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The national security adviser’s initial skepticism that Nixon could open Red China was fast disappearing.
Halperin for suspected leaking, and Gelb and Halperin both now worked at the Brookings Institution, a think tank Nixon regarded as a government-in-exile for Democrats.
Nixon often worked through a problem by venting, by letting off steam with imprecations and threats that were not to be taken literally.
Connally had little economic training but joked, “I can add.” He was a nationalist who had once said, “My view is that the foreigners are out to screw us, and therefore it’s our job to screw them first.”13 Connally’s ignorance of economic matters matched Nixon’s own; although Nixon was a substantive, unusually well-read political leader, his economic expertise was surprisingly shallow.
This revelation was, on its face, shocking. The Joint Chiefs had been caught red-handed spying on the president of the United States. “Jesus Christ!” Nixon exclaimed when Ehrlichman told him. The president banged the table and threatened prosecutions.
Working all night, Kissinger found an artful finesse—the Americans acknowledged that Taiwan was part of “one China” but left it to the “Chinese themselves” to settle the matter peacefully.
In the Nixon White House, as well as at the CRP, the gathering and spreading of dirt was sanctioned, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, from on high.
and felt a rush of emotion looking back at the onion domes of the Kremlin to see the American flag flying over his guest quarters. (The flag was shown again and again on American TV to a public becoming more and more appreciative of their globetrotting president-for-peace.)6
They intended to break into the Democratic National Committee, only a corridor and elevator ride away. But the alarm on a door was unexpectedly armed, and the duo spent the night trapped in the banquet room. The next night, a different group of burglars, lacking the proper tools to pick the locks, failed as well. On the third try, the burglars got into the Watergate and placed bugs on the phone of DNC chairman Larry O’Brien and another official. One of the bugs didn’t work. The Plumbers broke into the DNC’s Watergate offices again on the night of June 16, but one of the burglars taped the
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There is an aura of disengagement, detachment, even mild bemusement in Nixon’s recounting of his initial reaction to the Watergate break-in. He regarded spying on opponents as normal and accepted, and from the very beginning of the Watergate scandal complained about a “double standard” in the press that let Democrats get away with dirty tricks but not the Republicans.
Haldeman agreed. He began to explain, warily, cryptically, that others in the White House had tried to respond to the president’s steady demand for campaign intelligence by undertaking certain projects—but nothing so crude and clumsy as the Watergate breakin.
Leaving the inexperienced Dean to handle the investigation was a fatal blunder; he quickly incriminated himself in a cover-up in a way that no careful criminal lawyer would ever countenance.
Mitchell had presided over two meetings at which Liddy outlined the appalling “Gemstone” plans to bug, blackmail, and kidnap. He may not have given a clear green light to Liddy, but he did not fire him either. Everyone
remind Nixon that Liddy ultimately reported to John Mitchell, who was the chairman of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President. This apparently prompted Nixon’s mind to wander into dangerous territory: Had Mitchell known about the break-in before the arrests? “Mitchell?” said Haldeman,
Nixon’s explanation to Frost was self-serving. It deflected blame away from where it belonged—at Richard Nixon’s doorstep. It was Nixon who created the toxic environment in which his lieutenants felt pressure to spy on the president’s perceived enemies. And
But it is also true that in the summer of 1972, Nixon’s deep-seated dislike of personal confrontation served him very poorly.
The Bureau had been able to trace the hundred-dollar bills found on the burglars. The money trail would lead straight to some Nixon campaign donors who did not wish to be identified because some of them were Democrats hedging their bets.
The donors were being sucked into the case because Liddy, in his double role as counsel to the Republican Finance Committee, had carelessly used the cash from their donations to finance the burglary.
Nixon’s advisers came up with the idea of enlisting the CIA to head off the FBI’s investigation into the account of on...
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Such misunderstandings were typical of Nixon’s handling of Watergate: He wanted to stay out of it but couldn’t resist meddling, in ways that were often ambiguous, confusing, and ultimately incriminating.
Magruder had just learned that he would not be indicted. He had successfully misled the grand jury and persuaded the prosecutors that he—and, by extension, his boss John Mitchell—had not known about the Watergate break-in.
But Nixon and Kissinger needed each other. Nixon ordered Kissinger to break the news about the stalled peace talks at a press conference. Kissinger acquiesced—but made sure to mention Nixon’s name fourteen times.32
Ten days later, on January 22, LBJ died, “of a broken heart,” as Nixon wrote. President Johnson had “longed for the popular approval and affection that continued to elude him.”
But the overwhelming impression left by listening to the tapes is of a man who is not clever, who is all too human—who rambles, gets lost, changes his mind, knows too much and too little all at once.55 Nixon the brilliant political analyst is nowhere to be seen. His judgment is clouded by human frailty. One moment he sounds cold-blooded and ruthless. The next moment he is naïvely idealistic, prattling on about the lesson of the Hiss case as related in Six Crises—the cover-up is worse than the crime!—while plunging into an ever-deeper cover-up. Perhaps he was being cynical and manipulative. Or
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Fond of quoting British statesmen, Nixon was familiar with William Gladstone’s maxim that “The first essential for a Prime Minister is to be a good butcher.”60 Nixon, by his own admission, was not a good butcher.61
pronounced sentence.75 Bebe Rebozo would later recall an old Cuban expression, “Sooner or later, everyone walks under the lanai.” It meant that you should treat people well because when you walk under the veranda they can wave to you—or push a flowerpot onto your head.
In 1970, Judge Sirica had presided at the swearing-in of William Casey as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. After the ceremony, Sirica had said to the president, “I was the head of Italians for Eisenhower-Nixon in 1956 in New York City. I’d like to be on the court of appeals.” Nixon had brushed him off.76
It is hard to explain this failure of judgment, the most critical mistake Nixon ever made. Favoring hush money over full disclosure was a moral lapse, regardless of whether Nixon had committed a crime, but the reasons for his actions are complex and not easy to sort out. It is generally true, as his defenders have argued, that Nixon was continuing to view his problems as political when they were by now legal—criminally so.28 But this explanation begs deeper questions. Nixon suffered from a blind spot brought on by mixed motives, some of them decent but ultimately fatal to his presidency. His
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Inevitably, debates over interpretation have been shaded by sympathy and ideology.31 *3 Nixon always tried
In fact, I had known some of the details of the cover-up before March 21, and when I did become aware of their implications, instead of exerting presidential leadership aimed at uncovering the cover-up, I embarked in an increasingly desperate search for ways to limit the damage to my friends, my administration, and myself.
Nixon told Haig, “Al, those tapes are going to defend me. They’re going to protect me from what I’m being charged with.” He would come to rue his decision not to destroy the tapes.
They (Zeigler [sic], possibly Haig and certainly the President himself) seem to think if he keeps saying it over and over again, it will become the truth or be accepted as such, but still won’t give up the tapes which presumably would at least give some clarification of what the truth is.
Along with Kissinger, he had a tendency to delude himself with the presumption that America could cold-bloodedly calibrate the fate of other peoples as part of some grand global “geostrategy.”11 And yet, in a critical moment in the history of Israel, Nixon—who could so casually utter ethnic slurs—decisively and forcefully came to the rescue of the people of Israel.
The aggressive young lawyers in Cox’s office were examining the hefty expenditure of taxpayer dollars to improve Nixon properties in Key Biscayne and San Clemente, as well as a sizable tax break Nixon had claimed when donating his private papers to the National Archives.
Homer’s Iliad. The passage (slightly improved by Richardson) had been inscribed, in Greek, in a signed photo given to Richardson by Judge Hand: Now, though numberless fates of death beset us, which no mortal can escape or avoid, let us go forward together, and happily we shall give honor to one another, or another to us.20
deputy, William Ruckelshaus, had resigned. (Solicitor General Robert Bork, the number three official at Justice, finally fired Cox because, while he disagreed with the decision, Bork believed that Nixon was within his rights and he recognized the need for continuity of government.) The
On May 13, the president made a national radio address proposing comprehensive national health insurance. His proposal, with its federal mandates, was not significantly different from the one that Barack Obama finally pushed through Congress nearly four decades later.
It is likely that the president’s approval ratings would have bottomed out even without Watergate; without doubt, voter anger over the economy further drained Nixon’s nearly empty reserves of goodwill in Congress. Wallace’s
His voice faltered. “I want to give you something. But look around the office. I don’t have anything anymore. They took it all away from me.” Becker awkwardly tried to reassure Nixon, but the former president fumbled around in his desk drawer and finally produced some cuff links. “I used to have all kinds of things, ashtrays, you know, paperweights and all that. Lots of them,” he said. “I’m sorry this is the best I have now.” Becker returned to Washington
Still, it’s true that Watergate got out of hand in part because Nixon was too shy, too trusting to confront his own staff on exactly what happened and who was to blame.
Nixon’s strengths were his weaknesses, and vice versa. The drive that propelled him also crippled him. The underdog’s sensitivity that made him farsighted also blinded him. He wanted to show that he was hard because he felt soft. He learned how to be popular because he felt rejected. He was the lonely everyman to the end.
power and purpose and essential goodness. He devoted his life to serving his country. Nixon bemoaned the rise of the “Me Generation,” the baby boomers preoccupied with self-realization and self-affirmation. It is ironic that Nixon, by discrediting faith
Aeschylus wrote that from suffering comes wisdom; Nixon’s tragedy was that he did not gain wisdom, at least about himself, from suffering—certainly, not until it was too late to save his presidency.
