Watergate, page 54
There were intense disagreements behind the doors of the Justice Department about how one even plea-bargained with the sitting vice president. The department’s in-house legal advisors, the Office of Legal Counsel, weighed in to decide whether it was even constitutional to indict the vice president, deciding that while the president could not be indicted, the number two had no such protections in office. During one marathon seven-hour strategy session at the Justice Department, Richardson had doodled as Henry Petersen and the other prosecutors talked through how to balance justice and the political imperatives of the case; Petersen, who had weathered now an intense year of political stress balancing the White House and the Justice Department, found himself repeatedly agitated by the Maryland assistant U.S. attorneys. In one meeting, he incredulously exclaimed, “The man is the goddamn vice president of the United States! What are you trying to do—get him to crawl on his belly?”
On September 25, Agnew went to the Hill and pleaded with House leaders to allow the Judiciary Committee to take over the federal investigation, claiming that he was the target of a vindictive and ambitious prosecutor. Agnew told the lawmakers he needed a fair and impartial congressional jury instead. Tip O’Neill resisted any effort to drag the House into the investigation, believing it would tie up Congress for months, distract from other matters, and—most of all—allow Agnew an undeserved lifeline to hold on to an office he seemed poised to lose. The next day, House Speaker Carl Albert invited reporters into his office and read a short statement: “The Vice President’s letter relates to matters before the courts. In view of that fact, I, as Speaker, will not take any action on the letter at this time.”
With options dwindling, Agnew’s ferocity rose. In late September, he used a speech to the National Federation of Republican Women in Los Angeles to take the offensive. “Small and fearful men have been frightened into furnishing evidence against me,” the vice president ranted to the two thousand sympathetic audience members. “I will not resign if indicted!” The audience roared with chants of “Fight Agnew fight!” and waved signs declaring, “Agnew for President.” The speech worried both Nixon’s circle, who feared their vice president’s growing connection with the party’s most rabid conservatives, and the Justice Department, who saw Agnew’s speech as an assault on the rule of law. Nixon found himself squeezed—how could he not defend his own attorney general and Justice Department, but how could he attack his own vice president?
Haig continued unsuccessfully to push Agnew to resign. “The vice president was tough, cold, and aggressive in his demands,” Haig recalled, “a large, smooth, bullet-headed man, impeccably groomed and tailored in the Washington style, and when he turned off his considerable charm he was capable of conveying a somewhat menacing impression.” The situation got so tense that Haig joked to his wife that if he disappeared, she “might want to look inside any recently poured bridge pilings in Maryland.”
Agnew and Watergate, although separate scandals with entirely unrelated players, had merged as a political problem, and Nixon knew he needed to relieve himself of Agnew before he could focus on his own challenge. As one late September meeting with the president on Agnew wrapped up, and as his attorney general headed to the door, Nixon changed the subject: Once Agnew was gone, he intended to fire the special prosecutor.
* * *
The tapes were never far from Nixon’s mind that fall. According to the story that he would later tell, that final weekend of September, Nixon decided to review the contents of the recordings demanded by the special prosecutor, and ordered his personal aide Stephen Bull and his trusted, longtime secretary Rose Mary Woods to bring them to Camp David. Almost immediately, Bull reported back to Haig that he couldn’t locate the tape for one of the subpoenaed conversations on June 20, 1972, a meeting between Nixon, Ehrlichman, and Haldeman. Buzhardt told him not to worry—the missing tape wasn’t one of those requested by Cox, who Buzhardt believed, incorrectly, actually wanted another, different conversation from the same day.
In the end, the staffers brought the other eight relevant recordings, and cloistered from distractions and prying eyes, they worked diligently to transcribe them. Making sense of the scratchy, garbled, low-quality tapes was a nightmare—Nixon often had a habit of putting his feet on the desk and jangling coffee cups, which disrupted the recordings, as did the omnipresent background noise of the Oval Office. Woods alone spent some twenty-nine hours doing the work over just two days, completing only a single tape. Nixon himself swung by the Dogwood Cabin, where Woods and Bull were working—the Secret Service were stationed outside for security—and listened for a while Saturday afternoon. For seven minutes, he pushed buttons back and forth on the Sony recorder. When he was done, he told Woods that he empathized with her “terrible” task.
On Monday, Woods continued the work at the White House; following her complaints over the weekend about the slowness of the primitive recorder she was using, the Secret Service had procured her a fancier Uher 5000 recorder that came with a foot pedal to ease playback. Louis Sims, the head of the Secret Service’s technical division, went downtown at lunchtime, purchased the machine at Fidelity Sound Co. for $528.80, tested it, and delivered it by 1:15 p.m.
Shortly before 2 p.m., as the president and his secretary would later recount, she became distracted from transcribing by a ringing telephone, and pressed the record button on the new, unfamiliar machine while she turned to answer the phone. Woods panicked when she realized she’d accidentally erased some of the tape and ran to the president in his hideaway office in the Executive Office Building. She interrupted his meeting with his White House physician at 2:08 p.m. to sheepishly admit that she’d damaged the tape. “There is no problem, because that is not a subpoenaed tape,” the president reassured her, himself seemingly confused about which tapes were being ordered.
Through the rest of the week, Woods continued her diligent, painstaking transcription, working at the White House and later in Key Biscayne as the president headed south the following weekend. Bull personally carried the eight tapes south to Florida, where they were locked away in a villa safe under guard by the Secret Service. For security purposes, the typewriter ribbons Woods used were burned afterward. Finishing the transcriptions would ultimately take Woods until October 23—by which point the controversy around them would escalate into a constitutional crisis.
Chapter 38 Mud-Wrestling
October 1973 would prove to be perhaps the most historic single month in the history of the American presidency, as the man in the Oval Office confronted what would normally have ended up being three separate and mostly unrelated presidency-defining crises: one foreign, two domestic, one personal. It was a fall that on one level seemed awe-inspiring and momentous yet seemed more primal on another. White House lawyer Len Garment summed it up with two words: “mud wrestling.”
Hardly a day would pass without one Watergate case or another playing out in some courtroom or on Capitol Hill; competing scandal storylines filled the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. On October 1, Donald Segretti pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor counts of campaign law violations, for illegally distributing campaign literature, charges that stemmed from a Tampa case alleging he’d distributed cards during the Florida primary that read, “If you like Hitler, you’ll love Wallace… vote for Muskie.” Segretti’s arrangement, in turn, helped Richard Davis’s “dirty tricks” task force begin to form a perjury case against former White House appointments secretary Dwight Chapin. Two days later, Segretti testified before the Senate Watergate Committee that he’d reported regularly to his old USC classmate about his dirty tricks, considering him his “boss,” a statement that contradicted Chapin’s repeated assertions to the FBI that he’d barely had any contact with Segretti.
That same day, Ervin stood before the Senate and decried the unfolding legal showdown with the president. The tapes, the North Carolina senator said, were “highly important evidence tending to show what happened in connection with the Watergate affair, who participated in the ensuing coverup operations, and who was without legal or moral responsibility.” He rattled off presidents who had cooperated with Congress and the courts before—Jefferson, Lincoln, Grant, and Teddy Roosevelt, among others—and denounced Nixon’s autocratic view of presidential power, saying, “The president’s position is, in reality, incompatible with the doctrine of separation of powers of government.” In withholding the documents and recordings despite a proper, legal subpoena, the president was violating the constitutional oath of office he’d sworn, obstructing Congress, and “induc[ing] multitudes of people to believe that he is withholding the tapes and memorandums because their contents are adverse to him.” It was one of a series of unprecedented moments that left citizens, politicians, and journalists unsure of where to look first, until the crisis involving their vice president became impossible to ignore.
On October 4, Haig cornered one of Agnew’s top aides to tell him simply, “The clock is running.” The vice president had neither support on Capitol Hill nor the unconditional backing of the president. When Haig added, “The president has a lot of power—don’t forget that,” the vice president knew it was the most direct warning he was likely to get that Nixon was done with him.
The prosecution and defense struggled to find an acceptable middle ground. The Justice Department wanted prison time, but Agnew saw that as a deal-breaker. “He would resign only if he could do so with no possibility of confinement and he could resign with dignity,” his defense lawyer recalled years later. All nine of Maryland’s federal judges had recused themselves from the case, so a judge from the neighboring district in Virginia was appointed. On October 8 the judge summoned the parties to the Old Colony Motel in Alexandria, Virginia, for a day of covert negotiations in Room 208—the government and defense lawyers perched on chairs and the sofa.I Private conferences were held in the bathroom. They went through so many rounds of discussion that the various proposals were known by the drafter’s initials and numbers; “HEP #3,” Henry E. Petersen, Draft 3, became the outlines of a deal.
On October 9, Attorney General Richardson surprised Haig by calling to say that after much thought, he’d decided he could stomach allowing Agnew to avoid jail if he resigned, pleaded guilty to a minor charge, and allowed the evidence against him to become public. The change of heart, one of the prosecutors later explained, “had to do with the top-priority importance to the country of getting him out of the vice-presidency.” Nixon’s own battles were growing; the tension was too great for the government to hold. The attorney general felt the larger cause of justice was served by removing Agnew from office. “I am in a lonely spot over here,” Richardson told Haig. “I am going to make clear to my own people that this is the result of my own prayerful consideration.”
That night, prosecutors stayed up late preparing a detailed, forty-page recitation of the case against Agnew, summoning witnesses to the courthouse all through the evening and night to run through what amounted to an assembly line of evidence. (In an age before word processors, the prosecutors literally cut the transcribed statements apart with scissors and reassembled them with tape.) The attorney general and Petersen arrived around 2 a.m., bringing fresh doughnuts and coffee for a final push. They finished just ahead of their early-morning deadline, and U.S. marshals raced a copy by police escort—lights flashing and siren screaming—to Agnew’s team in Washington, by 8:05 a.m. The whole process had unfolded in total secrecy.
* * *
The final hours of Agnew’s vice presidency unfolded even as war broke open in the Middle East. Henry Kissinger had begun his shared role as national security advisor and the nation’s fifty-fourth secretary of state on September 22—a Saturday, which had forced his parents, both Orthodox Jews careful to avoid travel on the Sabbath, to walk from their hotel to his swearing-in—and was just asleep in his suite at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria on Saturday, October 6, when an aide awoke him with news that Egyptian air forces and armored vehicles had launched a massive, sustained attack on Israel in the Sinai Peninsula.
The fight, coming just as Israel began to mark Yom Kippur, quickly turned dire—officials were away, military units unready—as the country found itself under siege from a large Arab coalition led by Egypt and Syria. Hundreds of aircraft and thousands of tanks battled across the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights, as Egypt seized the eastern bank of the Suez Canal to Israel’s south and Syrian tanks advanced ten miles into the Golan Heights in the north. Nixon was back in Key Biscayne, and Kissinger rushed to Washington to chair a National Security Council crisis group meeting; he and Haig, who was down in Florida with the president, agreed that Nixon should not rush back to the White House also, a move that might appear to ratchet up the sense of geopolitical crisis. That first set of decisions set the tone for the rest of the conflict; over the days ahead, while Nixon and most of his inner circle found themselves consumed by Watergate and Agnew, Haig and Kissinger would all but independently navigate the war in the Middle East together.
Even as the judge, prosecutors, and Agnew’s team met at the Old Colony Motel, an Israeli counterattack floundered in the Sinai on the other side of the world. In the initial hours and days of the conflict, the U.S. weighed how much support—and how openly—it could provide Israel; huge battlefield losses meant that the U.S. ally desperately needed assistance, supplies, and materiel. In the first twenty-four hours, Israel lost more than one thousand troops killed in action, more than it had lost in the entire Six Day War of 1967, and on the battlefield Israel found itself outnumbered two-to-one in tanks and aircraft. Kissinger, working with similarly newly appointed defense secretary James Schlesinger, who had only stepped into the role in July after Richardson had been moved to attorney general, initially agreed to restock Israel with missiles and ammunition, provided Israel could airlift it from the continental United States. Within days, though, it became clear that level of distance would doom Israel; it didn’t have sufficient cargo planes to speed the weaponry six thousand miles to the battlefields. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, had no such compunction; on Wednesday, October 10, its cargo planes began feeding fuel and weapons to Syria.
That same morning in Washington, Nixon hosted a briefing for lawmakers on the unfolding Arab-Israeli war. They found him in an oddly jovial, almost manic mood, no matter the political and geopolitical storms engulfing his White House. He couldn’t stop interrupting Kissinger’s presentation to make fun of his aide’s reputation as a lothario. “We had a lot of trouble finding Henry,” Nixon teased. “He was in bed with a broad.” The secretary of state and national security advisor appeared nonplussed and continued presenting, only to have Nixon interrupt again: “Which girl were you with? It’s a terrible thing when you’re with a girl and the Secret Service comes looking for you.”
Scribbling in his notes at the meeting, Tip O’Neill wrote, President is acting very strangely. In their car ride back to Capitol Hill, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Thomas “Doc” Morgan, also lamented to O’Neill the president’s apparent distraction, but wrote it off as generalized stress: “He’s in real trouble, but I guess if we had his problems, we’d be the same way.”II
When O’Neill got back to the Hill, he went to the House floor. There a presidential messenger handed him a letter while he was mid-conversation with another congressman. O’Neill slipped it into his pocket absentmindedly as they spoke, and pulled it out later while he was smoking a cigar in the rear of the House chamber.
The letter, from Agnew, informed the House of his resignation.
* * *
At 2:01 on the afternoon of October 10, Spiro Agnew, wearing a light blue suit, walked into a Baltimore courtroom; in an adjacent room, an aide gave the signal by phone for a letter of resignation to be delivered to Kissinger in Washington. It was critical, everyone had agreed, that the resignation be sequenced first, so history wouldn’t record a sitting vice president pleading out in court. Richardson and Petersen represented the U.S. government at the prosecution’s table alongside Maryland U.S. attorney George Beall, prepared to take on the full burden and public criticism of the lax plea arrangement. U.S. marshals then sealed the courtroom. Agnew pleaded “no contest” to a single count of tax evasion.
“You fully understand the charge?” the judge asked.
“I do, Your Honor,” the now former vice president said, although later in the proceedings he denied all the other government’s charges.
In a press conference after, Attorney General Richardson made clear that he believed leniency was in the interest of full justice. “I’m keenly aware first of the historic magnitude of the penalties inherent in the Vice President’s resignation from his high office and his acceptance of a judgment of conviction for a felony,” he said. “To propose that a man who has suffered these penalties should in addition be incarcerated in a penal institution, however briefly, is more than I as head of the Government prosecuting arm, can recommend or wish.”
Under the terms of the plea agreement, Agnew avoided being fingerprinted or photographed; instead, he was quickly whisked out of court and taken, stricken, to a local funeral home. It had been a tragic twenty-four hours for the family; his half brother had died the day before. The Agnews, in grief and shock on multiple levels, dined on linguini with clam sauce that night in Baltimore’s Little Italy.
Back in Washington, Agnew’s staff was informed of the resignation; a weeping secretary confirmed the news when an AP reporter called moments later, leading to a surreal bulletin: Vice President Spiro T. Agnew resigned today, his secretary said. The law-and-order vice president had pleaded no contest to federal charges, just months after the law-and-order attorney general had himself been indicted. Everyone wondered: Would the law-and-order president be next?III
