The Wars of Watergate (75 page)

The summer of 1973 marked a sharp shift in Nixon’s fortunes. More verifiable proof than polls demonstrated his declining powers. Since 1966, congressional doves had failed in more than a hundred roll-call votes to reduce the Vietnam conflict either by cutting off funds or imposing bombing halts. But by July 1, Nixon confronted legislation stipulating a cutoff in funds for the bombing of Cambodia. He had successfully resisted such demands before, but now he had to accept the proviso in order to secure other defense appropriations. From Nixon’s other flank, conservative critics stepped up charges that the President had appeased liberals in the hope of stifling the Watergate investigation. The signs were apparent: the “liberal” Elliot Richardson had succeeded Richard Kleindienst, the “liberal” Frank Carlucci had been appointed to a high government position, and a new Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity promised to revitalize the agency, which was thought to have a liberal charge. Too, Nixon had allowed Archibald Cox to establish a “Kennedyite” beachhead in the government; the President had been unable to resist expensive increases in farm subsidies, Social Security benefits, and minimum wages; and finally, his giving in on the Cambodian bombing halt amounted to the “largest and most gratuitous concession” in the history of American foreign policy.
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The President’s declining authority in foreign affairs, coupled with the growing disenchantment of his conservative supporters, ominously exhibited the reality of his deteriorating position.

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Save for the discovery of the White House tapes, the Senate Select Committee’s efforts mainly replicated what the Watergate prosecutors in the Justice Department already knew. The committee’s investigators neither discovered John Dean nor led him to his disclosures about the President. Dean and his lawyer already had seriously discussed “Mr. P.” with the federal prosecutors. Still, the hearings kindled public interest in Watergate. Witnesses marched across the television landscape, alternately disillusioned, contrite, defiant, obsequious, stonewalling, disenchanted, and steadfastly loyal. Some had photographic memories and others brilliantly practiced ignorance and absent-mindedness. A fascinated viewing public gleaned lessons in political behavior not usually found in textbooks. Most important, the committee’s conduct and the information yielded by the hearings stood in stark contrast to the image and information conveyed by the Nixon White House.

After Alexander Butterfield’s startling revelations, the White House tapes took on a life of their own and became the center of attention. Their very existence gave a new lease to the notion that wrongdoing had occurred in high places, and they became the most contested terrain of the Watergate imbroglio. Richard Nixon could fight for or abandon key aides and yet survive himself, but the tapes imperiled him as did nothing else. The struggle to control them consumed the President for one full year, at what cost to his functioning in his office will never be known. But his tenacious battle only confirmed the importance of the tapes. That struggle precipitated the President’s dramatic conflict with the Special Prosecutor, ruptured his Administration, exacerbated his relations with Congress (particularly with members of his own party), and most decisively, confirmed the swelling, unshakeable image of Nixon as a man who had something to hide.

As the most prominent figures in the Administration ended their Senate testimony, President Nixon and his staff launched a brief but extensive counterattack in mid-August. In an evening address to the nation on the fifteenth, he again insisted that he had no prior knowledge of the break-in; that he neither authorized nor encouraged subordinates to engage in improper campaign tactics; and that he “neither took part in nor knew” about any of the subsequent cover-up activities. “That,” he insisted, “was and that is the simple truth.” He alluded to John Dean as “a witness who offered no evidence
beyond his own impressions” and who had been contradicted by every other witness “in a position to know the facts.” As for the September 15, 1972 meeting, the President said that Dean had given him “no reason whatever to believe that any others were guilty.” Of course, he could not reveal the true nature of that meeting, in which he and Haldeman had discussed the management of the cover-up with Dean.

Nixon said he had been determined throughout “to get out the facts about Watergate, not to cover them up.” But he warned that that effort could not include any revelations from the White House tapes, arguing that they might “irreparably” harm the “confidentiality” of the presidency. Even if the tapes contained conversations that related to illegal acts, that still did not justify making them public. With that twist of Nixonian logic, the President maintained that to release the tapes, even those involving illegal actions alone, “would risk exposing private Presidential conversations, involving the whole range of official duties.” Throughout his August 15 speech, he mixed his own taping activities up with official wiretapping by the Department of Justice. He acknowledged a willingness to abide by the limitations that the Supreme Court had set on wiretapping in 1972, but he typically noted that the Kennedy Administration had authorized more than twice as many wiretaps as his own.

Above all, Nixon pleaded for an end to Watergate, seeking to justify his Administration’s alleged misdeeds on the grounds of self-defense. “We must recognize that one excess begets another,” he told the nation, “and that the extremes of violence and discord in the 1960s contributed to the extremes of Watergate.” But the cure, he said, might be worse than the disease. Twelve weeks of televised testimony had brought the nation to the point “at which a continued, backward-looking obsession with Watergate is causing this Nation to neglect matters of far greater importance to all of the American people.”

A week later the President held a rare news conference (his first in five months and the first to be televised in fourteen), reiterating the themes of his speech. He assailed those who exploited Watergate for their own political advantage, but he maintained that his enemies would not dislodge him. He would not consider resigning, even if he believed that his capacity to govern had been seriously weakened. “[H]ad I been running the campaign,” the President lamented, “other than trying to run the country, particularly the foreign policy of this country,… [Watergate] would never have happened. But that’s water under the bridge,” he concluded.
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Whatever the force of the President’s words, they paled beside the possibility that his deeds and words had been recorded. His credibility, too, showed no signs of recovering. His approval rating rose after the televised speech, but polls showed that more than two-thirds of Americans thought
that Nixon had failed to offer “convincing proof” that he was not part of the cover-up, and more than 70 percent thought that he continued to withhold important information. The President’s lawyers thought his press conference was “superb” and that it would “go far to put Watergate to bed.” They believed he had provided them with “the frosting on the cake” for their briefs defending the President’s right to withhold the tapes. California Governor Ronald Reagan said that Nixon represented “the voice of reason,” but Senator Barry Goldwater remarked that nothing in the speech, or in other speeches, tended “to divert suspicion” from the President. Equally ominous, William Ruckelshaus, who had moved from the FBI to the Justice Department as Deputy Attorney General, said that the speech lacked specificity and would not satisfy Nixon’s critics.

The growing controversy over the tapes heightened suspicions on the Republican Right that the “Watergate millstone” had forced Nixon into “preventive appeasement,” both at home and abroad, in order that he be able to present the nation with “accomplishments.”
National Review
editorialized that the tapes “could probably clear up” many of the problems, but the magazine recognized that Nixon’s instant refusal to release them signified more controversy and more compromising. Watergate, the editorial concluded, had drained the President’s “political sinew, his moral authority, and his credibility.”
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When Nixon left Bethesda Naval Hospital on July 20 after his bout with viral pneumonia, he offered the first public hints that Watergate had begun to paralyze his presidency. To White House workers gathered in the Rose Garden, the President spoke movingly of the little time he had left to finish the tasks before him. He noted that there were those who suggested he resign because the burdens of the office had become intolerable—that, he said, was “plain poppycock.” He would press forward. “And what we were elected to do, we are going to do,” he exclaimed, “and let others wallow in Watergate, we are going to do our job.” Spiro Agnew thought the President had the look of a “frightened man” and that he was fearful the tapes would embarrass him and affect his place in history.

Before he left the hospital, however, the President had expressed a thought he could not divulge to the nation: “Should have destroyed the tapes after April 30, 1973,” he wrote while in his hospital bed. With some bitterness, he complained that their discovery had unduly affected his Counsel, Leonard Garment, and other staff members. “We must be strong and competent. We must go ahead,” the President wrote, as if to spur himself. Raymond Moley, once FDR’s chief aide, pleaded with Nixon to do just that. A psychiatrist, long known to Nixon, offered counsel on how the President should deal with the “emotional undertone” of Watergate and how people “perceived [it] by their psyche.”
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The discovery that the President had taped conversations astonished and fascinated the nation. In time, Americans would hear that previous presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, had also taped conversations, but in that summer of 1973, Richard Nixon had few defenders.

“God bless the blunderers at the Watergate,” labor leader George Meany said when he learned about the tapes on July 17. “If they hadn’t been so clumsy, America would never have known this was going on.” For Meany, the secret taping was “almost beyond belief.” Goldwater was not surprised, but he thought that individuals should have been told they were being taped. The President’s former protégé Robert Finch was “literally astonished … [and] incredulous.” Speaker Carl Albert thought the practice outrageous, but Senate Democratic leader Mike Mansfield typically covered all the options: “I am not surprised but I don’t like it. I wouldn’t have minded if they told me,” said Mansfield. Some could not resist the ready quip. Congressman Wilbur Mills (D–AR) said that if he had known he was being recorded in his meetings with Nixon, his English would have been better. And Senator Robert Dole (R–KA) added that he was glad he always nodded when talking to the President. Sam Ervin, now a prosecutor of sorts, appropriately thought the news nothing less than “providential.” Republican House leader Gerald Ford was the exception that proved the rule, as he found nothing wrong in the practice of recording presidential conversations and solemnly insisted that “I have never said anything to the President that could not be a matter of public record.”

Melvin Laird, the former Secretary of Defense, who had returned to the White House as a presidential aide after Haldeman and Ehrlichman departed, had been told by Counsel J. Fred Buzhardt that the tapes showed the President’s involvement in the cover-up. Laird felt betrayed. His recent appointment reflected the President’s need to stroke his Republican congressional constituency, with whom Laird had strong ties. In fact, the two men had little liking and much distrust for one another. Laird claimed that when he visited the President in May, he asked him point-blank if he had taken part in the cover-up. The President, Laird said, stated “absolutely, positively” that he had not been involved.
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The most important immediate reaction to the exposé of the tapes was the President’s decision not to destroy them. Of the numerous imponderables about Watergate, Nixon’s failure to destroy the White House tapes is one of the most bewildering and confusing, and yet perhaps it is quite simply explained. Nixon believed that the tapes, selectively exploited, would exonerate him. Beyond that, he regarded them as politically and historically invaluable—again, if used in a selective fashion. Finally, he had every reason to think that executive privilege offered adequate protection against any judicial or legislative demands for the tapes.

Richard Nixon’s own memory of that decision was marked by confusion, obfuscation, and above all, regret: “If I had indeed been the knowing Watergate conspirator that I was charged as being,” he wrote in his memoirs, “I would have recognized in 1973 that the tapes contained conversations that would be fatally damaging. I would have seen that if I were to survive they would have to be destroyed.”

The President acknowledged that the tapes were a “mixed bag,” filled with politically embarrassing talk and ambiguities. Yet, years later, he still maintained that they “indisputably disproved” Dean’s contention of presidential obstruction of justice since September 1972. Long after the fact, Nixon seemed anxious to hold his advisers accountable for the decision to retain the tapes. According to Nixon’s memoirs, Haldeman had assured him that they could explain the March 21 meeting—the tape of which his former Chief of Staff had heard, although Nixon had told his August 22 press conference that Haldeman had listened only to the September 15, 1972 tape. When the two men had met on April 26, they talked about the tapes’ references to hush-money payments, Thomas Pappas’s role as a money raiser, and other “politically embarrassing” items. Yet the President believed that the tapes would save him, for they could be used to point out Dean’s minor inaccuracies and inconsistencies and thereby discredit him.
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Alexander Haig reasoned that destroying the tapes would only enhance suspicions of presidential guilt. Nixon concurred, realizing that actual revelations of wrongdoing would be less crippling than the taint of having destroyed evidence. Yet for all his evasiveness on the meaning of the tapes, Nixon later realized what their existence meant: “my presidency had little chance of surviving to the end of its term.” The struggle for the tapes aroused the nation, and as the President realized, the fight to keep them private would “paralyze the presidency.”
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