The Fall of Richard Nixon Read online

  Americans who had seen plentiful, cheap energy as a kind of birthright were suddenly faced with limited supplies at prices ever more dear. What we had taken for granted for so long was gone. Manufacturers and transportation industries were suddenly dealing with a sharp increase in the cost of doing business.

  President Nixon launched Project Independence in an effort to rally the country to achieve energy self-reliance. A national speed limit was introduced: fifty-five miles per hour with strict fines, except in the wide-open spaces. This included Montana, where motorists drove fifty-five only when leaving the parking lot and speeding tickets were rare and cost only five dollars to settle.

  Kissinger worked to ease the political strains by persuading Israel to withdraw from portions of the Golan Heights and the Sinai following the Yom Kippur War.

  By mid-March 1974, the oil embargo was lifted, but while it was underway I had an up-close look at the power of Saudi Arabia’s hold on the West as a result of its petroleum holdings.

  The Saudi oil minister was a sophisticated member of the royal family named Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, a dashing prince with a master’s from New York University and a Harvard law degree. He was a devoted Muslim and a patron of efforts to preserve his religion and culture. Seemingly overnight he became a household name as he traveled the globe, making the case for the embargo with a soft-spoken lawyer’s touch and the petroleum equivalent of holding four aces.

  Secretary Kissinger invited the sheikh to a stag dinner at the State Department. It was still the time of the old boys’ circuit, and I vividly remember the columnist Rowland Evans grabbing the sheikh on the way in and saying, “When are you bastards gonna let up on us?” Yamani simply smiled and patted Rollie on the arm.

  A mix of government, business, and academic leaders sat around a large, horseshoe-shaped table, all watching the soft-spoken sheikh for any sign of concession or willingness to please. This made for a long evening with no payoff.

  My dinner partners were George Ball, an aloof and brilliant member of the American diplomatic aristocracy, and Rawleigh Warner, chairman of Mobil Oil. I told Warner that my connection in this crowd was that as a teenager I’d worked for a Mobil gas station one summer. He laughed, and when I saw him on future occasions, he always brought that up.

  Although not much was resolved that evening, it was flattering to be included. My self-satisfaction must have shown, for across the table Peter Lisagor fixed me with his crooked grin.

  Then he simply broadened the smile and mouthed, “F—— you.”

  It became a ritual when Peter spotted me in the anchor booth at conventions or being interviewed by local reporters on domestic assignments, his way of deflating any signs of exaggerated self-importance.

  Peter’s been gone for more than forty years, and I miss him still.

  Later I had a slightly different take on Sheikh Yamani when, during an OPEC meeting where the hotel had run out of space, my late colleague Garrick Utley was graciously given a room in the sheikh’s enormous suite. Garrick recalled that like any good reporter, he poked around some, and in the sheikh’s bedroom he saw a book on the bedside table.

  It was the bestseller by pop psychologist Thomas Anthony Harris.

  I’m OK—You’re OK.

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  Elaborate schemes to get a tank of gas were the 1970s equivalent of winning the lottery. Unexpectedly, David Brinkley called and in his familiar clipped speaking style asked, “Do you and Meredith like horse racing?”

  “Er, sure, I guess so. Why?”

  David: “My son works at a gas station and managed to get a full tank of gas. There’s a nice little horse track in West Virginia, and I’m driving over. Why don’t you and Meredith join Susan and me?”

  As we made our way to West Virginia, in the middle of Watergate, the Arab oil embargo, and the deep political division in the country, the horse track promised to be a welcome diversion.

  David’s presence brought with it the full VIP treatment, including a private box on the finish line with copies of the Daily Racing Form opened to the evening’s rundown. David, who had reached a pay grade way above mine, was an active player. I knew just enough about the Racing Form to win a few and lose a few. Most of all the excursion was a welcome relief from the daily pressure of covering the president and all the complexities of Watergate, which grew more tangled with every passing day.

  Nixon was rarely in public. We later learned that beginning in his first term he’d isolate himself late at night with yellow legal pads, scribbling goals to define himself. “Compassionate, Bold, New, Courageous…Need to be good to do good…Need for joy, serenity, confidence, inspiration.”

  When the Watergate tapes were made public, the nation heard a different Nixon instructing his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, to have Richard Helms, director of the CIA, tell the FBI to break off its investigation into Watergate because it was a national security matter. Later the president is heard on tape saying it would not be a problem to get the money to pay off the Watergate burglars to buy their silence.

  That and more was yet to come, but a night with the horses and David was a treasured respite.

  Nixon and his secretive friend Bebe Rebozo spent a lot of time together in Key Biscayne, Florida.

  IT WAS NOT WIDELY KNOWN that the White House assignment came with a Florida bonus: the president was a regular in Key Biscayne, Florida, where he spent many weekends with his friend Bebe Rebozo, the secretive banker whose family was of Cuban descent.

  Nixon had gone to Key Biscayne to mull his future after losing the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy by the slim margin of just over one hundred thousand votes. When Nixon won in 1968, he returned often to spend time with Rebozo.

  Rebozo was single and rarely seen on the social circuit. He had been Nixon’s friend since 1950, shortly after the president was elected to the U.S. Senate from California. Nixon had his own Florida home next door to Rebozo’s property but often stayed with his friend. Rebozo later recalled that the two of them were swimming when the president got word of the Watergate break-in. According to Rebozo, the president’s first reaction was “What in God’s name were they doing there?” Rebozo recalled that they laughed and “forgot about it.”

  That news received while swimming changed Rebozo’s life as well as his friend’s. Rebozo’s finances were examined, there were unconfirmed stories about their personal relationship, and Rebozo was drawn into the Nixon family’s emotional turmoil at the end of the ordeal.

  So much of what went on in Key Biscayne was out of reach of the White House press. We endured briefings on routine matters, played tennis, including matches with Haig and Ziegler, and crossed the bridges to Miami Beach to dine at Joe’s Stone Crab, the family restaurant that turned the tasty crustacean into a fortune. All these years later I still try to visit Joe’s at least once a year to catch up with JoAnn, the granddaughter of the founder, who’s become a friend.

  While we were busy heading to Joe’s or playing tennis, one momentous visit went unappreciated until the president’s resignation. As October 1973 gave way to November, Leonard Garment, the president’s friend and former law partner, and Fred Buzhardt, the White House counsel, both of whom had reviewed the tapes of the president’s meetings with Bob Haldeman and John Dean in which various political and payoff schemes were discussed, realized that the president’s claim that he was innocent was demonstrably not true. They had decided to take a bold step and confront the president with their conclusion: he must resign.

  They flew to Key Biscayne on the first Saturday in November and spelled out their case to Haig and Ziegler. It was not just Watergate. There were the other problems: the president had manipulated the donation of his vice presidential papers for a large tax deduction, and he had made that deal with the American dairy industry for richer price supports in exchange for campaign con
tributions. It was also disclosed that work on his California estate not necessary for security had been done at government expense and had plainly crossed the line.

  When they were finished, Haig and Ziegler were stunned.

  It would not happen. They insisted that the president would not resign.

  The White House press office described the Garment and Buzhardt trip as a routine briefing for the president on legal matters.

  Garment and Buzhardt flew back to Washington, and the White House press corps didn’t have a clue. So one of the most dramatic developments of Watergate went unreported until Woodward and Bernstein spelled it out in their post-resignation book The Final Days.

  The Watergate ordeal went on for another nine months.

  The White House press corps became a national story during the energy crisis when we were met by the car-rental company that had a contract for our weekend visits. They unloaded on us all the gas guzzlers in their fleet: Cadillacs, big Buicks, Mercury station wagons, and Oldsmobile 98s. I protested, but the rental honcho shrugged and said, “That’s all we have.” I’ve always believed that was a cover story. He saw a chance to get top dollar for the fuel hogs no one else wanted.

  The Miami press heard about the excesses from outraged local citizens, and we were quickly front-page news, portrayed as elitist consumers who preached parsimony and practiced indulgence.

  It was a “gotcha” from the local press. We had it coming.

  At Nixon’s surprise sixty-first birthday party, his dog, King Timahoe, enjoyed some cake off the president’s jacket.

  AS CHRISTMAS 1973 APPROACHED, Washington was in a suspended state. What would the New Year bring? There were so many loose ends. Members of the House Judiciary Committee were quietly preparing for the possibility of impeachment hearings.

  Leon Jaworski, the folksy Texas lawyer with impeccable credentials who had been named special prosecutor after Cox’s firing, continued to request material from the White House. Later, during the Ronald Reagan presidency, I found myself on the lower level of the White House with Al Haig, by then Reagan’s secretary of state. We were hurrying to a social event on the main floor when he grabbed me and with a sly smile said, “Brokaw, you know this is the Map Room, right?”

  Yes, I replied.

  “Well,” Haig said, “it’s too late now to do you any good, but this is where I used to meet Jaworski to argue about the files he wanted.”

  In 1973, White House reporters didn’t get beyond the confines of the press room or the Ziegler operation.

  On December 26, 1973, an unexpected call from our Washington news desk. President Nixon and his family were going to California for the holidays but not on Air Force One. They had booked much of the first-class cabin of a United Airlines wide-body jet, and they were leaving that evening. It was the president’s idea to show the American people that he, too, was making sacrifices during the energy crisis. Never mind that United didn’t have the sophisticated communications system or security apparatus fundamental to presidential travel.

  Whatever you think of the White House press corps, reporters are also critical components of presidential travel. If something unexpected happens, the public deserves a swift, factual account.

  Think back to November 22, 1963, and President Kennedy in Dallas. Merriman Smith of United Press International alerted the world: THREE SHOTS WERE FIRED AT PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S MOTORCADE TODAY IN DOWNTOWN DALLAS. That announcement was followed by another bulletin, this one signaled by a FLASH marker: “Kennedy seriously wounded—perhaps fatally.” Smith’s eyewitness accounts covered the wounding of Texas governor John Connally and included a quick exchange with a Secret Service agent who said to Smith of the president: “He’s dead, Smitty.”

  Smith continued to file reports from the hospital on the frantic, futile efforts to save the president and then raced to Dallas Love Field, where he filed again before jumping on Air Force One, the presidential airliner, with a new mission: to transport Kennedy’s body back to Washington with a new president on board: Lyndon B. Johnson.

  Smith was already a highly regarded reporter in the small fraternity of Washington wire service reporters. His work that day remains a gold standard for working reporters everywhere.

  As a twenty-three-year-old news editor in Omaha, Nebraska, I had read Smith’s words on the air after breaking in to a noontime gardening show on KMTV. I distinctly remember thinking, “My God, this doesn’t happen in America.” It was the end of my prairie naïveté as my career took me through the Sixties, Vietnam, the RFK and Martin Luther King assassinations, the landing on the moon, the rise of China and the fall of the Soviet Union, the 9/11 attack on America, the digital age, and medical miracles.

  For President Nixon’s December 1973 California trip, the White House did give two reporters advance notice of an hour, but the Secret Service was not happy. The idea of the president flying cross-country in a public airliner with a planeload of civilians who had not been screened was high-risk. And the president’s team had also failed to alert the Federal Aviation Administration.

  Guess who was running the aviation agency at the time? Alexander Butterfield, the White House staffer who had discovered and disclosed that there was a taping system.

  Butterfield, who had a distinguished Air Force career before joining the White House staff, was not pleased by the president’s action in flying to California on a commercial flight, or the absence of notification. He said the last-minute disclosure “left precious little time…to implement…special precautionary procedures which must always be followed” when the president is in the air. Ziegler dismissed the concerns, insisting that the key to the success of the flight was the element of surprise: the White House saw the commercial flight as a PR success, showing the president as a man of the people and setting an example for fuel conservation. “Stunt” was a better description of these arrangements.

  The White House press office emphasized that the president had also ordered that no other government aircraft accompany him to the West Coast. No backup plane, no press plane, no courier aircraft or helicopters.

  Thankfully, Nixon’s daring trip was uneventful, as he sat in the front row of first class in the United airliner.

  When I heard about his travel plans, I hurriedly booked a red-eye flight to Los Angeles, determined to file my report from California the next morning on Today.

  Unfortunately for the Nixon party, the president transported the gloomy Washington atmosphere to the Southern California coastal weather. It was overcast and chilly most of the time we were there, conditions that did give the president real reason to indulge his habit of keeping a wood-burning blaze going in the fireplace, whatever the weather.

  Now there was business to be done: finding the president a lawyer skilled in the courtroom if it came to an impeachment trial, one with a reputation for developing a game plan that left nothing to chance.

  James St. Clair of Boston, a seasoned courtroom litigator, native of Ohio, got the call. When he arrived in California, he was slipped into La Casa Pacifica for his first meeting with the president. As Woodward and Bernstein reported later, Nixon emphasized that he wanted St. Clair to represent the office of the presidency, not the man. At the end of their one-hour meeting, St. Clair was ushered out to meet with Al Haig, who closed the deal: $42,500 a year for salary, with support staff to be settled later.

  St. Clair was familiar with high-profile Washington cases. As a young lawyer he had been at the side of another Boston lawyer, Joe Welch, for one of the enduring moments in capital lore. It was Welch who famously said to the infamous Senator Joe McCarthy, after one of McCarthy’s rants on Communist influence on the Army, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” It was the defining moment in the Senate hearing on McCarthy. McCarthy’s poisonous public notoriety faded quickly. For young James St. Clair, it was
a memory he later shared with his new staff representing Nixon.

  That gloomy December, California was hardly a festive getaway location. The Arab oil embargo was still on, one of the president’s daughters had stayed in the East, and the newspapers were preparing their year-end reviews, which would be heavy on Watergate and projections about what would be likely to happen to Nixon.

  California remained cold and rainy throughout the president’s stay, so his clerical staff decided he needed cheering up on his sixty-first birthday, in early January. They arranged a “surprise” cake for La Casa Pacifica and rounded up a press pool to cover the festivities. Helen Thomas grumbled as she boarded the bus for the ride to the seaside mansion, filling her role as a pool reporter.

  When the bus returned, Helen was first off and laughing so hard we could barely understand her, but once the videotape of the “party” rolled, we all were convulsed.

  The opening scene is outside the president’s office, where a large frosted cake is on a wheeled table. When the doors to the office swing open, we can see the president in a dark blazer and tie as the staff sings out, “Happy Birthday, Mr. President!” while wheeling the cake up to his desk.

  The president is obviously pleased as he gets up from the desk, leaning over the cake to blow out the candles. In a Nixonian move he leans too far, and when he stands up his jacket is covered with white frosting. King Timahoe, his handsome Irish setter, knows a good deal when he sees one and races over to lick the frosting off his master’s jacket.