American Experiment (376 page)

Impeachment! During much of 1973 few even in the media had dared mention the word; it smacked of the impeachment and trial 105 years earlier of Andrew Johnson, an episode ill regarded in most recent histories. For months the committee and its big staff had been sorting through White House tapes and other records that the President, dragging his feet at every stage, had turned over to the committee or the courts. Day by day the specter of impeachment became more real. The Republican minority on the committee were an especially anguished lot. Many were personally as well as politically loyal to Nixon, who had done them many favors,
including trips into their districts to give their campaigns the White House blessing. This was the case with Hamilton Fish, Jr., who to boot was the fourth consecutive Hamilton Fish to serve as a Republican member of Congress. His father, famed as a target of FDR’s jibes at “Martin, Barton, and Fish,” was still active, at eighty-five, in backing Nixon and demanding whether there could be “fair and impartial justice among the left-winged Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee who received large campaign contributions from organized labor.”

But the younger Fish was slowly moving toward impeachment after the Saturday Night Massacre, which had socked him “right in the gut,” and after reading tape transcripts. Some Republicans were outraged by the unending stream of revelations; others held out for “our President,” while Rodino sought to “mass” the committee in order to stave off accusations of blind partisanship. The committee rose to the occasion, with some noble utterances during its deliberations.

Barbara Jordan, Texas Democrat, woman, black: “Earlier today we heard the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States. ‘We, the people … ’ It is a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787 I was not included in that, ‘We, the people.’ I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision I have finally been included in ‘We, the people.’ Today, I am an inquisitor. My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.”

M. Caldwell Butler, Virginia Republican: “For years we Republicans have campaigned against corruption and misconduct.… But Watergate is our shame. Those things have happened in our house and it is our responsibility to do what we can to clear it up.” He announced that he was inclining toward impeachment. “But there will be no joy in it for me.”

On July 27, 1974, the committee voted 27-11 to recommend impeachment on the ground that the President had “engaged personally and through his subordinates and agents, in a course of conduct or plan designed to delay, impede, and obstruct the investigation” of the Watergate burglary. Two days later the committee voted, 28-10, an article charging that Nixon’s conduct had violated the constitutional rights of citizens and impaired the proper administration of justice. The votes reflected a precarious coalition of committee Democrats and Republicans; the majority of Republicans still stood by their President.

But on August 5, Richard Nixon, in obedience to the Supreme Court
decision, released the transcripts of three conversations which showed beyond any doubt that six days after the Watergate break-in—on June 23, 1972—he was at the center of the conspiracy to cover up that crime, obstructing justice by plotting to block the FBI investigation. “I was sick. I was shocked,” a middle-level White House official told a journalist. “He had
lied
to me, to all of us. I think my first thought, before that sank in, was of those Republicans on the Judiciary Committee … those men who had risked their careers to defend him.”

Now one of those men—Charles Wiggins—said, “I have reached the painful conclusion that the President of the United States should resign.” If he did not, “I am prepared to conclude that the magnificent career of public service of Richard Nixon must be terminated involuntarily.”

The White House, August 7-9, 1974.
In the final days the two Nixons—the shrewd, confident calculator and the narcissist hovering between dreams of omnipotence and feelings of insecurity—emerged in the Watergate crucible. Even now he was a cold head counter, yet he appeared to be swinging erratically between holding out to the bitter end and throwing it all up. Senators Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott and House Minority Leader John J. Rhodes arrived at the White House on August 7 to brief the President on the situation in Congress. After some small talk:

SCOTT:
We’ve asked Barry to be our spokesman.

NIXON: GO
ahead, Barry.

GOLDWATER:
Mr. President, this isn’t pleasant, but you want to know the situation and it isn’t good.

NIXON:
Pretty bad, huh? … How many would you say would be with me—a half dozen?

GOLDWATER:
More than that, maybe sixteen to eighteen.… We’ve discussed the thing a lot and just about all of the guys have spoken up and there aren’t many who would support you if it comes to that.

I took kind of a nose count today, and I couldn’t find more than four very firm votes, and those would be from older Southerners. Some are very worried about what’s been going on, and are undecided, and I’m one of them.

NIXON:
John, I know how you feel, what you’ve said, I respect it, but what’s your estimate?

RHODES:
About the same, Mr. President.

NIXON:
Well, that’s about the way I thought it was. I’ve got a very difficult decision to make, but I want you to know I’m going to make
it for the best interests of the country.… I’m not interested in pensions. I’m not interested in pardons or amnesty. I’m going to make this decision for the best interests of the country.

SCOTT:
Mr. President, we are all very saddened, but we have to tell you the facts.
NIXON:
Never mind. There’ll be no tears. I haven’t cried since Eisenhower died. My family has been fine. I’m going to be all right.… Do I have any other options?

There were no options. After a bit more small talk his visitors left. The next night the President addressed the nation on television. He was calm, restrained. “As we look to the future, the first essential is to begin healing the wounds of this Nation, to put the bitterness and divisions of the recent past behind us and to rediscover those shared ideals that lie at the heart of our strength and unity as a great and as a free people.” There was no admission of guilt, no word about the lies he had told or the laws he had broken or the trust he had violated; he would say only that “some of my judgments were wrong”—but he announced his resignation, effective the next day, August 9, at noon.

In the last hours the President vacillated between mourning and brief bouts of euphoria, between weeping and laughter. In his departing speech to cabinet and staff on the morning of August 9, he talked about the White House—“this house has a great heart”—and about his father, “a streetcar motorman first”—and about his mother—“my mother was a saint.” Then an admonition from this man whose great hatreds had contributed to his fall: “… always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

Finally the scene, etched on the memory of America, of Nixon and his wife and daughters, their eyes brimming, walking out to the waiting helicopter. There in the door he turned to the crowd, and waved, a contorted smile on his face. From Andrews Air Force Base he and Mrs. Nixon flew west on the
Spirit of
’
76
to their home in San Clemente. Somewhere over central Missouri the presidency of Richard Nixon came to its end.

What did the President know? When did he know it? And when would the American people know what and when the President knew? These continued to be the critical questions facing Americans during most of the months of Watergate. The stunning answer came on August 5, 1974, when Nixon released the three damning tapes of June 23, 1972. At last the “smoking gun” lay before the people.

Knowing what had happened evoked the more compelling and intractable questions: Why? How could it have happened? Was Watergate due to one man, Richard Nixon, and his flaws of character? If so, why had he been joined in criminal and immoral acts by another thirty or forty men, not all of whom were close to him? Was Watergate, then, a product of the political institutions in which these men operated—of the “imperial presidency,” a hostile and biased media, the whole political and constitutional system? But what had shaped these institutions—psychological forces within the political elite, a corruption of the American national character, economic and social tendencies inherent in an individualistic, dog-eat-dog culture?

Nixon’s apologists defended him as a victim rather than a villain—as the legatee of dishonorable precedents set by previous Presidents, as the butt of a vindictive press, as simply acquiescing, in son-in-law David Eisenhower’s words, “in the non-prosecution of aides who covered up a little operation into the opposition’s political headquarters,” a long-established practice “that no one took that seriously.” John Kenneth Galbraith had predicted at the time of Nixon’s resignation that someone would also advance the argument that “there’s a little bit of Richard Nixon in all of us.” Galbraith added, “I say the hell there is!”

A more persuasive explanation of Watergate put the whole episode in a political and institutional context. The “swelling of the presidency,” wrote presidential scholar Thomas E. Cronin, had produced around the President a coterie of dozens of assistants, hundreds of presidential advisers, and “thousands of members of an institutional amalgam called the Executive Office of the President.” This presidential establishment had become a “powerful inner sanctum of government, isolated from traditional, constitutional checks and balances.” George E. Reedy, former press secretary to LBJ, saw beneath the President “a mass of intrigue, posturing, strutting, cringing, and pious ‘commitment’ to irrelevant windbaggery”—a “perfect setting for the conspiracy of mediocrity.” John Dean remembered the “blind ambition” that had infected him and others in the White House.

Jeb Magruder wrote that the President’s mounting insecurities and passions over Vietnam and the antiwar protests led to Watergate, for Presidents set the tone of their Administrations. But, Magruder continued, it was not enough to blame the atmosphere Nixon created. “No one forced me or the others to break the law,” he said. “We could have objected to what was happening or resigned in protest. Instead, we convinced ourselves that wrong was right, and plunged ahead.”

It was the sting of the media that drove Nixon to dangerous and desperate retaliatory tactics, some of his supporters contended. In fact, each side—all sides—exaggerated the extent to which the media supported
their adversaries and, even more, the actual influence wielded by the media. The Watergate “battle of public opinion” was more like a vast guerrilla war in which a variety of political and media generals and colonels fought for advantage in the murk. Nixon repeatedly used television to reach the viewers over the heads of the press, but his credibility was suspect. Investigative reporters burrowed away, looking for fame as well as facts. Polls were used to influence public opinion as well as to test it. A polling organization friendly to the White House asked its sample: “Which action do you yourself feel is the more morally reprehensible— which is worse—the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick or the bugging of the Democratic National Committee?”

The nature of the public-opinion battle, moreover, changed during the two-year struggle. People tended to react to the early revelations as Democrats and Republicans, or as Nixon admirers and haters. The press, too, tended to divide along lines of party or presidential preference in 1972, when about seven of every ten newspapers endorsed Nixon and about one out of every twenty McGovern. At first the pro-Nixon newspapers tended to play down or ignore the Watergate burglary; then they faltered and shifted in the face of the avalanche of evidence of wrongdoing. All in all, two close students of Watergate public opinion concluded, grass-roots political attitudes had less an active than a reactive role in Watergate; they were not so much a powerful, cohesive force pressing for a certain action as simply a melting away of Nixon’s old constituency, especially after the smoking-gun revelation, and he was left without his “base.”

In the end it was not in the “tribunal” of public opinion that the issue was settled but in the more formal tribunals of the American political and constitutional system. If Nixon hoped he could save himself eventually as he had done with his “Checkers” appeal in 1952, he was underestimating the legislative branch. A Congress that for months had been stupefied and almost immobilized by shocking revelations roused itself to concerted action, voting in committee to impeach. Even so, the system might well not have worked except for investigative reporters who refused to quit, a remarkable series of blunders by Nixon, stretching from his original taping of the White House to his failure to destroy the tapes, and other “chance” or aberrant developments. In some respects the constitutional system thwarted rather than impeded action. The separation of powers and checks and balances, political scientist Larry Berman concluded, had not stopped “the espionage, the plumbers, the dirty tricks, the cover-up, the secret bombing of Cambodia, all the culmination of presidential imperialism.” It was the capacity of key persons—journalists, legislators, judges, even men in the White House circle—to rise in
the face of doubt and suspicion and to defy the royal court itself that made all the difference by 1974.

Ultimately, Watergate became a test of moral leadership—a test that the White House dramatically failed to meet. There was no sense of embarrassment or shame, Magruder said later, “as we planned the cover-up. If anything, there was a certain self-righteousness to our deliberations. We had persuaded ourselves that what we had done, although technically illegal, was not wrong or even unusual.” Their foes were making a mountain out of a molehill. “We were not covering up a burglary, we were safeguarding world peace.” Besides, hadn’t previous presidencies—especially the JFK White House—prepared the way for “hardball politics”? Kennedy men had stolen the election of 1960 from their boss, some in the White House still believed. They recalled the old story that members of Kennedy’s White House loved to tell about the JFK staff man who was complaining of the misdeeds of the “rascals” in the enemy camp. When another staff man remarked mildly that there were rascals in their own camp as well, the first man said, “Ah, but they are
our
rascals!”