Watergate, page 61
The resulting tax bills for 1968 through 1972 seemed outrageous: $789 in federal income tax in 1970 and $878 in 1971, meaning that he had earned $525,000 over 1970 and 1971 but paid less in income taxes than someone who had earned just $9,800. In 1972, he still only paid $4,298.III
As Weicker and Senate investigators looked further into the matter, the fishier and less altruistic the president’s “donation” seemed. For one thing, there was no original official deed of gift at the National Archives, or a record of the papers being turned over. A deed had been delivered to the National Archives in April 1970, with signatures from a White House lawyer and a lawyer from Kalmbach’s firm, both dated April 21, 1969, an apparent attempt to illegally backdate before the new law took effect. The transfer of the papers appeared to come with the stipulation that archivists couldn’t fully access the records, which also would have negated the effect of a “gift” under the tax law. As far as Weicker’s team could determine, the arrangement with the National Archives was less a tax-deductible gift to benefit Americans and more a taxpayer-financed storage facility.
This inevitably led to other questions about Nixon’s personal finances. Reporters and investigators had been trying all year to piece together the financial transactions behind his vacation homes in San Clemente and Key Biscayne; Nixon had originally bought the whole twenty-six-acre Casa Pacifica estate with a loan from Abplanalp, and later sold most of the adjoining land to Abplanalp and Rebozo, who then sold his share back to Abplanalp. Thanks to deft legal work by Kalmbach, the transactions had all flown under the radar.
That fall, amid everything else, allegations swirled that Howard Hughes had helped finance the purchase of the Casa Pacifica; ABC reported that Nixon held a million-dollar “secret investment portfolio” of old campaign funds, and Jack Anderson hinted at Swiss bank accounts. At one point, Pat Nixon even faced her own allegations that she’d kept for personal use jewels given to her as first lady. “What more can they possibly want us to do?” Pat asked Richard, in despair.
All those allegations proved false, but the public fixated on the true controversy that as much as $10 million had been spent on “improvements” to the Nixon getaways in San Clemente and Key Biscayne, a huge figure compiled by Congress and the General Services Administration that primarily captured the routine communications and security infrastructure installed for presidents away from Washington, much of which would be removed at the conclusion of Nixon’s term.IV However, plenty of the “improvements” seemed to be about Nixon’s comfort than security and eyebrows went up across Washington as Congress and reporters dug deeper. Pat Nixon was horrified at the scandal. “She came to believe that nothing hastened the turning of public opinion against the Nixon presidency more than the suggestion of profiting at the taxpayers’ expense,” Julie Nixon wrote later.
Needless to say, the fresh questions began to undermine the administration’s Operation Candor campaign. Over the course of a week, Nixon had hosted nine separate sessions with lawmakers, each stretching across two hours and allowing for a meaty conversation about Watergate and Nixon’s plans for the path ahead; all told, he met with 241 Republican lawmakers and 46 Democrats, hoping that the transparency push would make clear he was leveling with the American people. However, at every turn, the sessions seemed instead to highlight how many questions he wasn’t willing to answer directly. Nixon grew increasingly frustrated, unsure how he could ever move past it all. (“I know in the history books 25 years from now, what will really matter is the fact that the President of the United States in the period from 1969 to 1976 changed the world,” he lamented in one conversation.)
On November 17, he made a quick trip from Key Biscayne to Orlando to speak at the annual meeting of Associated Press newspaper editors as part of his transparency tour. During a sometimes tense but nonetheless expansive hour-long question-and-answer session, he fielded inquiries on all manner of the scandals he found himself embroiled in. When one questioner asked about his taxes and personal finances, Nixon launched into a lengthy soliloquy that harkened back to his famous “Checkers speech.” When he’d left Washington in 1960, the president explained, his net worth after fourteen years of government work had been just $47,000 and a 1958 Oldsmobile. Over his eight years in the private sector, though, he’d prospered (left unsaid was that his newfound wealth came in no small part thanks to John Mitchell’s law firm and guidance), and eventually, upon entering the White House, he converted those assets into real estate, which to him had seemed more appropriate than holding stocks as president.
Continuing, Nixon told the four hundred assembled newspaper editors, “Let me just say this, and I want to say this to the television audience: I made my mistakes, but in all of my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service—I have earned every cent. And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice.”
As he put it, “I welcome this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I am not a crook. I have earned everything I have got.”
Later, amid the questions and answers, Nixon did elicit one round of good-natured laughter when asked about the nation’s still unfolding energy crisis and need for conservation. In response, he alluded to the fact that he’d canceled the standard practice of having a backup presidential jet shadow Air Force One: “If this [plane] goes down, they don’t have to impeach.”
A few days later, Nixon faced the nation’s Republican governors and issued similar reassurances. Oregon’s governor, Tom McCall, asked Nixon point-blank, “Are we going to be blindsided by any more Watergate bombs?”
“If there are any more bombs, I’m not aware of them,” Nixon said confidently.
Within twenty-four hours, McCall and the rest of the country would learn that it was a lie.
* * *
The day before Thanksgiving, Wednesday, November 21, Fred Buzhardt called Leon Jaworski at 9:30 with an urgent message: The White House lawyer needed to “discuss a serious problem… in the strictest confidence.” That afternoon, he visited the Special Prosecutor’s Office for the first time and explained, haltingly, that they’d identified a problem with one of the subpoenaed tapes—the conversation on June 20, 1972, between Haldeman and Nixon had a gap in the middle stretching across more than eighteen minutes. The words between the president and his chief of staff, whatever they had been, were gone. It was almost certainly a critical conversation, understood to be the first the two men had had at the White House following the burglary, after a morning of meetings and intelligence gathering by Haldeman around the West Wing.
The issue had consumed the White House’s top echelon over the preceding days, as Buzhardt had been cataloging the tapes to hand over to the court—listening hours on end, chain-smoking unfiltered Camels and trying to decipher what was being said on the scratchy recordings piped through what his colleagues called his Mickey Mouse earphones. He had stumbled upon the gap on November 14 and quickly realized it was far more than just the accidental five-minute erasure Rose Mary Woods had supposedly reported to the president in October.V
Now Buzhardt was direct with Jaworski. “I see no way that this could have been done accidentally,” he said, before firmly pointing the finger at Rose Mary Woods.VI The lawyer relayed that they’d spoken with her, a conversation in which she maintained she had no explanation for the erased tape. They planned to tell her to get her own criminal defense attorney.
“Well, I guess we better go see the judge,” Jaworski sighed. Buzhardt recoiled. He had hoped to wait until after Thanksgiving. Jaworski wouldn’t have it; he didn’t want to be accused by anyone, friend or foe, of being party to another stage of a White House cover-up.
That afternoon, Buzhardt, Garment, and Jaworski arrived in Sirica’s chambers. As soon as the trio entered, Sirica noted that Buzhardt, who rarely looked well, now looked pale as a ghost. The judge was horrified by their admission too—Buzhardt referred to it oddly as an “obliteration of the intelligence”—and he only got angrier as the president’s counsel explained that the missing portion of the tape came about three minutes into Nixon and Haldeman’s conversation. Buzhardt explained that they had located Haldeman’s handwritten notes about the meeting and confirmed that the erased portion—eighteen minutes, fifteen seconds long—dealt with Watergate. The tape picked back up as Haldeman and Nixon were speaking about an unrelated topic. The erasure seemed almost surely purposeful. “[Sirica] was almost impassive,” Jaworski recalled. “With his shock of black hair and strong brown features, he looked on that afternoon like an Apache chieftain.”
Finally, the judge spoke. “This calls for another hearing.” He wanted the problem and the explanation on the record and in public as quickly as possible. Buzhardt protested, saying he needed time to organize the White House’s response, and Sirica granted him an hour, though he thought even that was generous.
Sirica ordered the tapes delivered to him by Monday and set a schedule for additional hearings to understand how exactly a critical piece of evidence, supposedly under tight guard in one of the most tightly guarded compounds in the world, had been erased.
Speaking to reporters after, Richard Ben-Veniste was quick to answer what subsequent hearings might uncover. “Obstruction of justice,” he said.
So much for Operation Candor.
I. Part of the staff’s dubiousness about Jaworski stemmed from confusion over whether he wanted the staff to call him “Colonel,” an honorific dating back to his time as army prosecutor that had been carried on by his friends and colleagues in Houston. “Well, if he opens up a fried chicken joint in the basement, I’ll call him Colonel. Until then, he’s Mr. Jaworski to me,” Doyle grumbled to Ruth.
II. The other major issue at the top of Jaworski’s docket as he took over was Egil “Bud” Krogh’s case. Jaworski and prosecutor Bill Merrill leaned hard on Krogh. “I tried to make it clear that I saw him as a decent person who was caught in this vise,” Merrill recalled later. Then, Jaworski closed in, recounting his experiences as a war crimes prosecutor at Nuremberg, where he’d help try the villains behind the Dachau concentration camp. “Those who came out of that experience whole were the ones who admitted responsibility for their actions,” he said. “It is not enough to say, ‘I followed orders.’ ” Krogh pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate the civil rights of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Lewis Fielding. In exchange, Jaworski dropped the perjury charge he faced.
III. The totals were so low that when Lowell Weicker first heard them, he’d not been particularly concerned because he’d assumed the tax bills referred to Nixon’s weekly income tax payments—not his annual tax bill.
IV. Those security requirements had exploded only since the Kennedy assassination, and Nixon felt again held to a double standard as Lyndon Johnson had seen similar—and even some more outrageous—government-funded construction work on his Texas ranch without criticism.
V. No one had been happy to hear the news; Haig exploded to Buzhardt, “Dammit Fred, this is a pretty late date to be telling me something like that,” and Nixon, in turn, exploded at Haig when told, saying, “What the hell do you expect me to do about it?”
VI. Buzhardt would long maintain Woods as his prime suspect, in part, he said much later, because Nixon was such a transparent liar he didn’t imagine the president could have done it without somehow telegraphing that in conversation—or confessing outright.
Chapter 45 The Rose Mary Stretch
Coming on the eve of a long national holiday, the timing of the revelations of the eighteen-minute gap couldn’t have been worse. Across the country, members of Congress flowed home to their districts only to receive an earful from their constituents about the president’s behavior and ongoing obfuscations. The Monday after Thanksgiving, there was a long line of Democratic congressmen waiting to share those frustrations with Tip O’Neill and pressure him to move forward on impeachment. “When are we going to get moving?” Ohio representative Jim Stanton asked. “My constituents aren’t just disgusted with Nixon, they’re starting to get on me, too. They don’t think we’re doing anything about it.”
O’Neill’s patience was wearing thin, as was his remaining caution. The House majority leader knew that the impeachment question wasn’t about the law anymore; it was political. He pushed judiciary chair Rodino to move faster in launching a real impeachment inquiry. Exasperated with Rodino’s foot-dragging, O’Neill delivered an order: Pick a main lawyer for impeachment before Christmas.
That same Monday, seven reels of tape—all covering the conversations of June 20, 1972—arrived at the D.C. courthouse from the White House. To protect them, Judge Sirica had contacted the National Security Agency, who installed a special secure safe in his chambers; he and his clerk memorized the combination—his wife’s birthday, December 27, 1923, reversed as 23-27-12—and told no one else. U.S. marshals took up a twenty-four-hour guard outside, and soon a security camera watched over the door as well.
The judge also immediately convened a hearing to get to the bottom of the eighteen-minute gap. It would be the starring moment for Jill Volner, the only female prosecutor on the Watergate task force. In an era with few high-profile female lawyers and when federal rules actually then barred women from wearing pants to court, the young, fashionable Volner captivated the courtroom and nation beyond; nearly every mention of her would contain a description like “the miniskirted lawyer,” a phrase like “blonde bombshell,” or a reference to her “peaches-and-cream complexion.” (Her boss, Jaworski, described her in his memoir as “an attractive, perceptive woman of thirty.”) A photo of her wearing a flouncy fur coat as she walked into the courthouse became one of the scandal’s most famous photos. She was a tough interrogator.I
Over three days of questioning, Rose Mary Woods and Volner sparred back and forth as Nixon’s longtime secretary sought to explain the erasure without risking any damage to her boss.
Woods had been the president’s confidante, closest associate, and ultimate gatekeeper throughout his entire public life. Though her role was labeled as “secretary,” Woods was far more than that—at the White House, she’d actually had three secretaries of her own—and she’d long been the president’s political memory, remembering friendships and holding grudges as long as necessary. Never married and roughly the age of Richard and Pat, she was known as “Aunt Rose” to the two Nixon daughters, and referred to by outsiders as the “Fifth Nixon.” She even traded clothes with the first lady, since both wore a size 10. While she’d mostly be remembered as a punchline in the Watergate story, she had commanded widespread respect before the scandal. In 1962, the Los Angeles Times had named her “Woman of the Year,” and early in Nixon’s presidency, Ladies’ Home Journal had named her one of the nation’s “75 most important women,” alongside Joan Baez, Coretta Scott King, and even Katharine Graham herself.
The hostility between Woods and Volner seemed almost palpable in the courtroom—“Volner got her story from her with the calm tenacity of a plowman striving for a straight furrow,” Jaworski recalled—a tension that had likely carried over from the last time Volner had questioned her about the missing tapes, asking what had been done to protect their integrity. (“I used my head—it is the only one I had to use,” Woods had shot back.)
Now, just three weeks later, Woods was telling an entirely different story—in this version, she maintained that she’d carelessly and distractedly damaged the key conversation by accident. Sirica was galled realizing that she’d sat in his courtroom weeks earlier and said nothing, despite knowing that one of the tapes was damaged in her transcription efforts.
After being advised on the record by Volner of her Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination, Woods recounted her experience attempting to transcribe the tapes at the end of September and beginning of October at Camp David, the White House, and Key Biscayne. While working on the unfamiliar Uher 5000 recorder, she explained, she must’ve accidentally pressed the record button while reaching to answer a nearby phone and then kept her foot on the pedal during the telephone call; she’d immediately realized her mistake, informed the president, and then been assured that the mistaken erasure wasn’t part of the subpoenaed tapes. It was only in November, the White House said, that it realized the affected tape was part of the batch demanded by Archibald Cox.
To test the theory, Volner gave Woods a similar tape recorder and asked her to demonstrate her stretch as she reached for the telephone—as soon as she did, her foot came off the pedal. (A photo later released by the White House of Woods, at her desk, awkwardly re-creating her stretch to answer the phone while keeping her foot on the pedal was almost laughable in her contortions; it ran on the cover of Newsweek with the headline “Rose Mary’s Boo Boo.”)
Even if Woods’s story was believable, it still only accounted for five or six minutes of the eighteen-minute gap, and over the course of the three days, she never tried to offer an explanation for the full loss. Moreover, the timelines she’d listed didn’t add up. Woods said she’d spent more than two hours transcribing the tape on October 1, but the Uher 5000 machine was only delivered to her sometime after 1:15 p.m., and she said she reported the problem to Nixon at 2:08 p.m., a time stamp backed up by White House records.
Later, on the witness stand, Al Haig, who had made it through most of his testimony with crisp, no-nonsense answers, stumbled when asked how the other thirteen minutes of the tape were erased. “Perhaps some sinister force had come in and applied the other energy source and taken care of the information on that tape,” Haig posited.
