The Fall of Richard Nixon Read online

  John Mitchell, Nixon’s former law partner and original attorney general, portrayed himself as Mr. Law and Order, but when he moved over to chair the President’s reelection campaign he became deeply involved in the Watergate cover-up. He knew about the burglaries and approved of efforts to get the CIA involved as a cover, claiming national security. Eventually Mitchell was convicted of perjury, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy.

  Richard Kleindienst, Mitchell’s successor at Justice, had failed to tell authorities about President Nixon’s order to ignore an antitrust investigation of the manufacturing conglomerate ITT when Kleindienst was an assistant AG. Later, after Kleindienst had been elevated to attorney general, he refused a request from G. Gordon Liddy to intervene in the Watergate investigation to protect CREEP, the President’s reelection campaign, which was deeply involved in the break-in. Kleindienst resigned as attorney general and returned to his home state of Arizona to resume his law practice. His replacement was Elliot Richardson, who would come to play a major role in the President’s demise.

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  By August 1973, several of Nixon’s top advisers had lied their way into certain jail time. The bungled Watergate break-in was symptomatic of a larger criminal conspiracy run out of the White House, the aim of which was to crush political enemies.

  The fabric of the presidency was unraveling, and constitutional law was under assault. That we’ve known for some time. What is worth examining again, in light of today’s political climate, are the day-to-day developments, decisions, and delusions, as well as the actions of the president, that led to the historic disgrace of the man who came so far and fell so hard.

  On August 15, 1973, the president took his case to the American people. He opened his speech with a note of contrition, saying that because the abuses had taken place in his administration he accepted “full responsibility” and the right of the Senate committee to investigate the charges. His most emphatic statement was in his defense:

  I state again to every one of you listening tonight these facts—I had no prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in. I neither took part in nor knew about any of the subsequent cover-up activities. I neither authorized nor encouraged subordinates to engage in illegal or improper campaign tactics.

  That was and that is the simple truth.

  We now know that if there had been an electronic truth meter in the studio at the time, sirens would have been wailing, horns honking, lights flashing, and an offscreen voice bellowing, “Are you kidding?”

  The president went on to describe what he insisted were his many efforts to uncover the facts about the break-in, and then got to the heart of his speech: the right of a president to protect confidential conversations and memoranda.

  His speech was designed to advance the case for presidential authority and to proclaim his innocence, arguments that would be central to his defense for the next year. He argued on national television that the Oval Office tapes were “privileged.” In doing so, he invoked, without using the term, the concept of executive privilege, which is reserved for the chief executive of the United States; the concept has evolved with the presidency, and is designed to protect the executive branch from raids, subpoenas, and other interventions by the legislative or judicial branch.

  Executive privilege. We would be hearing a lot about that presidential claim in the coming months, even as we do today, as I write this, during the Trump administration. President Nixon argued on that August night that if executive privilege were compromised, “it would cripple future presidents by inhibiting conversations between them and those they look to for advice.” The Nixon strategy would undergo many contortions in the coming months, but his fundamental defense was now in place.

  Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, a master of White House organization and discipline who was also a Watergate ringmaster.

  IN AUGUST 1973, ALL OF THIS was playing out against a political reality that on the surface seemed to favor the president. When President Nixon took office for his second term earlier that year, he had an indisputable mandate. Peace talks with the North Vietnamese were making progress. Relations with the Soviet Union had entered a promising new era. China, after Nixon’s bold first-term trip, was slowly opening for business.

  But by midsummer there were reports of more criminal activities run out of the White House, including a break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Ellsberg was the former Marine and Defense Department aide who had famously released to the press a secret and devastating account revealing the greatly flawed government plan for winning in Vietnam dating back to the Johnson administration. The Nixon White House had hoped to find embarrassing information about Ellsberg’s mental state in order to discredit him—in a very real sense, abusing its power for the purpose of smearing a private American citizen.

  CREEP—to use the popular moniker for the financial wing of President Nixon’s Committee for the Re-Election of the President (officially, CRP)—had been run like something out of a John Grisham novel. A heretofore little-known Southern California lawyer, Herb Kalmbach, had set up the fundraising office in Los Angeles and sent out detailed descriptions on how to circumvent campaign finance laws. (One went to my boss at NBC in Los Angeles, and he immediately sent it over to me. Editors at The Huntley-Brinkley Report in New York were not interested, so I slipped it to my friend Steve Roberts of The New York Times and he had a well-placed exclusive in his paper.)

  Before the 1972 election, Kalmbach’s luxurious suite of offices had opened in a pricey neighborhood on Wilshire Boulevard. The decor suggested that this was a prestigious firm working on a variety of important legal matters, yet its principal mission was to raise gobs of money for the Nixon campaign. And so it did. The man with his name on the door, Herbert Kalmbach, eventually went to jail for gross violations of campaign finance laws.

  By August 1973 these were full-blown scandals, too.

  Men who had risen to the top of the White House power grid were suddenly suspects in a chain of events leading to the Watergate break-in. Mistrust now tainted the most powerful figures in the Nixon administration, including chief of staff Bob Haldeman, domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman, special counsel Charles Colson, and White House counsel John Dean at the top, as well as a string of eager but misguided lieutenants below them: campaign aide Jeb Magruder, appointments secretary Dwight Chapin, Ehrlichman aide Egil Krogh, and political hand Donald Segretti.

  Several of the president’s closest advisers had not come from the traditional East Coast Republican establishment. They had arrived four years earlier from the West Coast, the political offspring of Californian Richard Nixon. They brought to his first term as president can-do exuberance and little experience in the complex culture of the nation’s capital. As they prepared for a second four-year term, they were cocksure and more West Coast tribal than ever.

  My friend Zan Thompson, a savvy California Republican political consultant, later captured the attitude of these eager acolytes and the culture they bred in Nixon’s White House. In an op-ed in The New York Times, she wrote:

  When the extent of the dingy little deeds was first becoming known, Herb Klein, who was the White House director of communications, said, “Too much responsibility was given to too many people with no experience.”

  It was the day of the deadly amateur. The White House was full of people who had “never run for sheriff,” who knew nothing of politics, who were “sniffy” little snobs and who had perfectly marvelous teeth. Young men, whose qualifications for White House service were limited almost entirely to blowing up balloons at campaign rallies and seeing that the happy volunteers had buses that ran on time, were suddenly seen striding through the Executive Office Building and the west wing of the White House as though the weight of Government were on their shoulders. Sadly, it was. And what they were all trying to figure out was how to get permissi
on to eat in the White House mess, where the air is rarefied, and they have the Mexican plate on Wednesdays.

  Three weeks after I’d started my new job as a White House correspondent for NBC News, a Los Angeles grand jury handed down indictments in the case of the break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, naming as defendants John Ehrlichman, the president’s right-hand man for domestic affairs; Egil Krogh, Ehrlichman’s young aide; former CIA operative G. Gordon Liddy; and David Young, an aide to Henry Kissinger. It was the beginning of a series of indictments, confessions, and other accounts of criminal behavior by those closest to President Nixon.

  As we experience another chaotic time in the American presidency, it is worth remembering what we went through before.

  The role of a White House correspondent during the last year of the Nixon presidency was at once an intense, bewildering, and fascinating professional and personal experience, mixed in, as well, with the Washington journalism culture and a social scene unchanged since the 1950s.

  In California, my NBC assignments had been to anchor the 11 P.M. local news and work for the network news on a regular basis. California politics and the cultural upheaval in the state at that time became a personal specialty, and this, in turn, brought visiting reporters to my office.

  When David Brinkley arrived to anchor the evening news from California during Ronald Reagan’s campaign for governor, I organized a large reel portraying Reagan’s evolution as a candidate. It was a daunting assignment for a twenty-six-year-old rookie in the NBC bureau.

  David was a demigod, a partner with Chet Huntley in the formation of The Huntley-Brinkley Report, the game-changing evening news program that twinned two appealing anchors with a conversational style. They seemed to be inside your living room, delivering the news from a comfortable divan. Watching them during the long night of the 1960 election had settled my career aspirations. “That’s what I want to do,” I said to myself, and six years later, in a darkened screening room, David was asking me about Ronald Reagan’s style. He was always looking for the telling detail.

  “How has Reagan changed from movie star to candidate for governor?” he wanted to know.

  “Well,” I said, “at the beginning of the campaign he appeared in slacks, loafers, and sports jackets, but recently he’s been dressed like a CEO, in blue suits.”

  That night David opened The Huntley-Brinkley Report from Los Angeles saying, “Ronald Reagan, who used to be seen around town in slacks and sports jackets, now appears only in suits.”

  “Good grief,” I thought, “what else did I tell him?”

  The California political culture was a kind of traveling road show, long on informality, short on rituals and barriers. Which is how I came to know Bob Haldeman before his notoriety as President Nixon’s chief of staff.

  Before joining the Nixon campaign in 1968, Haldeman had run the Los Angeles office of J. Walter Thompson, the large advertising agency. He was also a regent of the University of California. We met when the new governor, Ronald Reagan, fired Clark Kerr, the university system’s president, for being insufficiently tough on widespread student protests.

  Haldeman introduced himself and said KNBC, the powerful Los Angeles NBC affiliate, had hired his agency to launch an advertising campaign featuring me as the new face of local television election coverage. He explained that the campaign was in good hands because he had assigned it to one of his young associates at Thompson, Ron Ziegler.

  Bob became a reliable source about California Republican party politics. He had been an advance man for Richard Nixon’s 1960 presidential bid. When Nixon announced his 1968 campaign, I asked Bob if he was joining up. He quickly responded that he had no plans to go back on the campaign trail. After all, Nixon had not only lost to John F. Kennedy, he had also unwisely run for California governor in 1962 and lost to Edmund G. “Pat” Brown.

  Pat Buchanan, Nixon’s faithful adviser and speechwriter, remembers with a chuckle, “Then the campaign caught on, and when we got to Oregon, Bob Haldeman showed up with his team and quickly became the manager.” Haldeman brought discipline and efficiency as campaign manager, at a critical time; he was rewarded with the powerful position of White House chief of staff when Nixon won the 1968 election. Bob recruited his friend John Ehrlichman to run domestic affairs and his protégé, Ron Ziegler, to be White House press secretary.

  In his book Being Nixon: A Man Divided, the prize-winning biographer Evan Thomas credits Haldeman with establishing a state-of-the-art White House system that was a model of efficiency for dealing with personnel and political issues. As we learned later, of course, a managerial blueprint is no substitute for sound personal judgment.

  Haldeman made his first trip back to California in the spring of 1969. The administration was off to an ambitious start—trying to put more pressure on North Vietnam with massive bombing, which brought on ferocious protests at home, while simultaneously reducing the American troop presence (that fall a lottery system was substituted for the draft) and reaching out to what the Nixon team called “the silent majority,” his base of political support.

  Haldeman’s team called to tell me, “You get an exclusive. You’re the only television correspondent on his schedule.” Haldeman was accommodating but stern in language and expression. There was no “Hi, how are you?” It was all business.

  Before long, it was clear that his brusque demeanor was not personal. He sent an emissary to say that Ron Ziegler was being “promoted” to head the White House communications department. Haldeman wanted me to be the new daily press secretary, and the president had agreed.

  Once I recovered, I said, “Tell Bob thank you but sorry,” thinking, “No, never, no.” I had no interest in leaving journalism for a political job in either party.

  Through a third party, Bob kept the offer alive, but finally gave up. My secret held and had a surprise ending.

  Henry Kissinger, here addressing assembled journalists in San Clemente, knew how to work the press.

  AS IT TURNED OUT, the White House was in my future, only in a different role.

  Our family—my wife, Meredith, and our three daughters—had happily settled in as Californians, with weekends at the beach, new friends from the legal, academic, and film communities, affordable housing and entertainment.

  Our first home was a prewar custom-built four-bedroom nestled on the rim of a canyon in the San Fernando Valley. We bought it for $42,500. I drove by recently and saw that it had been torn down and replaced by a gated mansion that must be worth three or four million dollars.

  John Chancellor, a star reporter headed for the anchor chair at NBC News, would often say, “Come on, Tom, move east and become a grown-up!” It was our private joke, and I’d respond, “John, no thanks. I’ve gotten used to warm winter days, the beach, and no ties when not on the air.”

  However, the White House, especially during the growing Watergate scandal, was irresistible. As a family, we gave up the new house on the beach that we had just finished building, the year-round sunshine, the rich mix of friends, the desert, and our weekends in Yosemite and San Francisco, and headed east.

  It was a phased-in move, as President Nixon spent the end of August 1973 in San Clemente, and so, when I eased into the White House press pack at the beachfront hotel Surf & Sand in Laguna Beach, I was replacing Richard Valeriani, a longtime friend, who was NBC’s new chief diplomatic correspondent, covering National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. Some of his colleagues in the White House press corps wrote the president of NBC News, arguing that I was not qualified to replace Valeriani at the White House. Dick was unaware of the letter, and in his congenial way he could not have been more gracious in arranging a get-acquainted dinner for me with senior members of the traveling White House press corps.

  CBS’s Dan Rather returned from a fishing trip to resume his assignment as the best known of that prestigious g
roup of journalists. As he walked in, he was plainly popular with his colleagues, and I felt like the new kid on the first day of school. Dan was immediately cordial with his down-home Texas manners and warm welcome. Over the years, we went head to head on big stories, and later as anchors of our respective flagship broadcasts. We were hotly competitive, but to this day his genial welcome in that first meeting lingers.

  In September, President Nixon made a major but not unexpected announcement: Henry Kissinger was named secretary of state. He replaced William Rogers, a longtime Nixon friend, who nonetheless had endured four years of sitting on the sidelines as Kissinger and the president made bold moves on Vietnam, with the Soviet Union, and, especially, with the opening to China.

  When Kissinger spoke with the press in his new role, it was striking to see the difference between meeting with him and any encounter the press had with the president. Henry was a master of the reverse compliment. When asked a question about a complicated piece of national security, he’d often say something like “You’ve framed that very well and opened some options I had not considered.” On the plane headed home from an important meeting, Kissinger would organize a small cocktail party for the traveling press and share off-the-record anecdotes or insights. Other members of the Washington press corps referred to the diplomatic correspondents as “the choir boys” for their closeness to Kissinger, a commentary that was part criticism and part jealousy. A few years later, on a flight from Asia, I caught a ride on Kissinger’s plane, and when the cocktail hour arrived I didn’t claim journalistic sanctity.

  By late 1973, Nixon’s White House staff had been reduced to a handful of loyalists. They included chief of staff Al Haig, on leave from the Army. Haig was never far from Nixon’s side.