The Final Hours: Richard M. Nixon in the White House

When the Watergate break-in first hit the news, my press secretary, Ron Ziegler, aptly called it a third-rate burglary. To compare Watergate with Teapot Dome, the Truman 5-percenter scandals and the Grant Whiskey scandals misses the point totally. No one in the Nixon Administration profited from Watergate. No one ripped off the government, as was the case in previous scandals. Wrongdoing took place, but not for personal gain.

All administrations have sought to protect themselves from the political fallout of scandals. I detailed my mistakes in this respect at length in my memoirs, a third of which dwelt on Watergate. In retrospect, I would say that Watergate was one part wrongdoing, one part blundering and one part political vendetta.

The Watergate break-in and cover-up greatly damaged the American political process. While not unusual in political campaigns, these actions were clearly illegal. Over the years, I had been the victim of political dirty tricks and other kinds of vicious tactics in the cut-and-thrust of political warfare. What happened in Watergate--the facts, not the myths--was wrong.

In retrospect, while I was not involved in the decision to conduct the break-in, I should have set a higher standard for the conduct of the people who participated in my campaign and Administration. I should have established a moral tone that would have made such actions unthinkable. I did not. I played by the rules of politics as I found them. Not taking a higher road than my predecessors and my adversaries was my central mistake. For that reason, I long ago accepted overall responsibility for the Watergate affair. What’s more, I have paid, and am still paying, the price for it.

Apart from its illegality, Watergate was a tragedy of errors. Whoever ordered the break-in evidently knew little about politics. If the purpose was to gather political intelligence, the Democratic National Committee was a pathetic target. Strategy and tactics are set by the candidate and his staff, not the party bureaucracy. Moreover, in view of the 30% lead I had in the polls, it made no sense to take such a risk because the likely Democratic nominee, Sen. George McGovern, stood virtually no chance of winning. I also contributed to the errors. As a student of history, I should have known that leaders who do big things well must be on the guard against stumbling on the little things. To paraphrase Talleyrand, Watergate was worse than a crime--it was a blunder.

When I was first informed about the break-in I did not give it sufficient attention, partly because I was preoccupied with my China and Soviet initiatives and with my efforts to end the war in Vietnam and partly because I feared that some of my close political colleagues might be somehow involved. Some have said that my major mistake was to protect my subordinates. They may be partly right.

I believe that in any organization loyalty must run down, as well as up. I knew those who were involved acted not out of desire for personal gain but out of their deep belief in our cause. That knowledge may have contributed to my hesitation in tackling the question. In retrospect, it is clear that I should have focused on the issue immediately, dug out the truth on a top-priority basis, fired everyone involved and taken the political heat.

But what we remember as the Watergate period was also a concerted political vendetta by my opponents. Anyone who knows the workings of hardball politics knows that the smoke screen of false accusations--the myths of Watergate--were not at all accidental. In this respect, Watergate was not a morality play--a battle between good guys in white and bad guys in black--but rather a political struggle.

The baseless and highly sensationalistic charges, the blatant double standard, the party-line votes in congressional investigating committees, and the unwillingness of my adversaries and the media to look into parallel wrongdoing within Democratic campaigns, all should tip off even the casual observer that the opposition was pursuing not only justice but also political advantage.

Only in 1982 was it revealed how a small group of liberal Democrats tried to exploit this advantage during Watergate. For a brief period in 1973, after Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in a personal scandal unrelated to Watergate and before Gerald Ford was confirmed by the Senate, Democrat Carl Albert, the Speaker of the House, stood next in line to the presidency.

Ted Sorensen, a former speech writer for President Kennedy and a highly partisan critic of my policies, asked Albert for permission to write a secret “comprehensive contingency plan” so that the Democrats could take over the White House swiftly if I were to leave office. Albert agreed. The plan even included suggestions for the tone of the new President’s inaugural address and an agenda for his first week in office.

The Partisan Dimension

Albert is a fine American who wouldn’t have been involved in anything improper. But the prospect of winning through Watergate what they had failed to win at the polls was evidently too much for some Democrats to resist. Albert himself quoted Bella Abzug, then a left-wing congresswoman from New York, as saying to him, “Get off your goddamned ass, and we can take this presidency.” So it was without irony that in my memoirs I referred to the final struggle over Watergate as my final political campaign.

When a balanced historical appraisal emerges, the partisan political dimension of the investigation and prosecution will stand out as a prominent feature of the period.

As I wrote my memoirs, I was able to look back at Watergate and separate myth from fact. At the core of the scandal was the fact that individuals associated with my reelection campaign were caught breaking into and installing telephone wiretaps at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel. After their arrest, others in my campaign and in my Administration attempted to cover up this connection in order to minimize the political damage. I failed to take matters firmly into my own hands and discover the facts and to fire any and all people involved or implicated in the break-in. I was also accused of taking part in the cover-up by trying to obstruct the FBI’s criminal investigation.

Alone, that would probably not have been enough to bring down my Administration. But the term Watergate has come to include a wide range of other charges that my adversaries used to try to paint my Administration as, in their words, “the most corrupt in American history.” Together, these accusations represented the myths of Watergate, the smoke screen of false charges that ultimately undercut my Administration’s ability to govern effectively.

The most blatantly false myth was that I ordered the break-in at the Democratic headquarters. Millions of dollars were spent by the executive branch, the Congress and the office of the special prosecutor to investigate Watergate. Not one piece of evidence was discovered indicating that I ordered the break-in, knew about the plans for the wiretapping or received any information from it.

The most politically damaging myth was that I personally ordered the payment of money to Howard Hunt and the other original Watergate defendants to keep them silent. I did discuss this possibility during a meeting with John Dean and Bob Haldeman on March 21, 1973. In the tape recording of this meeting, it is clear that I considered paying the money.

The ‘Smoking Gun’ Tape’

I should not have even considered this option, but the key facts were that I rejected offering clemency to the defendants as “wrong” and at the end of the conversation ruled out any White House payment of money to the defendants. Moreover, those who made this accusation ignored the even more crucial fact that no payments were made as a result of that conversation.

The most serious myth--and the one that ultimately forced me to resign--was that, in my specific orders, the CIA obstructed the FBI from pursuing its criminal investigation of the Watergate break-in. I discussed this possible course of action with Bob Haldeman in the famous “smoking gun” tape of June 23, 1972.

At that time, I thought that in view of the fact that some former CIA operatives had participated in the Watergate break-in, the CIA would be concerned that their exposure would, in turn, reveal other legitimate operations and operatives, and that the agency would therefore welcome a chance to avoid that outcome. I thought that would also serve our political interests because it would prevent the FBI from going into areas that would be politically embarrassing to us.

In my conversation with Haldeman, I made the inexcusable error of following the recommendation from some members of my staff--some of whom, I later learned, had a personal stake in covering up the facts--and requesting that the CIA intervene. But that mistake was mitigated by two facts.

First, because of the good judgment of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Richard Helms, and his deputy, Vernon Walters, they ignored the White House request and refused to intervene with the FBI, despite the pressure from members of my staff.

Second, when FBI Director L. Patrick Gray complained to me in a telephone call three weeks later on July 12 about attempts to suppress his investigation, I told him emphatically to go forward with it, and I instructed Haldeman and John Ehrlichman to make sure the campaign and the Administration cooperated with the investigation “all the way down the line.” No obstruction of justice took place as a result of the June 23 conversation.

After I completed my memoirs, the only time I addressed Watergate at any length was in the televised interviews conducted by David Frost. I agreed to make the broadcasts not by choice but by necessity. I faced a major financial crunch because of attorneys’ fees. The entire amount I received from the broadcasts of $540,000 went to my lawyers.

The weeks of preparing for and the 26 hours of taping the broadcasts proved to be the major ordeal of my stay in San Clemente. Writing my memoirs required me to engage in detached analysis and intense concentration. The Frost interview required me to gird for intellectual combat. I did not expect the telecasts to be positive or even balanced, and I was not surprised when they turned out to be highly negative. It was a commercial enterprise, and these do not pay off by producing enlightening discussion but by producing clashes between personalities.

I vividly recall my first meeting with the British media magnate, Sir James Goldsmith, who visited me while I was taping one of the programs. He was a strong supporter and was shocked by what he considered to be the vicious anti-Nixon bias of Frost’s top researchers, James Reston Jr. and Bob Zelnick, now Pentagon correspondent for ABC News. I knew he was right, and the choice of topics, the slant in the questions and the editing of the final broadcasts reflected the bias. At the time, however, I had no choice in such matters.

THE WHITE HOUSE, AUG. 9, 1974

I did not sleep well my last night in the White House. This was not unusual; after a major speech or press conference I get so keyed up I always find it difficult to get to sleep. That evening, in a nationwide address, I had announced my decision to resign the Presidency. It was 2 a.m. before I dozed off.

I woke up with a start. I looked at my watch; it was only 4 a.m. I went across the west hall to the kitchen to get a glass of milk. I was startled to see Johnny Johnson, one of the stewards, making coffee.

I said, “Johnny, what are you doing here so early?”

He replied, “It isn’t early, Mr. President. It’s almost 6 o’clock.”

My watch had stopped. After three years the battery had run down.

I asked Johnny to make me some corned beef hash with a poached egg rather than the usual Spartan breakfast of wheat germ, orange juice and a glass of milk. I showered and shaved and walked down to the Lincoln Sitting Room. It is the smallest room in the White House and my favorite. I sat down in my favorite chair and put my feet up on the ottoman. Pat had given the chair to me as a birthday present when we were living in California in 1962. We had taken it with us first to our apartment in New York and then to the White House. It is the chair in which I am sitting as I dictate this recollection.

I tried to make some notes for what would be my last speech as President. I had spoken to tens of millions the night before on television. Now I had to think of something personal to say to a few dozen members of my White House staff--dedicated men and women who had served so loyally during the tumultuous days of the Vietnam War and the even more difficult days of Watergate.

‘Too Painful for Them’

The day before I had found it difficult to control my emotions in a meeting in the Cabinet Room with my closest friends and supporters in Congress. I concluded by blurting out what I knew was true: “I just hope that I haven’t let you down.” Today, I had to find a way to lift up the loyal members of my staff. I knew I should not talk about Pat, Tricia, Julie, Ed Cox and David Eisenhower, who would all be standing by my side on the platform. It would be too painful for them and for me.

The family had unanimously opposed my decision to resign. Tricia, whose quiet strength reminded me of my mother, fiercely insisted to the very last that I not even consider resigning. Two days before, I had worked on my resignation speech until 2 a.m. in the Lincoln Sitting Room. When I went to my bedroom to catch a couple hours’ sleep, I found a note from Julie on my pillow:

Dear Daddy,

I love you. Whatever you do I will support. I am very proud of you.

Please wait a week or even 10 days before you make this decision. Go through the fire just a little bit longer. You are so strong! I love you. --Julie Millions support you.

If anything could have changed my mind, Julie’s note would have done it. But I was too worn out to reconsider. It was not because I had given up the fight but because I knew that the decision I had made was best for the country. Two years of Watergate was enough. The nation could not stand the trauma of a President on trial before the Senate for months. The international situation required a full-time President.

Once my family knew that the decision was final, they backed it. Pat took on the superhuman task of supervising the packing of all the belongings we had acquired during the past 5 1/2 years in the White House. She had not slept for 48 hours. I don’t know how she did it. The way she stood on the platform by my side, erect and proud though her heart was breaking, demonstrated what I had always said--that she is the strongest member of my family, personal or official.

Finally, I decided to talk to the staff about my roots.

I spoke of my father and my mother. I read the moving tribute Theodore Roosevelt had written when his first wife died: “She was beautiful in face and form and lovelier still in spirit. When she had just become a mother, when her life seemed to be just begun and the years seemed so bright before her, and then by a strange and terrible fate death came to her. And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went from my life forever.” T.R. had written those words when he was in his 20s. He thought the light had gone out of his life forever. But he went on to become President of the United States.

I went on, “We think sometimes when things don’t go the right way, when we suffer a defeat, that all has ended. Not true. It is only a beginning, always. Greatness comes not when things always go good for you, but the greatness comes when you are really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes. Because only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.

“Always give your best. Never get discouraged, never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you, but those that hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

The critics panned my remarks, not surprisingly, as being too emotional. They overlooked the fact that it was an emotional moment.

Finally, it was all over. We said goodby to the Fords and were on our way back home to California, where we thought, mistakenly, we would at long last find peace and quiet.

‘They Will Harass and Hound You’

The following day, the blows began to fall again. The special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, had been delighted when Al (Alexander M.)Haig (Jr.) informed him of my decision to resign. He thought it would be in the best interest of the country. Haig reported to me that, based on his conversation, he did not believe we would continue to suffer harassment by the special prosecutor. He had not reckoned with the young activists on Jaworski’s staff. Far from being satisfied by the resignation, their appetites for finishing the injured victim were whetted.

When Ed Cox urged me not to resign, he had warned me that this might happen. He had known several of Jaworski’s staff at the Harvard Law School and had served with some in the U.S. Attorney’s office in New York. He said, “I know these people. They are smart and ruthless. They hate you. They will harass you and hound you in civil and criminal action across the country for the rest of your life.” He was right.

One after another, the blows rained down.

Scores of lawsuits were filed against me by individuals who were seeking damages for assorted government actions. Few involved presidential decision. Most were dismissed, but all had to be defended.

The cost for attorneys’ fees was staggering. In the 15 years since I resigned the presidency, I have spent more than $1.8 million in attorneys’ fees to defend myself against such suits and to protect my rights that were threatened by government action.

The Supreme Court ruled against me on my suits to gain possession of my papers and tapes, including those that were private.

‘They Were Obvious Forgeries’

A scandal magazine printed letters that I was supposed to have written to a countess in Spain whom I had never met. They were obvious forgeries, but the story was never retracted.

One of the worst blows was the harassment of my friends. Bebe Rebozo was accused of being associated with the Mafia, gamblers and drug barons. The special prosecutor’s staff pursued him for more than a year. He testified 85 times before the prosecutor’s staff and the Ervin Committee. All of the charges were false. He had done nothing wrong, except to be my friend. In the end, he was cleared. His attorneys’ fees were enormous.

Maurice Stans, a scrupulously honest man, paid fines for five technical non-intentional misdemeanor violations of the campaign laws--the moral equivalent of parking tickets. Similar violations by Democratic fund-raisers were ignored.

By far the hardest blow was the pardon. My primary reason for resigning was to avoid having a President of the United States in the dock for alleged illegal activities. But the assaults had not stopped. As President, even after I had been crippled by Watergate, I could still set the agenda to an extent. My visits to the Soviet Union and the Mideast that summer had resulted in some significant diplomatic achievements. But now, without the powers of the office, I was utterly defenseless.

My public standing had been driven so low that I do not think there was any allegation about me, no matter how horrendous or base, that would not have been believed if it was aired or published. In fact many distortions and blatant lies about me, my family and my friends were aired and published. It was not enough for my critics to say that I had made terrible mistakes. They seemed driven to prove that I represented the epitome of evil itself.

The Presidential Pardon

I will never forget the moment that Jack Miller, my attorney from Washington, came into my office in San Clemente on Sept. 4 to inform me of President Ford’s decision to stop the hemorrhaging by issuing a presidential pardon. Now I had to decide whether or not to accept it.

We discussed it at great length. I told Miller I was worried the pardon would hurt Ford politically. He said that in the short run, it would. But he added that if the country continued to be obsessed by Watergate, President Ford and others in government would suffer even more from being unable to devote their attention to urgent problems at home and abroad.

Miller also knew my desperate financial situation. He pointed out that the attorneys’ fees and the other costs of defending actions against me would bankrupt me. In view of what happened soon thereafter, he was remarkably perceptive when he added that he thought that I had taken as much physically, mentally and emotionally as I could and that I should accept the pardon for my own well-being and my family’s as well. His strongest argument was that because of the unprecedented publicity over the past year and a half, there was no way I could get a fair trial in Washington.

Next to the resignation, accepting the pardon was the most painful decision of my political career. The statement I issued at the time accurately describes my feelings then and now:

“I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate, particularly when it reached the state of judicial proceedings and grew from a political scandal into a national tragedy.

“No words can describe the depths of my regret and pain at the anguish my mistakes over Watergate have caused the nation and the presidency--a nation I so deeply love and an institution I so greatly respect.”