the terrace of Aspen Lodge, Nixon seemed to share a deeply personal confidence. “You know, Bob,” he said, “there is something I've never told anybody before, not even you. Every night since I've been President, every single night before I've gone to bed, I've knelt down on my knees beside my bed and prayed to God for guidance and help in this job. Last night before I went to bed I knelt down, and this time I prayed I wouldn't wake up in the morning. I just couldn't face going on.”

At the time Haldeman was touched. Later, when he compared notes with Ehrlichman, he learned that Nixon had delivered precisely the same speech to
him. He was hurt, for he had believed he had a unique emotional bond with the president. “Now,” Haldeman observed later, “I see that this was just a conversational ploy—a debater's way of slipping into a different subject—used on both of us.”

It is a measure of Nixon's discomfort in human relationships that, when he shook Haldeman's hand that day, his closest aide realized that in seventeen years he had never done so before. Nixon and Haldeman would have occasional contact with each other in the future. Ehrlichman received one phone call from Nixon the following Christmas but never heard from him again. He was sent a signed copy of his former boss's memoirs in 1978, but was less than delighted. “My name was misspelled,” Ehrlichman told the author, “the ultimate insult.”

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Nixon appeared on television on April 30 to announce to the nation that his top aides, as well as Attorney General Kleindienst and John Dean, were resigning. He accepted responsibility, but no blame, for the Watergate abuses. They had been concealed as much from him, he claimed, as from the public. Then he rambled on about how most people in politics were good people, how he loved America and wanted his remaining days in office to be the best in American history, and how he hoped everyone would pray for him.

The president appeared wan and shaken, tearful as he stepped off camera. When he retreated to the Lincoln Sitting Room, some heard him say, as he had to Haldeman and Ehrlichman, that he hoped he would not wake up in the morning.

Less than an hour later, however, he was on the phone complaining to Haldeman that only one cabinet member, Caspar Weinberger, had called to praise his speech. Nixon slurred his words as he said: “Goddamn it, I'm never going to discuss this sonofabitching Watergate thing again. Never, never, never, never.” Then, as the slurring grew more pronounced, he told Haldeman he loved him. He loved Ehrlichman too. He hoped his having ended the speech with “God bless America” had gone over all right.

Nixon placed other similar calls that night, and the sound of his voice on the tape suggests he was either drunk or perhaps mixing alcohol with pills. When Dean had visited him one night earlier that month, he had smelled liquor on the president's breath and seen him reach down into his desk drawer for a pill bottle. He had trouble getting the cap off, Dean noticed. Just weeks earlier, Nixon had received a visit from Jack Dreyfus, who had introduced him to the drug Dilantin. That may have been the occasion when, as Dreyfus told the author, he provided the president with another batch of a thousand pills.

Those who closely observed Nixon had been concerned about his condition for some time. The UPI's Helen Thomas had noted that “his eyes seemed not to see us” during an interview. Checking a press conference transcript against a tape recording, John Osborne had written “tremor” beside ten
passages. Secret Service agent Dennis McCarthy, escorting Nixon back to the family quarters after the April 17 address, found himself with a man in distress.

“We had walked only a few feet,” McCarthy recalled, “just far enough to be out of sight of the office, when he abruptly stopped, leaned against one of the columns, and began to cry . . . his shoulders heaved as he sobbed, and he took a handkerchief from his pocket and held it against his eyes. He stood there for at least a full minute, until he seemed to get control of himself, straightened up, and walked on without ever saying a word to me. . . .”

Days earlier, sounding “highly agitated,” Nixon had phoned Henry Kissinger and asked if it was time to “draw the wagons around the White House.” Kissinger murmured something noncommittal. Two weeks later the president made a strange remark to press aide Ziegler. “Good God Almighty,” he said, decrying the attacks on him, “. . . the whole hopes of the whole goddamned world, of peace, Ron, you know where they rest? They rest right here in this damned chair. . . . The press has got to realize that . . . whatever they think of me, they've got to realize I'm the only one at the present time in this whole wide blinking world that can do a goddamn thing, you know. Keep it from blowing up . . .” “Yes, sir,” Ziegler tactfully responded.

The firing of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Ziegler thought, was Nixon's lowest emotional moment. “He looked out of the window and said, ‘Ron, it's over.' And I knew he was referring to himself and the presidency.” The next day, when the president saw an FBI agent posted in front of Haldeman's office door to prevent unauthorized removal of documents, he physically shoved the man. Then he summoned an immediate cabinet meeting.

“No sooner had the President sat down,” recalled Kleindienst, then in his last hours as attorney general, “than he began pointing his finger at me in an agitated manner.” Nixon was still raging about the guard he had found posted outside Haldeman's office, and wanted someone to blame. When the tirade continued, Kleindienst walked out.

Nixon headed for Key Biscayne after the resignations of Haldeman and Ehrlichman. He reportedly spent his days there sitting silently with Rebozo and his nights, away from Pat, in a converted office some distance from the house.

He seemed in good form a few weeks later, at a White House dinner for prisoners of war recently released from captivity in North Vietnam. Behind the backs of the freed servicemen, though, Nixon is said to have made disparaging remarks. He threw away gifts they had brought him.
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During the election campaign the previous year, according to one of a fifteen-strong team of CIA psychologists, all but one had concluded that the president “lied in public most of the time.” He had continued to lie, liberally, in 1973. In March he had authorized Senate Republican leader Hugh Scott to say in his
name that the White House had nothing to hide. The tapes show he gave a similar false assurance to Billy Graham.

“I don't give a shit what happens,” Nixon had said to Mitchell on March 22. “I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up or anything else, if it'll save it. . . .” He had proffered the sly lawyer's advice on how to avoid telling the truth without actually committing perjury: “. . . just be damned sure you say ‘I don't remember; I can't recall. . . .' ” He coolly informed Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen: “I don't lie to people.” Then, the very next day, he told Haldeman that Magruder was “supposed to lie like hell” before the grand jury.

John Ehrlichman likened the Nixon of early 1973 to “some sea anemone which recoils and closes when it is threatened. I began to feel that he didn't know what the truth was. He didn't know what he had said, didn't know what he had done, and the fact was whatever he was saying was truth at that particular moment.”

Nixon actually spoke of resigning that spring, sixteen months before the final fall. “Maybe,” he told Kissinger during one after-dinner phone session, “we'll even consider the possibility of, frankly, just throwing myself on the sword . . . and letting Agnew take it. What the hell.” Kissinger told him not even to consider it.

Two weeks later, when speechwriter Ray Price was working on the Haldeman-Ehrlichman resignation speech, the president again floated the notion that he too could quit. If Price agreed, Nixon said as if past caring, he should just “write it into the next draft.” The president seemed “unraveled . . . distraught,” Price recalled. “. . . I was very concerned about his state of mind.”

Nixon brought up the subject of resignation twice more in the weeks that followed, both times with his family. Pat urged him to fight on, as did his daughters, arguing that the country needed him.

Nixon wavered between despair and defiance. Ehrlichman, who had dared mention the possibility that he might be impeached, recalled his reaction as having been flat, “like dropping a dead cat into the Kool-Aid.”
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Weeks later Nixon would be claiming to Alexander Haig, Haldeman's replacement, that he, the president, was “the one person who is totally blameless in this. . . .” “I wouldn't give a damn,” he told Kissinger, “if they proved red-handed that I was there in the Watergate, you know, and wearing a red beard, collecting the evidence. Hell, I wouldn't even consider—the President of the United States isn't going to resign . . . not over this chicken shit stuff.”

The atmosphere at the White House was by now growing increasingly surreal. “I came away feeling very comfortable,” said one senior member of Congress after a meeting with Nixon in the Cabinet Room. “It was obvious that he was trying too hard to appear normal, as if nothing had gone wrong.”

Kissinger noticed in early April that the president was no longer paying proper attention to business. Gone were the plethora of annotations he had
habitually appended to memorandums. Once, presented with a document that required him to indicate his preferences, Nixon checked
all
the boxes.

Kissinger considered what he was seeing nothing less than “the disintegration of a government that a few weeks earlier had appeared invulnerable. The President lived in the stunned lethargy of a man whose nightmares had come true. . . . Like a figure in Greek tragedy, he was fulfilling his own nature and destroying himself.”

A year to the day after the Watergate arrests, when John Dean was about to testify before the Senate, Nixon received the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. He had insisted on going ahead with the summit, Kissinger believed, because “to concede that his ability to govern had been impaired would accelerate the assault on his presidency.” Yet the fact was, in Kissinger's view, that Watergate had “deprived him of the attention span he needed to give intellectual impetus to SALT,”—the arms control talks.

As Nixon was seeing Brezhnev off at an air base in California, the Soviet leader wandered away unexpectedly to chat with the press. Instead of taking this in stride, Nixon snapped angrily that his counterpart had surely said all he needed to already. It was a gesture of considerable rudeness, a diplomatic discourtesy.

“By the end of the visit,” Kissinger gathered from Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, “the Soviet party understood that the summit had been overshadowed by Watergate. . . . More gravely, the summit began to convince the Soviet leaders that Nixon's problems might turn out to be terminal.” This perception of U.S. weakness at the top, Kissinger has suggested, encouraged the Soviets to risk acting as boldly as they would less than four months later, when war erupted in the Middle East.

The “domestic passion play,” as Kissinger called Watergate, now threatened to enfeeble the nation, not only the man.