Watergate, page 72
“Now I think we’re getting somewhere,” Sirica said, closing the meeting.
* * *
The House vote came down on Saturday night, July 27. Doar’s presentations and evidence proved, in the end, to be enough. Amid the many voices on the Judiciary Committee, just ten of the votes really mattered: The so-called Unholy Alliance, of the three conservative Democrats targeted from the start by Rodino and the seven Republicans. Alabama representative Walter Flowers was the last to speak. “There are many people in my district who will disagree with my vote here. Some will say that it hurts them deeply for me to vote for impeachment. I can assure them that I probably have enough pain for them and me,” he said.
In a final attempt to stall or disrupt the debate, New Jersey representative Charles Sandman, a lit cigar before him on the dais, offered a series of amendments to strike each paragraph of the impeachment article one by one—but then backed down after he realized he lacked the necessary support. Rodino called for the vote; in the Byzantine language of House proceedings, his actual words gave little sense of their historical importance. “The question occurs on the substitute offered by the gentleman from Maryland, as amended,” he instructed the committee, turning to clerk Jim Cline for the roll call vote.
As it began, reporters noted that three members appeared close to tears. One by one, every member of the committee stood before history. A ripple of murmurs coursed through the crowd of three hundred in the hearing room as Wisconsin Republican Harold Froehlich cast a yes, and the first no, from Republican Edward Hutchison, seemed to observers to be almost “buoyant,” as opposed to the more “mournful” assents. The seven Republican members of the Unholy Alliance, whose cooperation and negotiation had brought the country to this moment, each voted in turn.
“Mr. McClory?”
“Aye.”
“Mr. Railsback?”
“Aye.”
“Mr. Fish?”
“Aye.”
“Mr. Hogan?”
“Aye.”
“Mr. Butler?”
“Aye.”
“Mr. Cohen?”
“Aye.”
“Mr. Froehlich?”
“Aye.”
A few minutes after 7 p.m.—reporters differed whether it was precisely 7:05 or 7:07—the House Judiciary Committee adopted an article of impeachment against the President of the United States; the vote was a resounding 27–11.
The spell that had settled over the room was broken when the House sergeant at arms slipped up to Rodino to report that a plane had just left National Airport on a kamikaze mission to crash into the Rayburn Building. Rodino ordered the room evacuated, and he and Doar retreated together into the chairman’s office. Word then came that there was no kamikaze plane. Rodino—the cautious, conservative congressman who had once wanted to write songs and poems—finally stood from his chair and left the office, to be alone as he was overwhelmed by tears.
Nixon had just finished a swim in California when he received word of the committee’s vote. The man set to become the first president impeached in 106 years got the news barefoot, standing in a trailer, wearing old pants and a blue windbreaker with the presidential seal. As he walked back to the compound with his daughter, Tricia noted what a wonderful woman her mother was. Nixon agreed and thought about how much she’d been through in the last twenty-five years, in and out of politics: “God, how she could have gone through what she does, I simply don’t know.”
* * *
On July 29, Vice President Ford, Tip O’Neill, and other golf aficionados in the congressional leadership flew to Worcester, Massachusetts, to play in the Pleasant Valley Classic. O’Neill teased Ford as he was late to the plane, having been caught up reviewing drapes for the new vice president’s mansion at the Naval Observatory: “What are you bothering with that for? You’re never going to live in that house—you’re going to be living on Pennsylvania Avenue.”
Ford’s response was quick: “Don’t talk like that.”
Once in the air, the House Republican whip, Les Arends—an Illinois farmer who had first arrived in Congress in 1935—went off with Ford to the private compartment at the back of the plane. “Jesus, Jerry, do you have any idea how serious this thing is?” he asked. “You could be the new president very soon.” Arends was hardly expressing a secret or a controversial opinion—the president’s departure was an open topic of conversation across town. Mississippi representative Trent Lott, whose district had recorded the nation’s most pro-Nixon vote in the ’72 election, told reporters, “Secretly, maybe all of us are hoping for resignation, and maybe I care enough for my colleagues to think that’s the best course.”
That same evening at 11 p.m. the Judiciary Committee approved a second article of impeachment, charging the president with abuse of power. The next day, July 30, it approved a third, charging obstruction of Congress, and voted down two others—one focused on the bombing of Cambodia was rejected in part, as Cohen said, because Nixon’s actions were partially driven by “sloth and default on the part of the Congress,” while the fifth article under consideration, on tax fraud and the president’s personal finances, was rejected 12–26. The committee’s debate had stretched for nearly thirty-five hours.
On Monday, as the House debated, John Connally, Nixon’s friend and the man he’d hoped to choose as his vice president and eventual successor in ’76, was indicted, as part of the milk price fixing scandal, on five charges, including accepting a bribe, obstruction of justice, and perjury, the last of the Nixon dominos to fall.
Nixon, furious over what he saw as the railroading of a friend and ally, called the Justice Department to demand that Henry Petersen had to go. The deputy attorney general, after consulting with Attorney General Saxbe, explained that it was too late. Power is ephemeral, and cities like Washington that live and die on its use develop a finely tuned ability to sense the subtle shifts, murmurs that become stampedes, ripples that become tsunamis. And so it was a capital that had not even heard the “smoking pistol” tape—was not, even, largely aware of the existence of the “smoking pistol”—that sensed the impending end of Richard Nixon. Nixon might still be president, but he had lost the moral authority to make such moves. “Tell him to go piss up a rope,” Saxbe said, colorfully.
The next afternoon, around three-thirty, James St. Clair took the first batch of twenty tapes and went to John Sirica’s courtroom. At 3:48, he handed the tapes over, as subpoenaed by the special prosecutor, ordered by the U.S. District, and affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court. At the same time, from 3:25 to 4:26, Nixon met with treasury secretary William Simon and his economic advisor, to discuss Simon’s recent trip through the Middle East and Europe. Later, Simon would tell reporters he had never seen the president as calm, confident, and strong as that afternoon. In the moment, as they gathered in the Oval Office and the White House photographer snapped a picture, no one knew the significance of the gathering. It was the last “presidential” meeting that ever appeared on Richard Nixon’s official calendar.
* * *
Everyone in Washington seemed physically and emotionally shattered as July ended—the press, Congress, the White House, the investigators. On Capitol Hill, the committee staff began to prepare for the coming debate on the House floor. They expected to have just three weeks to prepare a final report outlining the charges and evidence for impeachment with the floor debate scheduled to start August 19.
Day by day, the president’s core of support in the House and Senate lessened; the White House had originally counted upon thirty-five to forty hard-core Nixon supporters who would vote to acquit in the Senate—he needed at least thirty-four—but the jurors who would sit in judgment were considerably less sure of the president’s prospects at trial. Wednesday, Tennessee senator William Brock estimated the president’s floor was closer to twenty to twenty-six votes. Barry Goldwater too lamented that there didn’t appear to be a way to avoid calamity: “If the president wanted to listen, he would have listened already.” Across the board, among aides and family, Nixon’s ultimate culpability had set in. “He’s guilty as hell,” Haig told aide David Gergen.
Both Haig and St. Clair had finally been convinced of the existential peril of the June 23 tape. For St. Clair, it had taken three listens before he seemed to grasp the context, the players, and the timeline enough to see the damage to the president and the defense he’d mounted to the House committee earlier that month. Haig had still only read Buzhardt’s transcript, but for him, it was sufficient: “He had given the order that legitimized, in the minds of his underlings, everything that they subsequently did to cover up the Watergate crimes.” St. Clair and Buzhardt now explained to Haig their professional obligations: They were in possession of knowledge that the president had misled the court, and if the president didn’t come forward himself, they had to do so independently.I
The doubts and the end-of-the-line feeling had finally reached the president too. Nixon wrote in his diary, “We have to try to work out what we can do to live out whatever life I have left as president and thereafter in a decent way.” If he was impeached and removed from office, there were not just political considerations to address, but personal ones as well—he would lose his presidential pension and the federal allowances for staff support, including the government money due his widow when he died. There was also the question of his own legal liability; at what point after leaving office would he face criminal charges, and what might those be? Perhaps, Haig had reasoned, a resignation—an unprecedented, humiliating announcement of guilt—would serve to mollify the crowd crowing for a pound of flesh. “By resigning, he might preserve his health, some fragment of his reputation, and the possibility of winning back the good opinion of his fellow citizens,” Haig recalled thinking.
Thursday morning, Nixon told Haig he had decided. “Al, it’s over,” the president said. “We’ve done our best. We haven’t got the votes.” The president’s plan, he explained, was to escape to Camp David for the weekend with his family, explain his decision to them, announce his resignation Monday night to the nation, and then spend perhaps two weeks wrapping up his presidency before departing Washington. Haig cautioned against such a long glide path, recommending that perhaps Nixon would be better served to leave before the “smoking pistol” tape became public.
“No, it will be Monday,” Nixon said, his voice almost gentle. “Get Ray Price working on a resignation speech.”
I. It’s worth noting that in this final full week of Nixon’s presidency, accounts and recollections get muddy; across the half-dozen central memoirs, including Nixon’s and Haig’s, and the books that record this moment, like Woodward and Bernstein’s The Final Days, there are conflicting accounts of who said what in which meeting, who read or listened to the June 23 tape on which day, and so forth. There are even contradictions about Haig’s actions between his own memoir and The Final Days, where he was clearly an integral source. The arc of all the stories, though, is the same: The foundation of Nixon’s presidency unraveled steadily as the week progressed, meeting by meeting, conversation by conversation.
Chapter 53 The Final Days
The American presidency always exists on two levels, one flesh and blood, one spiritual—there’s the president, a human who embodies the title temporarily, subject to election or other life event, and the presidency, a perpetual office and constellation of powers and responsibilities that continues ever onward, guided by the Constitution’s Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which ensures it is never vacant.
It was on August 1, 1974, arguably, that the two roles—the man and the office—began to fully separate, the presidency departing Nixon and floating, nebulously, for a few days as Haig and others maneuvered Nixon’s politically impotent and fatally wounded presidency to Gerald Ford. “The clock had stopped in Richard Nixon’s White House,” Haig recalled in his memoirs. According to those memoirs, Nixon gave only the loosest of instructions to his chief of staff; in what Haig says was the only conversation they ever had about the transfer of the presidency, Nixon told him, “Al, you’ve got to tell Ford to be ready. Tell him I want absolute secrecy. Tell him what’s coming. Explain the reasoning. But don’t tell him when.”
On that Thursday, over a series of conversations, Haig explained the situation to a reeling vice president. The June 23 tape, he said, would be the end. (“You should prepare yourself for changes in your life,” Haig said.) They spoke, briefly, about the pardon powers of the presidency, and Haig seemed to dangle a request for a deal, to which Ford, wary, wondered aloud abstractly what might be the options available to what he referred to as “a president.” Haig presented a typed-up rundown of possible options for Nixon, ranging from fighting through a trial to resigning in exchange for a pardon, and asked which course of action Ford would recommend. The vice president, thinking quickly, refused to engage. “Al, I don’t think it would be proper for me to make any recommendations at all. I am an interested party,” he said.
After Haig left, Ford slumped, angry and disappointed, in a chair; the president had lied to him. “The hurt was very deep,” he recalled later. An aide who walked in on him moments later recalled that he looked like a man thunderstruck.
Down Pennsylvania Avenue, the president’s staff understood that they needed Nixon’s most ardent supporters to declare a cease-fire. The first to be told was California Republican Charles Wiggins, who had cheerleaded the president’s defense on the Judiciary Committee. St. Clair summoned him to the White House and urged him to read the transcript—then read it again and again and again. Each time, Wiggins’s dread spread. “That’s extremely damaging information to the president,” the congressman finally said. “It’s a bombshell. It established a count of obstruction of justice. You ought to be considering the possible resignation of the president.” Upon returning to the Hill, Wiggins surveyed the work he’d been doing when St. Clair summoned him—spread across his office were all the materials to prepare a vigorous defense of the president. Wiggins instead told his staff he was heading home. The tape, it seemed, would come out on Monday.
Friday night, Ford called Haig unexpectedly at the urging of his aides and read, stiffly, a prepared statement: “I want you to understand that I have no intention of recommending what the President should do about resigning or not resigning, and nothing we talked about yesterday afternoon should be given any consideration in whatever decision the President may wish to make.”
Haig understood the awkwardly worded message: Ford was establishing, for the future record, that there was no deal in place nor negotiation underway about trading Nixon’s presidency for a pardon. The phone call was, in its own way, Gerald Ford’s declaration of independence. His political loyalty had ended; he now had to be concerned about his own ability to govern as president.
Meanwhile, Nixon told Bebe Rebozo of his decision as they sailed together on the Sequoia, before he told his own family. Rebozo, the ultimate confidant, one who had stayed loyal even as his own life and privacy had been upended by the investigations around the president, protested when his friend said the end had come. Nixon, Rebozo argued, still maintained the support of millions of Americans; the president countered with the political reality: “Millions” no longer mattered. His presidency hinged on the support of just thirty-four men, the votes needed to acquit him in the Senate. After dinner, Rebozo drifted away to talk with the yacht’s crew, as he often did, and Nixon sat, alone, watching the Potomac and the capital drift by.I
* * *
In a country that had seen a few seemingly accidental presidents, men plucked from obscurity in the vice presidency and thrust into office by illness (Millard Fillmore) or an assassin’s bullet (Chester A. Arthur), Gerald Ford stood alone as the only man ever to ascend to the presidency without ever being elected by the American people—neither as vice president nor as president—and there was probably no one more unhappy about his impending elevation than he was himself.
Born Leslie L. King, Jr., the son and namesake of an awful, abusive father whom his mother had fled just sixteen days after their son’s birth in 1913, Ford had eventually taken the name of his mother’s hardworking and far more amiable second husband. Always affable and well liked, “Junie Ford” first glimpsed Washington, D.C., after winning a high school contest as the most popular senior in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the experience of watching the House at work from the visitor’s gallery was part of what inspired him to become a lawyer. He was a Hall of Fame football player at the University of Michigan, whose college yearbook finished a string of compliments by recording, “We can’t find anything really nasty to say about him.”
He had been just a few months out of Yale Law School when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and he enlisted in the navy the next day, bravely serving aboard an aircraft carrier in the Pacific Theater during the war, before returning to Grand Rapids to practice law again at the city’s top firm. “People believed in him,” his biographer later wrote. “Whether it was his earnestness, seriousness of purpose, readiness to listen, genial nature, or other qualities, there was something about him as a boy and a young man that brought people to see promise and possibilities.” Soon, he was headed to Congress, having defeated a decade-long incumbent in the Republican primary; he was married that fall to his wife, Betty, in shoes still muddy from campaigning earlier in the day. He loved being in the House of Representatives, the arm of the federal government that by structure and culture bore the closest relationship with the people it governed.
There his unwavering support throughout the president’s scandals had stemmed from more than just friendship; at a basic level, he trusted the president and all the denials. “You have to believe the president, and I did believe him,” Ford said later. “He had never lied to me.”
