The Wars of Watergate (105 page)

Burch’s group coordinated Watergate strategy; it did not formulate it. Lichenstein particularly remembered the frustration of dealing with Buzhardt, who seemed oblivious to the seriousness of the President’s problems. Even after the ominous questions St. Clair encountered at the Supreme Court hearing on July 8, Buzhardt told the Burch group that he expected a unanimous opinion in the President’s favor. The group, in fact, believed that St. Clair had performed dreadfully. Burch and Lichenstein also could not understand why Buzhardt did nothing to enhance the quality of his tape machine after Burch heard one tape and said that he could understand nothing. Similarly, they thought Buzhardt responsible for the inaccurate transcriptions and the consequent embarrassment they suffered from facing corrections by the Judiciary Committee. Distrust between Burch and his aides on the one hand, and between Haig and Buzhardt on the other, extended back to the President’s release of the tapes in late April. Burch told Lichenstein that Haig and Buzhardt had assured him that Watergate would be resolved in the President’s favor, a statement which Burch incorporated in a speech he was to make—much to his later embarrassment and regret.
¹³

In the aftermath of the House committee vote, Nixon and his supporters struggled to maintain an outward calm. Press Secretary Ron Ziegler gamely told reporters that the President was “confident” that the charges had no substance and that he would not be impeached. Ziegler added that Nixon knew he had “committed no impeachable offense.” Haig typically covered all contingencies, admitting that the President had suffered “very severe losses,” but asserting that he remained certain Nixon would be “vindicated.” Meanwhile, Wiggins and Rhodes talked about the forthcoming battle in the House, thereby dousing a suggestion by Pat Buchanan that the House quickly and unanimously vote impeachment in order to get on with a Senate trial. Ford dutifully echoed his former House colleagues when he complained about the lack of specificity in the charges; he, too, remained convinced of the President’s innocence. For Ford, the Democrats’ unanimity only proved the partisanship of the affair; as for the six Republicans who joined them, he said only that he was “disappointed.”

Nixon’s traditional support eroded. On July 29 Howard Phillips called for the President’s removal, either by resignation or impeachment. He announced the creation of “CREEP 2”—Conservatives for the Removal of the President. Phillips expressed a growing fear on the part of conservatives that Nixon would sacrifice any policy to remain in power. Just after the impeachment vote, Federal Judge Gerhard Gesell sentenced John Ehrlichman to a
twenty-month-to-five-year jail term for his role in the Fielding break-in, and two days later, John Dean received a one-to-four-year sentence for obstructing justice. The emergence of new enemies and painful reminders of “White House horrors” only reinforced the image of a totally discredited Administration.
¹⁴

Ford’s enduring faith must have shattered on August 1 when Haig told him that the situation had so deteriorated that “the ball game” might be over, and Ford should start “thinking about a change” in his life. New transcripts, he said, would refute the President’s story of his role in the cover-up and demonstrate his culpability. Ford remembered that both he and Haig were “angry” at the President’s deceit.
¹⁵
In fact, Haig had known for some time about that June 23 tape; it was, however, time for him to build new bridges.

Anger was a mild word to describe the feelings of presidential supporters four days later when the President released the June 23, 1972 tape transcript, destined to be known as the “smoking gun.” At the President’s first meeting that day, more than two years earlier, Haldeman told the President that “we’re back in the problem area,” because Pat Gray did not have the FBI under control. The FBI’s investigation had led into some “productive areas,” where “we don’t want it to go,” he said. Haldeman had talked to Mitchell and Dean, who agreed on the need to maintain a cover-up of the Administration’s role in the Watergate break-in. Mitchell’s recommendation that Deputy CIA Director Vernon Walters call Gray and tell him to “stay the hell out of this” was the fateful instruction. Didn’t Gray want to stay out of it? the President asked. Yes, Haldeman responded, but he needed a reason, and the CIA could provide him with one. Haldeman thought the story might be plausible, because the FBI investigation allegedly had been tracing money to some CIA connections.

The tape revealed more of the seamy side of the White House. Did Mitchell know? the President asked. “I think so,” Haldeman responded. Had Mitchell pressured that “asshole” Liddy—Liddy who “must be a little nuts!” Nixon rambled. Than, rather cryptically: “Thank God it wasn’t Colson.” Regarding FBI questioning of White House people, the President ordered: “Play it tough. That’s the way they play it and that’s the way we are going to play it.” The conversation shifted to various legislative and policy matters. But abruptly, Nixon returned to the Watergate problem. Call in the CIA people, he said, and tell them that further inquiry might lead to “the whole Bay of Pigs thing”; “don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is a comedy of errors,” Nixon said. The CIA should call in the FBI and say, ‘Don’t go further into this case[,] period’!”

Again, the President shifted the talk, now to politics, then to aides (Herbert Klein “just doesn’t have his head screwed on.… He’s not our guy at
all[,] is he?”), then to his own book,
Six Crises
(“damned good book, and the [unintelligible] story reads like a novel”), and finally, to baseball.

When the two men resumed their conversation later that afternoon, the President urged caution lest the CIA and FBI leaders have “any ideas we’re doing it because our concern is political.” Instead, he underlined an anxiety that any revelations might “blow the whole, uh, Bay of Pigs thing.” Haldeman informed Nixon that he had spoken to Walters and that Gray had informed CIA Director Richard Helms that the FBI had run into a CIA operation. Walters had agreed to call Gray, as Haldeman had suggested, but apparently he told Haldeman that Helms did not understand Gray’s call. At this point, Haldeman and the President engaged in a bitter discussion of the Bay of Pigs and an alleged slight to Nixon by former Director Allen Dulles. Perilous moments generally seemed to arouse Nixon’s various festering resentments.
¹⁶

The June 23 tape offered a definitive answer to Howard Baker’s question, put just over a year earlier: the President knew. He knew that he had instigated a cover-up and thus had participated in an obstruction of justice almost from the outset of events.

When Nixon surrendered this evidence, he no longer had the ability to act as prosecutor, judge, and jury in his own cause; now, he stood alone as the accused, self-anointed, as it were. Even at this painful moment of confronting the truth of his involvement, however, the President could not be wholly forthcoming. He told the nation that the subject of the June 23 tape related to government business as distinguished from politics, a fiction that must have taxed the imagination of his most devoted speechwriters. He took “full responsibility” for not providing complete information to those arguing his case, an act “which I deeply regret,” he said. He admitted that he had known of the taped conversation for some time (though he never acknowledged remembering the actual conversation), and he “recognized that [it] presented problems.” Still, Nixon insisted that he “did not realize the extent of the implications which these conversations might now appear to have.” In his defense, he pointed to other statements and actions that embodied the “basic truth”: he had insisted “on a full investigation and prosecution of those guilty.”
¹⁷

Haig and St. Clair promptly called Leon Jaworski, insisting that they had not known of the existence of the June 23 tape. Haig, it must be remembered, had provided the President with that particular tape in May 1974. Given Haig’s temperament, it is almost unimaginable that he did not know the contents of the tape at that time. Furthermore, Fred Buzhardt undoubtedly gave Haig the tape, but Buzhardt carefully covered his tracks by telling interviewers later that he did not handle the June 23 tape until the day of the Supreme Court decision respecting subpoenaed materials in July 1974. “No way” that Haig alone was aware of that tape, recalled St. Clair. Leonard
Garment regarded Buzhardt as a careful lawyer and would have been “surprised” if he had not known the contents of the June 23 tape for some time. Melvin Laird claimed that Buzhardt told him about the particular tape as early as June 1974. When Jaworski described Haig’s protestations of ignorance, he interestingly connected their conversation to an observation that “Deep Throat,” the alleged source of information on the White House for
Washington Post
writers Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, was, according to Jaworski, “somebody who was trying to cover his own tracks in the White House and wanted to make sure that he wasn’t going to be under suspicion.”

At times, Nixon himself wondered about “strange alliances” surrounding him. John Connally called him in May to relay a message from Jaworski: “The President has no friends in the White House” was Nixon’s memory of the Special Prosecutor’s warning. Mitchell had no doubts about the lack of loyalty in the President’s house, and in time became convinced that Haig and Buzhardt served not the President, but the interests of the military and perhaps the CIA.
¹⁸

Nixon’s announcement and release of the “smoking gun” tape produced another “firestorm.” One television commentator said, “Let him go.” Let the President have his pension, his secretaries, and his office; “give him amnesty,” he added, “and draw a curtain over this scene, not for his sake—for ours.” For months, Nixon had resisted pressures that he leave office. As far back as the aftermath of the Saturday Night Massacre, in November 1973, he cautioned House Republicans against demands for his impeachment or resignation. “If you cut off the legs of the President, America is going to lose,” he said. He invoked a variation of a familiar threat: American allies, he warned, would consider “leaning toward the Soviet Union if domestic issues diminished the authority of the Presidency.” After repeated remarks that he would not resign, White House aides counseled that reiteration would “only be counter-productive.”
¹⁹

But after they learned of the June 23 tape, Republicans, like cuckolded mates, refused to accept Nixon’s expressions of regret for withholding the information. Some wanted him simply to resign; others wished to vent their fury on him. As the news spread through Washington, House Republicans reacted with dismay, sorrow, or anger; whether by impeachment or by resignation, they concluded, the President had to go. Democrat Don Edwards of the Judiciary Committee had anticipated some trouble in the House and Senate on the impeachment issue, but “this thunderbolt,” he realized, meant “we had him cold.”

One Republican House member urged Edward Hutchinson to move for immediate action on the first impeachment article. The tape revelation had “exacerbated the Executive leadership crisis,” he said. He thought that resignation might be in the best interest of the nation, but Congress nevertheless should immediately proceed to fulfill its legal and constitutional
responsibilities. Congressman Barber Conable (R–NY) angrily charged that the President had abused the trust given to him. Conable had slowly, but painfully, realized how Nixon had deceived his supporters. Earlier, he privately chided himself for accompanying the President on a Potomac cruise, feeling as though he had been “a party to jury-tampering.” The only issue remaining, Conable said, was how to effect an orderly transition of power to Gerald Ford.

Charles Wiggins would have one more moment in the limelight. St. Clair invited him to the White House on August 2 to read the June 23, 1972 transcript. At first, Wiggins persisted in his faith. The words provided “some evidence of obstruction,” he admitted, but “the words as used in their context [did] not drive you inevitably to that conclusion.” Wiggins felt no sense of betrayal by the President, only sadness. But after the release of the tape, Wiggins sensed the political winds and announced that he would support Article I. He, too, wanted the process to run: the “magnificent public career of Richard Nixon must be terminated involuntarily,” Wiggins said.

The President desperately tried to insert exculpatory material into his August 5 statement on his release of the tape. At the last moment, he drafted a notation that he had told Pat Gray to press forward two weeks
after
the June 23 conversation, once he had determined that there was no national-security matter at stake. But the statement would have to wait for his memoirs. Haig told him that St. Clair and the lawyers would leave unless the prepared statement remained intact. “The hell with it,” Nixon said. “Let them put out anything they want. My decision has already been made.” He knew that Washington had been “whipped into a frenzy”; Haig reported further desertions. “[F]ew, if any,” Nixon realized, “would want to be found standing with me.”
²⁰

Et tu, Brute.
That evening Gerald Ford also announced that he could better contribute to the orderly conduct of government by “not involving myself daily in the impeachment debate, in which I have no constitutional role.” At last, Ford’s staff prevailed in their advice that he distance himself from the President. The Vice President’s words must have been the unkindest cut of all for Richard Nixon: “I have come to the conclusion,” Ford stated, “that the public interest is no longer served by repetition of my previously expressed belief that on the basis of all the evidence known to me and to the American people, the President is not guilty of an impeachable offense.”
²¹
However convoluted the statement, Ford was saying nothing less than that the President was guilty.

Five months earlier, Nixon himself had stated that “the crime of obstruction of justice is a serious crime and would be an impeachable offense, and I do not expect that the House Committee will find that the President is guilty of any of these crimes.” But when he released the June 23 transcript, he argued that the information itself did not warrant impeachment. He urged
congressmen to consider his comments in the larger perspective of his demands for a full investigation. St. Clair thought it a pity that the transcript had not come out earlier. He believed that if it had been considered along with Nixon’s March 21 conversation with Dean, “you could live with those [together] in my view.” It “would have been just another difficult tape for the President.” Coming as it did, however, the inflamed environment of August following the House committee vote “enhanced its individual importance,” St. Clair acknowledged.
²²