The Wars of Watergate (63 page)

Nixon pleaded for advice in dealing with Haldeman and Ehrlichman. The least painful course for him was that they take leaves of absence. But Petersen challenged the President: why did he think he could separate the two from Dean—because they were “loyal” to the last minute? Petersen considered the distinction between dismissal and leave illusory. Later, he testily remarked that “the President was poorly advised on the premises.” But his suspicions were aroused. His wife, he told Nixon, had asked him whether he thought the President had been involved. He himself would resign if he thought so, he told her. Oblique as the implied request was, Petersen had asked the President the most important question of all. “Mr. President, I pray for you, sir,” Petersen remarked, as if to reinforce his concern. And again, he urged Nixon not to distinguish Haldeman and Ehrlichman from Dean. He pleaded with him to be forceful and take action. He knew the President and others wanted the investigation shut down. Petersen had told his parish priest that he considered Watergate the greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War, “and this guy [the President] is sitting there telling me I had to be fair to these people.” Eight days earlier Petersen had assured the President of his “confidence” in him. Obviously, the past eight days had shaken Petersen’s certain world. But Nixon refused to give him the direct
answer he wanted. “We’ve got to get it out.… I have wrestled with it,” was all Nixon could manage.
⁴⁷

Pat Gray’s withdrawal of his nomination as FBI Director, on April 5, allowed him to stay in place pending the appointment of a successor. But the end for Gray came suddenly on April 27—probably before either he or the President intended, particularly in the light of Nixon’s crisis involving the futures of his closest White House aides. The
New York Times
revealed that Ehrlichman and Dean had given Gray, then Acting FBI Director, the contents of Howard Hunt’s office safe at a White House meeting on June 28, 1972. Dean reportedly said that the contents “should never see the light of day.” Gray accepted the material after Dean assured him that it had nothing to do with the Watergate incident. He stored the papers in his house until July 3 and then brought them to FBI headquarters for destruction, claiming that he never examined them. Dean had informed the Justice Department of the incident in mid-April, after he had lost control of the cover-up and as he bargained for the best possible advantage for himself. Gray twice denied the charge but finally admitted it to Petersen. He acknowledged having burned the material, although he claimed he had never read it. Gray stood exposed as a perjurer, for he had testified earlier to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he was convinced Dean had made no effort to conceal Hunt’s files.

The President heard the news while aboard Air Force One and ordered Ehrlichman to demand Gray’s immediate resignation from the FBI. On that same flight, the President mused to Ehrlichman that 50 percent of him and Haldeman was worth more than 100 percent of any replacement. Nixon seemed to be offering a graceful exit, as he told Ehrlichman that he and Haldeman could continue to work on their files and ease things for their successors. Comfortingly, he added that Sherman Adams never had been indicted.
⁴⁸

The President—and the FBI—now desperately needed a leader who would be perceived as “Mr. Clean.” He came in the form of William Ruckelshaus, a bright, highly respected, middle-level Administration official then serving as Environmental Protection Agency Administrator. Although he filled the bill, however, Ruckelshaus was not exactly what Nixon had in mind. The model remained J. Edgar Hoover—feared, loathed, respected, useful—but withal, too independent and too powerful. Nixon had no objection to the Hoover model, save for a proviso that the Director be
his
Director. The President instructed Ziegler to announce that Ruckelshaus was not being considered for the post on a permanent basis and would eventually return to the Environmental Protection Agency, at Ruckelshaus’s own request. Nixon and Ehrlichman met immediately with Ruckelshaus. Following their session,
Ehrlichman went to his office for an FBI interview regarding his role in the break-in of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.
⁴⁹
The land mines seemed to be everywhere.

The Ruckelshaus appointment again rattled the FBI hierarchy. Not lightly did they accept the selection of a man who had led celebrations of Earth Day as head of the EPA while they had masterminded surveillance of the same event. The old guard was in near-mutiny, boldly sending a letter to the President urging consideration for “the highly qualified professionals with impeccable credentials of integrity within the organization itself.” Ruckelshaus immediately ordered heads of FBI field offices to Washington to a meeting and reassured them that the Bureau would maintain independence. He thought that the disaffection rested only at the very top levels. When he took office, he realized the Bureau was “torn asunder,” yet he did not think it was “falling apart.” He found the institution as a whole quite strong, “so highly structured, with its assignments so clearly delineated,… [that] the institution itself was largely untouched outside of Washington.” Ironically but appropriately, Ruckelshaus credited Hoover for the legacy of an effective, functioning FBI. Hoover’s old aides, however, actively schemed for one of their own as Director. Louis Nichols, a former Associate Director who was close to the President, urged that Nixon personally approach Cartha DeLoach, a former top official, or ex-agent John Bugas, both then highly placed in the business world. In case the President still felt indebted to William Sullivan, his ally in the Huston Plan and Hoover’s old nemesis, Nichols passed the word that Sullivan had had a nervous breakdown and also that he had opposed Nixon in 1968.
⁵⁰
The War of the FBI Succession was more than a skirmish in the widening Watergate War.

When Ruckelshaus agreed to take the FBI post, he asked Nixon whether the President himself had been involved in the Watergate affair in any way. Nixon offered the respectful Ruckelshaus “a very convincing argument” that he was in no way implicated in any wrongdoing. That was the last time Ruckelshaus saw the President; but he was not the last to hear Nixon’s “convincing argument” for his innocence.
⁵¹

The Plumbers and the Gray revelations proved too much for Attorney General Kleindienst. On Friday, April 27, as Gray stepped down, Kleindienst decided to submit his resignation the following Monday. But Richard Nixon had other plans. On Sunday he summoned Haldeman and Ehrlichman to Camp David to demand their resignations. Five days earlier, Nixon had told Haldeman that he would consider asking him to take a leave of absence, but he would not demand his resignation. For his part, Ehrlichman had not expected such summary treatment and resisted, furious that he was lumped together with Dean. The President told each man separately that he prayed
he would not awake; to Haldeman, he added that “I’m the guilty one,” mentioning his giving free rein to Colson, his allowing Dean to maintain the cover-up, and his mistake in allowing Mitchell to run the campaign.

Despite his tearful appearance, the President knew his course. That weekend, he also called in Kleindienst and ordered him to submit his resignation at once. He wanted to announce the resignations of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean—and Kleindienst—as a package, to demonstrate his determination for a “clean sweep.” Kleindienst argued it was unfair to link him to the others. Nixon recalled that “the poor beleaguered man” sobbed, yet the President told him that Elliot Richardson already had been selected to succeed him and, in fact, was in the next room. The firings were the “toughest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” the President told Richardson. Nixon called Kissinger that evening, “nearly incoherent with grief,” and told him that he needed him more than ever, to “help me protect the national security matters now that Ehrlichman is leaving.” Kissinger spitefully, but correctly, regarded the remark as both “a plea and a form of blackmail.”
⁵²

The President spoke to the nation the next evening, Monday, April 30. In retrospect, his words ring hollow. But at the time he projected a measure of confidence, and given his undoubted exhaustion from the events of the past few days, he displayed remarkable resiliency.

Nixon decided to admit no culpability for himself, a decision he later explained as a response to his growing fear of the nature of his enemies and opposition. In his memoirs, he acknowledged he had “thrown down a gauntlet to Congress, the bureaucracy, the media, and the Washington establishment and challenged them to engage in epic battle.” If he admitted any vulnerabilities, he thought, his opponents would “savage” him. He believed he could portray events as “just politics.” The resulting address was vintage Nixon. He blamed externals, extolled his record, and both praised and questioned the motives of others. He accepted responsibility as “the man at the top,” a thinly veiled abstraction that he later admitted fooled no one. Nixon lied when he said he had no knowledge of events prior to March 21. He thought he could put Watergate behind him with “excuses,” a style not unfamiliar to him. Later, he realized that “he could not have made a more disastrous miscalculation.”
⁵³
“Fatal” would have been more accurate.

Henry Kissinger had watched the President’s April 30 television address and found it unconvincing. Worse, he thought, no one “could avoid the impression that he was no longer in control of events.” The President had offered a similar judgment a few days earlier: “It’s all over, do you know that?” he remarked to his Press Secretary. Nixon later realized that he had amputated
both arms. Perhaps he could survive, he recalled, but the day left him “so anguished and saddened that from that day on the presidency lost all joy for me.” He noted that he had written his last full diary entry on April 14. “Events became so cheerless that I no longer had the time or the desire to dictate daily reflections.” But an anonymous aide fit the event into a familiar Nixon pattern: “For Nixon,” he claimed, “the shortest distance between two points is over four corpses.” Around this time, former aide Daniel Moynihan offered the President some curious comfort, suggesting that his men had not acted evilly but had brought on the “present shame” as a result of their “innocence.” Somehow, Moynihan concluded their actions were analogous to the “innocence” of antiwar and antiestablishment demonstrators in “elite schools.” “Extremely thoughtful,” Nixon told Alexander Haig, who had moved into Haldeman’s place.
⁵⁴

The bright prospects for the second term had dimmed. The high expectations for fresh ideas and personnel were strangled at the outset, virtually stillborn as the President and his closest aides grappled with the growing tentacles of Watergate. Their struggles were futile; in effect, by April 30 the presidency of Richard Nixon was over. The President told the nation in his television address that he wanted the 1,361 days remaining in his term “to be the best days in America’s history.” But Richard Nixon spent the next 465 days mostly fending off his “enemies,” themselves once pursued, now the pursuers. To be sure, he had a few triumphs left to savor, but these would be in foreign lands, not his own. The President and Kissinger still worked for diplomatic glory, for the United States, and for themselves. But there was no Haldeman, no Ehrlichman, no Mitchell, no Dean to fend off Nixon’s demons and antagonists and to cover the mistakes and misdeeds of his Administration. Indeed, several days after Nixon dismissed his aides, John Dean began to speak to the prosecutors in the Justice Department about the activities of “Mr. P” himself.
⁵⁵
The President’s personal fate had to be played out, but one suspects he knew what it would be long before others. Richard Nixon stood alone, naked to his enemies.

The April explosions gave no sign of abating as the calendar turned to May. The President’s April 30 speech fueled charges of wider scandal and stimulated pressures for a wider investigation. Nixon’s credibility was at stake. If Haldeman and Ehrlichman were among the “finest public servants” he had ever known, as he had said on the air, then why fire them?

The President now confronted the need to replace his staff, a need that required him to find loyal retainers, yet ones who would inspire public confidence. Having no alternative, Nixon also had to accept the appointment of a Special Prosecutor to plumb Watergate. Meanwhile, the Senate Select Committee prepared for a midmonth opening of its hearings, and its investigators pursued many witnesses already questioned by the U.S. Attorney, some of whom were now prepared to offer greater cooperation.

Nixon’s position was deteriorating rapidly, and a sharp erosion of his public support undermined him even more. The Silent Majority or Square America—however he characterized it—had begun to question the President’s behavior. In early April, a Gallup poll showed that the President had a nearly two-to-one approval rating, standing at 59 percent of respondents approving of his performance, 33 percent disapproving. The surveys for May 1–3 demonstrated a striking change, recorded at 48–40 percent approval/disapproval, with 12 percent now undecided. Ten days later, Gallup discovered the truly dramatic shift: 44 percent of respondents now approved of the President, while 45 percent disapproved. Reflecting the national erosion of confidence, Egil Krogh, under intense pressure for his role in the Fielding
break-in, found the President’s speech “unpersuasive.” Krogh told Ehrlichman that Nixon was “on darn thin ice,” and “in a helluva spot” for not having investigated matters “vigorously.”

Pat Buchanan pleaded with Nixon not to appease his opponents. This was not the time, Buchanan warned, “to surrender all claim to the positions we have held in the past”; instead it was a time for a “low profile and quiet rearmament in this worthwhile struggle.” He urged Nixon to take the offensive and not passively “suffer the death of a thousand cuts.” Nixon responded that it would be useful to unleash Spiro Agnew or John Connally to say that the President had been right in his handling of the Watergate affair.