Nixon Considered Quitting in 1973, Tapes Show

In one of his darkest moods, Richard Nixon raised the possibility of resigning as president in a post-midnight conversation more than a year before he actually quit, according to Watergate-era tape recordings released Monday by the National Archives.

A total of 201 hours of tapes, never before heard by the public, show a beleaguered president fluctuating between depression and determination.

On May 1, 1973, Nixon asked Gerald R. Ford, then the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, to rally support for his cause. Later that month, in a telephone chat with his new White House chief of staff, Alexander M. Haig Jr., Nixon asked: “Wouldn’t it be better to just check out?”

At the time, high-ranking White House aides were cooperating with prosecutors, telling what they knew about White House efforts to obstruct a federal grand jury investigation of Watergate crimes.

When Haig expressed shock at Nixon’s question, the tape of the May 25, 1973, conversation shows that the president replied: “No, no, seriously, because you see, I’m not at my best. I’ve got to be at my best and that means fighting this damned battle, fighting it all out.”

Haig then suggested that Nixon, by resigning, would be letting down his supporters.

“Yeah,” Nixon said, “But they’re such a small group, Al.”

It was not until August 1974 that Nixon resigned, faced with certain impeachment by Congress after disclosure of his so-called “smoking gun” tape of June 1972. In that recording, Nixon counseled H. R. Haldeman, Haig’s predecessor, on how to use deception to thwart an FBI investigation of how the 1972 Watergate break-in was financed.

The tapes released Monday represent the first of five batches to be made public after an agreement with the Nixon estate last April that settled more than two decades of often bitter litigation. Nixon died in 1994.

The Watergate scandal began in June 1972, when burglars hired by the Nixon campaign were caught breaking into Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate hotel complex. Although Nixon never was linked to that crime, evidence subsequently showed that he and top aides engineered a cover-up that involved attempting to thwart the FBI investigation, lying to Congress and federal grand juries and paying “hush money” to keep some of the burglars quiet.

Many historians believe Nixon might have survived the scandal were it not for the secret White House taping system he installed in February 1971. He removed it in July 1973 when its existence was disclosed in congressional testimony by former White House aide Alexander P. Butterfield.

Another tape released Monday showed that on May 1, 1973--about three weeks before his conversation with Haig--Nixon implored Ford to “tell the guys” to start replying to Watergate allegations that Nixon said were unfairly sullying Republicans.

“Any time you want me to do anything, under any circumstances, you give me a call,” Ford replied, according to the tape.

In October 1973, Nixon chose Ford to replace Spiro T. Agnew as vice president after Agnew resigned in the midst of a financial scandal unrelated to Watergate. Ford succeeded Nixon when the president resigned in 1974.