The Fall of Richard Nixon Read online

  President Nixon’s letter of resignation, addressed to the Secretary of State in accordance with the law of presidential succession, first passed in 1792.

  Copyright © 2019 by Tom Brokaw

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  NAMES: Brokaw, Tom, author.

  TITLE: The fall of Richard Nixon: a reporter remembers Watergate / Tom Brokaw.

  DESCRIPTION: First edition. | New York: Random House, [2019] | Includes index.

  IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2019029798 (print) | LCCN 2019029799 (ebook) | ISBN 9781400069705 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780679604679 (ebook)

  SUBJECTS: LCSH: Nixon, Richard M. (Richard Milhous), 1913-1994. | Watergate Affair, 1972-1974—Press coverage. | United States—Politics and government—1969-1974.

  CLASSIFICATION: LCC E860 .B76 2019 (print) | LCC E860 (ebook) | DDC 973.924092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2019029798

  LC ebook record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2019029799

  Ebook ISBN 9780679604679

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Carole Lowenstein, adapted for ebook

  Cover photograph: Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

  PRECEDING PAGES: Interviewing Richard Nixon for the opening of his presidential library.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  Introduction

  Part I: 1973

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part II: 1974

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Credits

  By Tom Brokaw

  About the Author

  Who was Richard Nixon?

  Just inside the stately columned building that houses the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library near his boyhood home in Yorba Linda, California, there is a poster-size white-on-black greeting that asks the evocative question: WHO WAS RICHARD NIXON?

  From his humble beginnings until his death in 1994 Richard Nixon spent much of his life working and striving, rising and falling and rising again, and always “daring greatly” in whatever arena he entered. The legacy of Richard Nixon’s 50 years in the arena—as Theodore Roosevelt called the political world—remains controversial. Was he a peace maker or a warmonger? Did he bring the country together or did he divide it? Did he leave the nation and the world a better place or not?

  The answers are far from simple. So as you walk through these galleries, take a moment to step into a President’s shoes. Explore Richard Nixon’s life and career from the inside and come to your own conclusion. Decide for yourself. Who was Richard Nixon?

  That provocative invitation is not far from a stylish gallery recording Nixon’s historic visit to China, alongside another that depicts his efforts to ease tensions with the Soviet Union. His bold and very controversial management of the Vietnam war receives dramatic attention.

  Then, in a separate corridor, oversize capital letters in bright red: WATERGATE, the scandal that brought him down, presented here in bold candor and unblinking detail. The last year of his presidency, from August 1973 to August 1974, was Richard Nixon’s darkest, most indefensible time in the arena.

  I was White House correspondent for NBC News during that turbulent time, and recently I’ve been reflecting on the enduring lessons, high drama, and historic consequences of that fateful year. It is, if you will, a reporter’s experience of Watergate, the final act. It is a mix of what I saw, experienced, and concluded as Watergate played out. But it is also a mix of what Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein learned later in their superb book The Final Days. Evan Thomas’s post-Watergate reporting for Being Nixon: A Man Divided was equally helpful and important. All of this was before electronic social media, before the reporting universe exploded into an expanding mass of fact, speculation, propaganda, and artifice. It is one reporter’s personal recollection of a time of great consequence for the nation and for a man who, even in death, provokes the question: Who was Richard Nixon?

  Police escort demonstrators from the Supreme Court, where a crowd awaited a ruling on the Watergate tapes. On the day the Supreme Court ruled, Nixon appeared to have hit a wall.

  This is how the presidential world of Richard Nixon ends.

  On July 24, 1974, the president is holed up in San Clemente, California, at La Casa Pacifica, his grand seaside mansion. It is less than an hour south of the president’s very modest childhood home in Yorba Linda, the working-class community where he grew up as a bright, awkward, and ambitious child in a Quaker household largely bereft of familial affection.

  On this sunny day in late July, the White House press corps is housed in the commodious Surf & Sand, a pricey oceanfront hotel in Laguna Beach. The bucolic setting and sybaritic life in the bar and on the beach make for an unlikely setting in which to deal with the serious issues that brought us here.

  As a member of that White House appendage, I am hanging out with my colleagues in a makeshift communications office attached to the hotel. We are awaiting a routine daily briefing from the White House press office on the president’s schedule, but our attention is focused on a stately building two miles east of the White House in the nation’s capital.

  The U.S. Supreme Court.

  Eight justices are preparing to announce their decision on one of the most momentous cases in American history. A ninth, Justice William Rehnquist, has recused himself because he was an assistant attorney general during Nixon’s first term. The essential question is, Does a president have the right to withhold from Congress tape recordings and other relevant material in a case involving suspected illegal behavior in the Oval Office? It is the pivotal issue in the long, complex, and historic case known as Watergate. Simply put, it asks whether the president was an active participant in the cover-up of a burglary that unraveled into a massive conspiracy in which senior White House aides, members of the president’s cabinet, higher-ups in the Justice Department, officials of the FBI, and senior members of the president’s 1972 campaign for reelection all had a role.

  Suddenly the word arrives: eight justices of the high court have voted against the president. He must turn over all relevant material to the special prosecutor investigating Watergate, including tape recordings in which he describe
d what actions he wanted taken. Finally Congress and, just as important, the American people will hear, in his own voice, just what the president wanted. Despite the presidential resistance to the long line of testimony, leaks, and circumstantial evidence leading to this moment, it appears that Mr. Nixon has hit the wall.

  Outside the press office I spot James St. Clair, a preeminent Boston lawyer who felt it his civic and legal duty to represent the president in this closing phase. St. Clair is leaning against a rail on a second-story balcony, serenely scanning the fair skies.

  “Any comment, Mr. St. Clair?”

  “It’s a beautiful day, Mr. Brokaw.”

  Smile.

  We are at a signature moment. The judicial branch has just delivered what will amount to a political death sentence to a sitting president. As presidential power has evolved over the course of American history, the presidency has been the most powerful of the three branches of government, with the chief executive exercising wide-ranging authority in domestic and foreign initiatives. That political reality was Richard Nixon’s primary defense in the long list of legal challenges to his behavior. The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision is now a reminder of the Founding Fathers’ wise decision to construct a legal system as a check on political assumption.

  In less than two years from his landslide reelection, tough-on-crime Richard Milhous Nixon is on the cusp of being forced from office. He was sworn in for his second term as president of the United States on January 20, 1973, with one of the most overwhelming margins in American electoral history, winning forty-nine of the fifty states, and with an indisputable mandate; now, eighteen months later, he is about to be the first president evicted from office.

  It is a surreal setting in which he receives the news.

  A glorious sunny day on the California coast, not far from where he began his historic odyssey to the presidency. Now he will receive the fateful news in a seaside villa he purchased during his first term, a conspicuous totem of his journey from the small kit home his father had constructed at the beginning of the century.

  His closest political aides from the first term and reelection campaign are elsewhere, awaiting their sentences as convicts in the political scandal. The Nixon men were members of the white-collar Republican establishment, comfortable in country clubs and fraternity houses. They helped lift him to historic highs during his first term and then inexplicably signed on to nefarious, blatantly illegal schemes to fix his reelection against an obviously weak opponent.

  By any measurement, it was one of the most bizarre and incomprehensible scandals, political or otherwise. There seemed to be no end to its vaudevillian qualities, which led to this, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling unanimously against the president, leading either to his impeachment or to his resignation.

  The irascible gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson appeared in San Clemente, demanding that the White House press office arrange for his magazine, Rolling Stone, to photograph President Nixon standing on the shoreline of the Pacific Ocean in a blue serge suit and black lace-up shoes—with his back to the sea. The not very subtle message: Richard Nixon has come to the end of his long political life where it started—trapped at the edge of the Pacific on the California coast. The symbolism was not lost on the White House press office, and Hunter was turned down.

  I had arrived at this same press office the year before, in the summer of 1973, as the new NBC News White House correspondent, anticipating a challenging turn in my career.

  My God, what a year it had been.

  We were nearing the end of what was later memorably labeled “our long national nightmare.”

  The men around Nixon: Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, Appointments Secretary Dwight Chapin, Domestic Policy Advisor John Ehrlichman—among the cocksure West Coast tribal team Nixon assembled. Haldeman, Chapin, and Ehrlichman would all go to jail.

  Former White House counsel John Dean testified before the Senate Watergate Committee in June 1973. Dean had already described to Senate investigators what President Nixon knew about the Watergate burglary.

  FOR ALL OF 1973 AND MOST OF 1974, America and the world watched as the fate of the most powerful nation on earth and its familiar president played out on the screen of history and daily journalism. By all expectations, 1973 should have been the beginning of a glorious conclusion to the public life of Richard Milhous Nixon, the poor boy from Southern California who fought his way into the highest offices in America with a brilliant mind, a deep dark streak, and a personality constantly in conflict with the demands of his calling.

  He began the year triumphantly, starting to wind down the unpopular Vietnam War as he launched a second term as president with nearly 61 percent of the American electorate having voted for him, a victory for this durable, familiar, and yet enigmatic son of Quaker parents. He had crushed the liberal establishment.

  What could go wrong?

  It had already gone wrong back in the summer of 1972, when a bumbling gang of burglars working for the Nixon reelection campaign were caught in a clumsy attempt to rifle through files at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel.

  Two gifted rookie reporters from The Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, were assigned to look into the burglary, and as they began to unravel the details, it became clear that this was no ordinary breaking and entering. Piece by piece, they constructed a case that traced the break-in from low-level assistants to the highest tiers of President Nixon’s staff. Nixon’s closest advisers, cabinet members, and fundraisers were already enmeshed in a spreading scandal that went beyond that botched burglary.

  It would forever be known simply as Watergate: the web of lies, payoffs, and toxic tape recordings, followed, finally, by the first resignation of an American president. All of it demanded closer examination.

  To this day, the essential question defies a rational answer: Why did the president’s men organize a nighttime invasion of the Democratic Party headquarters when they were so far ahead of George McGovern in all the polls?

  Later we learned that during his first term, Nixon had made a shady deal with milk producers, supporting higher prices in exchange for campaign contributions. Also, Nixon’s fundraisers had blatantly violated new laws designed to provide transparency to campaign contributions. Other Nixon acolytes had written phony letters maligning the character of prominent Democrats.

  Nonetheless, Nixon had survived massive demonstrations against his Vietnam policies in his first term, polls showed strong support for the law-and-order tenor of his campaign, his opening to China was widely praised, and the United States and the Soviet Union were negotiating new limits on nuclear weapons.

  All the indicators showed Nixon was poised to crush McGovern.

  The most tantalizing questions, however, remained: What was President Nixon’s role, if any, in the burglary? And were there other dirty tricks yet to be exposed?

  The reporting of Woodward and Bernstein continued to raise questions about the involvement of Nixon aides in the nefarious activities, and that went unnoticed by neither the feisty federal judge, John Sirica, who presided over the initial Watergate trials, nor the Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate.

  Partly as a result of Sirica’s warning that not all the facts had been revealed, the Senate voted unanimously on February 7, 1973, to establish a special committee to investigate Watergate. It was led by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, the very model of a folksy, shrewd, good ol’ boy southern lawyer. His Senate Republican counterpart was another southerner, the equally shrewd and likable Howard Baker of Tennessee.

  In April 1973, Nixon reluctantly dismissed two of his closest aides, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman and John Ehrlichman; they would soon perjure themselves before the Senate committee by denying their roles in the break-in cover-up. White House counsel John Dean was fired as well, after describing to the Senate investigator
s what the president knew about the burglary, saying the president was in the room on thirty-five occasions when the Watergate break-in was discussed.

  The Senate committee hearings started in May 1973 and quickly became must-see TV for the nation as the cast of once-powerful White House aides struggled to explain how and why the White House, the very symbol of American strength and prestige, could have been involved in such a tawdry enterprise.

  Daytime television audiences watching the Senate Watergate Committee during the summer of 1973 were riveted by the country-judge charm of Chairman Sam Ervin and by Howard Baker, who asked, “What did the president know and when did he know it?” While the president was trying to wind down the Vietnam War, strike up a new relationship with the Soviet Union, and capitalize on his historic opening to China, his closest aides were being questioned on Capitol Hill by the Senate committee, igniting time bombs on his future.

  One presidential aide, Alexander Butterfield, was called to describe how the White House offices were organized, and he disclosed the unexpected news that an elaborate taping system had been installed to capture historic moments for future archives. It also recorded presidential conversations on subjects Nixon and his advisers presumably didn’t expect to become whatever metaphor you like—smoking gun, noose, trapdoor. The recordings quickly became the prize in the investigation. Sam Ervin and his fellow senators were determined to get them.

  So were Attorney General Elliot Richardson and the special prosecutor Richardson had brought on board, Archibald Cox, both Harvard men, the kind Nixon privately detested. They had been appointed as the scandal was heating up.