The Wars of Watergate (103 page)

Flowers spoke most clearly to his constituents. He enumerated the reasons for impeachment, as well as some of the President’s alleged offenses. Still, he promised, he would listen to the debates and then decide—“based on the Constitution and the evidence.” His fellow southerner, James Mann, had diligently worked with Republican staff members to draft the articles of impeachment, yet he, too, refused to commit himself publicly. Mann deplored those who questioned the committee’s motives or who dismissed the inquiry with the casual observation that “it is just politics” or that political morality was relative. “Are we so morally bankrupt that we would accept a past course of wrongdoing or that we would decide that the system that we have is incapable of sustaining a system of law because we aren’t perfect?”
He asked for understanding from his constituents, an understanding that he must fulfill his oath and duty as he saw fit. He also asked for help from Richard Nixon: he was ready, he said, to receive additional evidence. “It is not too late.… I am starving for it but I will do the best I can with what I have.”

Caldwell Butler’s Virginia district had supported Nixon overwhelmingly. Flowers regularly teased Butler about the pickup trucks filled with armed constituents that would visit him if he opposed the President. But Butler’s dismay with Nixon and his annoyance at the narrow partisanship of the President’s defenders on the committee finally burst forth in a wave of passion and anger that belied his usual calm. Although Butler had to confront a skeptical district, he seemed to focus his public remarks on his fellow House committee Republicans. Watergate, he reminded them, “is our shame,” a scandal for a party that had campaigned so often against corruption and misconduct. “We cannot indulge ourselves in the luxury of patronizing or excusing the misconduct of our own people.” He challenged the loyalists’ analogy of a criminal trial and their rationalization of the relativism of corruption. Butler found such standards “frightening,” for they in effect condoned and left unpunished presidential conduct designed to subvert the processes he had sworn to uphold. We, Butler said, will then have said to the nation: “These mistakes are inconsequential and unimportant.” The evidence was “clear, direct, and convincing”—St. Clair’s words—that Richard Nixon had abused power and that he had engaged in a “pattern of misrepresentation and half-truths” to explain his conduct in the Watergate affair, a policy “cynically based on the premise that the truth itself is negotiable.”

The combination of Mann and Butler left no doubt as to the outcome. Together, they offered a bipartisan conservative condemnation of the President. Together, they combined the sadness and fury that must have flowed through all but the most committed Nixon-haters and loyalists alike. Mann’s voice broke at the end of his remarks; Butler, his passion spent, quietly said that his “present inclination” was to support impeachment, but “there will be no joy in it for me.”
¹⁸

When debate opened at noon on July 26, McClory moved to postpone consideration of the impeachment articles for ten days, if the President assured the committee within twenty-four hours that he would provide the House with the tapes which the Supreme Court had ordered him to submit to Judge Sirica. McClory had no expectation that Nixon would make the materials available. Apparently, he simply wanted to demonstrate that the committee had treated the President fairly and with proper deference. At the same time, he announced his intention to introduce a separate article of impeachment,
charging Nixon with contempt of Congress, for his failure to comply with earlier subpoenas. Brooks, Railsback, and Sandman, representing the three major factions in the committee, rejected the gesture as meaningless and opposed it. McClory’s motion failed, 27–11. By now the President commanded virtually no trust. A Gallup poll released that same day revealed that his disapproval rating had risen to 63 percent, while his support had fallen to 24 percent.
¹⁹

At this point, Paul Sarbanes introduced a substitute Article I which had been drafted largely by Mann, Butler, and Mooney. Why Sarbanes? Mann had presented the substitute to the committee’s Democratic caucus. “I just looked around the room and picked out Paul Sarbanes and said [he] is the best man to do it,” Mann said. “And like a good soldier, he didn’t flinch.” Sarbanes had little opportunity to study the changes he would propose, but Mann credited him with a “remarkable job” of presentation. Mann admitted that he “just didn’t care to be that far out front.” After all, he had said at the outset of debate that he still had reservations on how he would vote. Meanwhile, he noted that the Democratic liberals carefully worked to be “helpful rather than wanting to impose their thoughts.”
²⁰

Hutchinson attacked Sarbanes for the lack of “specific detail” in the charges. Railsback, in the style of what members call a “planned colloquy,” tried to help Sarbanes frame an answer, suggesting that the committee could provide the entire House with supporting information. But Wiggins and Sandman would have none of that. For Wiggins, obstruction of justice was a criminal offense, and any article of impeachment had to contain specific evidence of such acts on the part of the President. Sandman’s attack on Sarbanes’s article bordered on the abusive. He taunted Sarbanes with demands for specificity. “I want answers, and this is what I am entitled to,” Sandman said. “This is a charge against the President of the United States, [and] he is entitled to know specifically what he did wrong.… Do you or do you not believe, and you can say yes or no, that the President is entitled to know in the articles of impeachment specifically, on what day he did that thing for which you say he should be removed from office?” Sandman’s gusts of passion seemed calculated to extinguish whatever lights of reason could be culled from the evidence. His onslaught was emotional, but it was effective in planting seeds of doubt—and in shaking some of the resolve of the “fragile coalition.”

By late afternoon the Democrats had recovered somewhat and had begun to reply effectively to Wiggins and Sandman. Rodino read a staff member’s hurried note citing previous impeachment proceedings in which a body of evidence was provided apart from the articles themselves. Sarbanes reviewed the documentary evidence, to provide the members with “some appreciation” of the details behind the charges. None of them was unfamiliar. Hungate scoffed at Sandman and Wiggins. If someone brought an elephant
through the door, and a member called it an elephant, he suggested that others would consider it “a mouse with a glandular condition.” Still, the President’s supporters persisted, alternating between Wiggins’s demands for specificity and Sandman’s denunciations of the proceedings. “Isn’t it amazing? They are willing to do anything except make these articles specific,” Sandman said with mordant glee. Even McClory, clearly willing to impeach the President on other grounds, charged that the allegations in Sarbanes’s article were “weak” and “fuzzy.”
²¹

The counterassault by Wiggins and Sandman blistered the pro-impeachment forces. The Republican loyalists had little hope of moving those Democrats who had been firmly convinced by the evidence to vote against the President. Their target was the tenuous, uneasy bloc of approximately six Republicans and three Southern Democrats. Their shock tactics momentarily stunned the coalition and severely tested its mettle. The Sarbanes substitute motion was properly their responsibility; yet, when Wiggins and Sandman demanded specificity, none of them seemed able to respond with the data that had been carefully assembled since October. Cohen, certainly the Republican most solidly persuaded against Nixon, thought “the whole thing” was in danger at that point. The opposition to the President was on the verge of public and national embarrassment. During the nine-month investigation, Sandman had said virtually nothing. Suddenly, he asked: “Well, where’s the evidence?” It
was
embarrassing.

That night, Democrats Mann and Flowers, and Republicans Cohen, Railsback, Butler, and Hogan met for dinner and a post-mortem at the Capitol Hill Club. Some blamed Doar and poor staff communication for their own weak reply to Wiggins and Sandman. Flowers complained that the Democratic majority had not made the case. Cohen disagreed. “The members had got stung and they didn’t really know what to do,” he later recalled. The specificity that Wiggins and Sandman had demanded was readily available. Cohen told his colleagues that they could stay up all night, redraft the articles, and enumerate the specifics. He then proceeded to tick off all the lawyerlike “to wits” and “et ceteras.” But he had no takers.

Butler and Mooney remembered the “state of panic” and chaos that pervaded the group that evening. Flowers said that Sandman was the biggest hero in his Alabama district. The “specificators” had “licked us,” he complained. Meanwhile, ever politic, he suggested that the group maintain its image of neutrality. But the time for neutrality had passed. The coalition only bent; it did not break. The members had decided, and they were committed. Cohen deplored the label “fragile coalition.” He had reached the point where it didn’t really matter to him whether others “stayed in or stayed out,” as he had made his resolve. And so had his colleagues. The bloc remained intact, and despite Flowers, a number of them eagerly responded to the challenge of the President’s defenders.

*  *  *

When the coalition members returned for the evening session, they held their own against the loyalists’ attacks. They “talked facts” in response to the demands of Wiggins and Sandman. Barbara Jordan dismissed the calls for specificity as “phantom arguments, bottomless arguments.” She rebuked any claims that the President had not been given due process, pointing out the role the committee had granted St. Clair. “Due process? Due process tripled. Due process quadrupled,” she said with solemn dignity. Sandman, however, was not through, and he moved to strike the first paragraph of the article Sarbanes had proposed, on obstruction—the very heart of the charge. Coalition members Railsback, Cohen, Fish, Thornton, and Flowers joined the Democrats to reinforce the points made late that afternoon regarding a full report, as well as citing specific instances of presidential wrongdoing. The debate became increasingly rancorous, as Nixon’s supporters barely disguised their contempt for Republicans who opposed him. At the end of the evening, Harold Froehlich signalled another Republican defection when he suggested that the committee provide evidentiary facts in its report to the House rather than in its articles of impeachment. With that, Sandman’s motion was rejected 27–11.

Sandman sometimes appeared a man who could not put the trees together to form a forest, but by Saturday afternoon, July 26, he knew the count. He saw no need to “bore the American public with a rehashing” of material and acknowledged that the votes were there to pass the article. Wiggins, too, sensed the futility of the situation. The glue holding together the coalition—in Wiggins’s opinion, self-interest and an erroneous understanding of constitutional responsibility—proved strong enough.
²²

But some members, including Flowers, still believed that their constituents needed more justification for the step the committee was about to take. Although the outcome was apparent, at the late afternoon session Flowers moved to strike individual paragraphs from Article I, making his motions one at a time, mainly to give his fellow coalition members an opportunity to recite the specific evidence they had absorbed Friday night and Saturday morning. Each motion was defeated by the predictable majority, and with one exception, Flowers simply recorded himself as “present” in voting on his motions. Sandman would have none of such sham and pointedly rebuked Flowers. Rodino, however, continued to pamper his Alabama colleague, even providing him a final opportunity to justify his vote. Flowers then briefly yielded to allow Fish to speak to his “friends and supporters” in New York who supported Nixon. “There was no smoking gun,” Fish noted. “The whole room was filled with smoke.”

Suddenly, dramatically, Rodino asked for a vote on the Sarbanes substitute Article I that the coalition had prepared. Choruses of “ayes” and “noes” responded. But Rodino called the roll, and thirty-eight members recorded
their vote. The afternoon pattern held firm, and by a 27–11 vote, the committee adopted one article of impeachment against Richard Nixon. Six Republicans—Butler, Cohen, Fish, Froehlich, Hogan, and Railsback—joined the twenty-one Democrats.
²³
The bipartisan vote, transcending ideological alliances as it did, belied charges that the committee’s proceedings were a partisan vendetta. Richard Nixon had brought the committee together, as he was to bring the nation together—though clearly not the way he had intended in 1968. It was fourteen years to the day since he had first been nominated for the presidency.

Richard Nixon received the news of his own “Saturday Night Massacre” in his San Clemente beach trailer; it was, he said, “exactly” what he had “feared.” He realized a sense of historical shame—the “first President in 106 years to be recommended for impeachment.” Not the kind of first on which he usually prided himself. Compounding his anguish, the June 23 tape, in which he had discussed using the CIA to cover up the Watergate break-in, was, he knew, “like slow-fused dynamite,” waiting to explode. He expected his lawyer and aides to soon tell him that the situation was no longer manageable. The President had conceded impeachment in his own mind and was resigned to a six-month Senate trial. But according to his account, that weekend he considered the risks to the nation of a crippled presidency. He also worried about his own financial future, aware that if impeached and convicted, he would lose all government benefits.

Returning to Washington on July 29, Nixon found the White House “cloaked in gloom,” the staff’s confidence “shattered.” St. Clair had returned from a long weekend at Cape Cod and learned the contents of the June 23 tape. According to Nixon, his “breezy optimism” had evaporated. Now, St. Clair expressed concern for his own liability as a party to obstruction of justice.
¹