XXV
The End of the Administration
THE televised welcoming ceremony for the President’s return from the Moscow summit on July 3, 1974, was arranged for Loring Air Force Base in Maine. It was held at an air base at the farthest feasible remove from Washington because it would not have been a simple matter to organize a reception in the nation’s capital that was representative. Vice President Ford was there to praise Nixon for yet another contribution to the structure of peace in the world, and for a better foreign policy “than we have had in our lifetime and perhaps in the history of our country.” With the assistance of base personnel and a few local residents, a typically enthusiastic Presidential homecoming was arranged. Only its location testified to Nixon’s ordeals.
I had stayed on in Europe to fulfill the commitment of the Atlantic Declaration to brief our allies about our talks with Brezhnev. I stopped at NATO headquarters in Brussels, then Paris, Rome, Munich, London, and Madrid. It was not entirely an accident that I met the German leaders in Munich, where they had assembled for the finals of the quadrennial World Cup championship soccer match. I told the press at the airport that I would let no sporting event stand in the way of my obligation to our allies. Knowing that I am a passionate soccer fan, the German government made sure that my briefing of them did not keep me from the Olympic Stadium for the final. It was a relaxed weekend. Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the new West German Foreign Minister in Helmut Schmidt’s coalition cabinet, helicoptered me into the foothills of the Alps on Saturday afternoon, July 6, for a long exchange of views. In the evening he threw a huge party, including many key figures from politics, the media, and the entertainment world. The next day Germany won the final in a game that confirmed a theory I had long held about the relationship of national character and tradition to the style of soccer played. Germany used the methods of the Schlieffen plan, of complicated maneuver with intricately plotted designs, almost irresistible when everything worked as planned and with the psychological impetus of a friendly crowd. One could not be sure how the German team would react if its careful design were thwarted and it had to improvise. The Dutch lost, despite an even more cerebral style of soccer that was beautiful to watch but lacked the final will to prevail. (And so it was with other teams: England, once preeminent, now relying on condition and reputation to sustain its slightly old-fashioned, somewhat pedantic style, and therefore long since eliminated from the World Cup tournament. And Brazil, unsurpassed in daring virtuosity, but at that moment undecided whether to rely on its traditional spontaneity or to follow the more methodical European style. In 1974 it finished fourth, which is close to the Brazilian definition of national catastrophe.)
Washington was calm. Scowcroft reported that “activity here, as far as I can determine, is nil. Everyone seems busily engaged in relaxing. Talking with Al [Haig] the mood seems to be relaxed.”
It was the quiet before the final convulsion. I returned to Washington on July 9 to a city awaiting the catharsis of the Watergate obsession. No one knew when the climax would come; but there was no longer any doubt of its imminence or inevitability. On June 15 the Supreme Court had agreed to review whether the Watergate grand jury had the right to name President Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in. The Supreme Court had agreed, about two weeks earlier, to rule on whether Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski could subpoena tapes of sixty-four White House conversations. On June 21 the House Judiciary Committee completed six weeks of closed hearings on the impeachment evidence. On June 26 former White House aide John Ehrlichman went on trial for complicity in the break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist and for making false statements under oath.
The year before, the Senate Watergate hearings had descended on Nixon the very day his summit with Brezhnev ended. In 1974, the July 4 weekend intervened. But from then on, the impending denouement of Watergate dominated the national life.
On July 8 the question whether Nixon should be forced to hand over the tapes of sixty-four conversations in the Oval Office was argued before the Supreme Court. On July 12 Ehrlichman, among others, was found guilty. The next day, the Senate Watergate Committee released its unanimous three-volume, 2,000-page report on the Watergate cover-up and financing irregularities in Nixon’s 1972 campaign. The Senators avoided stating whether the President had participated in the cover-up, but on July 19 the majority and minority counsels of the House Judiciary Committee joined in urging a Senate trial on one or more of five central impeachment charges, including obstruction of justice, abuse of Presidential power in dealing with government agencies, and contempt of Congress and the courts. “Reasonable men acting reasonably,” they maintained, “would find the President guilty.”
These were the way stations on the road to the destruction of a President and I observed them with dismay. By now Nixon was in San Clemente awaiting the unfolding of events he could no longer control or even greatly influence. I stayed in Washington but flew to California for two brief stretches — July 19–20 and July 25–26 — to be with the President. He rarely spoke about Watergate; when he did, it was not about the substance but about the arithmetic of the impeachment vote, first in the House, then in the Senate. He was a man awake during his own nightmare. His vaunted self-discipline had not prevented the debacle and may even have caused it. For he had suppressed all the instincts that would normally have alerted him to his peril; he had been sustained on the fatal course by associates who subordinated policy to procedure and who were at a loss as to how to react when the procedures miscarried.
Those of us who had worked with Nixon for five and a half years found it impossible to join in the wave of outrage sweeping through the media. We did not condone the shabby practices revealed by Watergate; we were as appalled as anyone. Nor did we have any illusions about the evasions and untruths unearthed. We had seen some of these tendencies at first hand. But we had a different perspective. We could see how they had helped to turn a serious error into a national disaster. We knew better than most that Nixon not so much lied as convinced himself of an expedient account. At various times we had been manipulated and set one against the other by the President. We were all too familiar with Nixon’s congenital inability ever to confide totally in anyone. Even his closest associates rarely were sure that they knew all the ramifications of his thinking and therefore did not know how to help him.
Nixon had no truly close friends. Even his intimates lived with the consciousness that they might be abandoned or dropped if it served some inscrutable purpose. The atmosphere was summed up in a remark I made to the late John Osborne, one of the wisest of columnists, who manned the “White House Watch” for The New Republic. In 1971, shortly after my secret trip to China had made me a public figure, John asked me how it felt to be the director of the play. I replied truthfully: “John, I don’t know whether I am the director of this play or an actor in some other play whose plot they have not told me.”
No modern President could have been less equipped by nature for political life. Painfully shy, Nixon dreaded meeting new people; only the anonymity of large, approving crowds could make him feel secure. Fearful of rejection, he constructed his relationships so that a rebuff, if it came, would seem to have originated with him. Fiercely proud, he could neither admit his emotional dependence on approbation nor transcend it. Deeply insecure, he first acted as if a cruel fate had singled him out for rejection and then he contrived to make sure that his premonition came to pass. It is a truism that none of us really knew the inner man. More significant, each member of his entourage was acquainted with a slightly different Nixon subtly adjusted to the President’s judgment of the aide or to his assessment of his interlocutor’s background.
When the transcripts of the Oval Office conversations on Watergate were first published, I was astounded at the muscular language sometimes bordering on jive talk. Unless his more colorful expressions had become so much a part of the landscape that I took them for granted — which I doubt — the Nixon who talked with me on foreign policy did so rather with the prissy pedantry of his public personality. Moreover, as I have said many times, those closest to him had learned to discount much of what he said and to filter out many assertions made under stress. We were expected, we believed, to delay implementing more exuberant directives, giving our President the opportunity to live out his fantasies and yet to act, through us, with the calculation that his other image of himself prescribed.
One of the Walter Mitty dimensions of his personality, and one of the causes, I am convinced, of Watergate, was Nixon’s love-hate relationship with the Kennedy family. He and John and Robert Kennedy had been bitter opponents in the i960 campaign and after. Nixon was thought to be at the opposite end of the political spectrum from his martyred rivals. Actually, it is probable that the Kennedys were (or at least started out to be) more conservative or more skeptical than many of their followers, while Nixon was far more moderate and sophisticated than his conservative constituency.
Nixon, much like Lyndon Johnson before him, would have given anything to achieve the adulation that had come to John Kennedy. Nixon ascribed the successes of the Kennedy family to technique, not conviction, and he spent hours each week ruminating about the ruthless political tactics and public relations gimmicks that he thought had made the Kennedys so formidable. Nixon was convinced that wiretapping had been a key weapon in the Kennedy arsenal during the campaign of i960, a view doubtless shared by others around him. He never offered any evidence to that effect. Though there is nothing to show that Nixon ordered the wiretapping of the Democratic National Committee headquarters, the event might have had its origin in that obsession. When one asks oneself why the Nixon team in 1972 would run the risk of wiretapping an opponent in a campaign that was already won, a possible answer is that a victory was not enough unless it emulated the hated, feared, and at the same time admired Kennedys. It was an act of retaliation for perhaps imagined injuries, not a step to achieve a specific purpose. (Nixon used to hint darkly that his and Agnew’s planes had had listening devices installed in the 1968 campaign — though how this could be blamed on the Kennedys, even if true, was less clear in the telling.)1
Most men mature around a central core; Nixon had several. This is why he was never at peace with himself. Any attempt to sum up his complex character in one attribute is bound to be misleading. The detractors’ view that Nixon was the incarnation of evil is as wrong as the adulation of his more fervent admirers. On closer acquaintance one realized that what gave Nixon his driven quality was the titanic struggle among the various personalities within him. And it was a struggle that never ended; there was never a permanent victor between the dark and the sensitive sides of his nature. Now one, now another personality predominated, creating an overall impression of menace, of torment, of unpredictability, and, in the final analysis, of enormous vulnerability.
This is why at the end of the day those of us who worked closely with Nixon developed, despite the exasperations, the indirections, and the bizarre qualities, a grudging respect and something akin to tender protectiveness for him. We had witnessed how his maddening aberrations grew out of a desperate conflict of discordant elements so that he was in truth the first victim of his own unharmonious nature. We saw a Nixon who could be gentle and thoughtful; indeed, some of his most devious methods were mechanisms to avoid hurting people face-to-face. He was highly analytical; he had an acute ability to get to the heart of a problem, especially in foreign policy. He was a great patriot; he deeply believed in America’s mission to protect the world’s security and freedom. He did not blame the Vietnam war on his Democratic predecessors as he might have; he thought he owed it to the families of servicemen killed in Vietnam to affirm that their cause had been just. And he did believe that the cause was just. With all his tough-guy pretensions, what he really wanted to be remembered for was his idealism. On his first day as President he had called for Woodrow Wilson’s desk and he used it while he was in the Oval Office; a portrait of Wilson graced the Cabinet room. He spoke often of his mother, and the quality that he recounted most about her was her gentleness; he seems to have missed her dreadfully when she left him when he was quite young to take care of an older brother dying of tuberculosis.
Of course, more than most, his close associates were familiar with the absence of any sense of proportion. His self-image of coolness in crisis was distorted by the dogged desperation with which he attacked his problems — born out of the fatalism that in the end, nothing ever worked as it was intended. His courage was all the more remarkable because it was not tied to a faith in ultimate success that distinguished leaders like de Gaulle or Churchill or Roosevelt.
My own feelings toward Nixon were commensurably complex. I recoiled at some of his crudities. I resented being constantly manipulated. I would have felt more comfortable had his words been less ambiguous or his methods more explicit. Yet I was deeply grateful for the opportunity he had given me to serve my country, first as national security adviser, then as Secretary of State. Where outsiders saw a snarl, I saw the fear of rejection. What often appeared as deviousness I understood as a means to preserve his options in the face of inner doubt about his own judgment. Few men so needed to be loved and were so shy about the grammar of love. Complexity was his defense, a sense of inadequacy his secret shame, until they became second nature and produced what he feared most. I had seen the lonely process of decision-making: the struggle with self-doubt and the frequently brave outcome. In White House Years, I summed up my feelings about Nixon the night he announced the Vietnam cease-fire, and eighteen months later as the end of the Nixon Presidency approached I felt the words even more deeply:
What extraordinary vehicles destiny selects to accomplish its design. This man, so lonely in his hour of triumph, so ungenerous in some of his motivations, had navigated our nation through one of the most anguishing periods in its history. Not by nature courageous, he had steeled himself to conspicuous acts of rare courage. Not normally outgoing, he had forced himself to rally his people to its challenge. He had striven for a revolution in American foreign policy so that it would overcome the disastrous oscillations between overcommitment and isolation. Despised by the Establishment, ambiguous in his human perceptions, he had yet held fast to a sense of national honor and responsibility, determined to prove that the strongest free country had no right to abdicate. What would have happened had the Establishment about which he was so ambivalent shown him some love? Would he have withdrawn deeper into the wilderness of his resentments, or would an act of grace have liberated him? By now it no longer mattered. Enveloped in an intractable solitude, at the end of a period of bitter division, he nevertheless saw before him a vista of promise to which few statesmen have been blessed to aspire. He could envisage a new international order that would reduce lingering enmities, strengthen friendships, and give new hope to emerging nations. It was a worthy goal for America and mankind. He was alone in his moment of triumph on a pinnacle, that was soon to turn into a precipice. And yet with all his insecurities and flaws he had brought us by a tremendous act of will to an extraordinary moment when dreams and possibilities conjoined.2
In the months of Nixon’s final torment I often reflected on a journey through his youth that he and I took in the summer of 1970. The incursion into Cambodia was behind us but its scars had not yet healed. Nixon was in San Clemente recovering from the ordeal of defending his decision — in his view essential if we were to extricate ourselves from Indochina honorably — against an extraordinary outburst of domestic violence and abuse. On a Saturday afternoon I had stopped off at the hotel in Laguna Beach that served as the press center when the ubiquitous White House switchboard operator reached me. Would I like to drive with the President and Bebe Rebozo to Los Angeles? We could have dinner at Chasen’s restaurant. The operator knew no precedent of an assistant’s refusing a Presidential invitation of this kind. She informed me that the President had already left and would pick me up shortly; I should be waiting on the sidewalk in front of the shops and restaurants opposite the hotel.
It turned out that the President did not wish to go directly to Los Angeles. He had his heart set on showing Rebozo and me his birthplace in Yorba Linda. So we set off in a brownish unmarked Lincoln, driven by a Secret Service agent, to the unprepossessing house where Nixon was born. Until we reached it, it was like any other sentimental journey. For Nixon’s companions, the significance of the trip was the honor of being invited; we could not possibly share the emotion that obviously gripped him. We walked around the outside of the house when suddenly Nixon noticed that two cars had followed us; one was filled with Secret Service agents, the other contained the obligatory press pool.
All of this — Secret Service and press — was standard procedure anytime the President moved; it was indeed a minimum Presidential entourage. But Nixon lost his composure as I had never seen him do before or after. He insisted that all follow-up cars leave immediately; he would not move so long as the Secret Service car and the journalists were in his motorcade. He did not want company. He was President and he was ordering privacy for himself. The orders were delivered at the top of his voice — itself an event so unprecedented that the Secret Service car broke every regulation in the book and departed, followed by the press pool.
Then, for a unique moment in his Presidency, Nixon was alone outside the Presidential compound with a friend, an associate, and one single Secret Service driver. I am sure that the mouths of many terrorists would have watered had they known what easy targets were available to them that Saturday afternoon. The President of the United States and his national security adviser, between them possessing almost all the national security secrets of the country worth having, were cruising around Southern California with only a single bodyguard who had to double in brass as a chauffeur.
When we were alone again Nixon became more relaxed than I have ever seen him. He and I sat in the rear of the car, Rebozo in front, as we headed toward the town of Whittier. Nixon pointed out the gasoline station his family had run and had sold just before oil was discovered on their former property. He showed us the hotel where a discouraged Republican party had canvassed volunteers to run for the United States Congress against the presumably unbeatable incumbent Democrat of the district — itself an almost unprecedented procedure. Nixon had applied because he had nothing better to do. To his surprise, he had been selected, and he won an election that even his associates had conceded to his opponent.
We drove around Whittier College, where he recalled the teachers who had been an inspiration to him. For once, I did not think that there was any arrière pensée. The Nixon in the backseat was not the convoluted, guarded, driven politician I knew from the Oval Office, but a gentler man, simpler in expression, warmer in demeanor.
And as he was talking softly and openly for the first time in our acquaintance, it suddenly struck me that the guiding theme of his discourse was how it had all been accidental. There was no moral to the tale except how easily it could have been otherwise — a theme much more apparent to Nixon than to me. For the lesson I had been drawing from what I heard was that only a man of unusual discipline and resilience could have marched the path from candidate in a hopeless Congressional race to the Presidency of the United States. Clearly, this was not the way it seemed to Nixon, who, that afternoon in Whittier, acted as if he belonged among his simple origins in a way he never did in any of the Presidential settings.
I have always thought of this car ride through Southern California as one clue to the Nixon enigma. “Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth,” said Archimedes. Nixon sought to move the world but he lacked a firm foothold. That, I suppose, is why he always turned out to be slightly out of focus. His very real gentleness, verging on sentimentality, ran the risk of sliding into mawkishness. And his cult of the tough guy was both exaggerated and made irrelevant because it had to be wrung from essentially resistant material. Nixon accomplished much but he never was certain that he had earned it.
As we headed for Los Angeles, Nixon suddenly conceived the idea that Rebozo and I should see not only his origin but how far he had come. He wanted to drive by the residence where he had lived for two years and recovered his sense of direction after losing the Presidential election of i960. He would direct the driver; it would take us only a few minutes out of the way.
It soon emerged that Nixon had no precise idea of the location of that residence. He remembered it was in a big development in some canyon near the Beverly Hills Hotel. We explored every canyon and the streets leading off them. We searched for well over an hour. But try as we might, we could not find the house. And in the process of looking, the relaxed, almost affable, Nixon gave way to the agitated, nervous Nixon with whom I was familiar. He was at ease with his youth; he could recount his struggles; he could not find the locus of his achievements.
Nixon had set himself a goal beyond human capacity: to make himself over entirely; to create a new personality as if alone among all of mankind he could overcome his destiny. But the gods exacted a fearful price for this presumption. Nixon paid, first, the price of congenital insecurity. And ultimately he learned what the Greeks had known: that the worst punishment can be having one’s wishes fulfilled too completely. Nixon had three goals: to win by the biggest electoral landslide in history; to be remembered as a peacemaker; and to be accepted by the “Establishment” as an equal. He achieved all these objectives at the end of 1972 and the beginning of 1973. And he lost them all two months later — partly because he had turned a dream into an obsession. On his way to success he had traveled on many roads, but he had found no place to stand, no haven, no solace, no inner peace. He never learned where his home was.
BY July, we were all trapped in the wait for the court cases, the investigations, and the impeachment proceedings that, each following its own momentum, seemed to be coming to a head simultaneously as if guided by an invisible hand. Even international relations slowed down. At home, we had to fight off criticisms that the summit had failed and détente was in jeopardy because we had not concluded a SALT agreement. But had we succeeded, the charge would have been that we had concluded agreements on unfavorable terms to save the President. It would have been an exacerbation of the process that had drained us for over a year. Since no agreement is possible that does not involve a balance of concessions, the group arguing that better terms were available would always have the better of the debate. Who could not claim that more might have been accomplished — especially in a Presidency whose credibility had collapsed? By July 1974 only 13 percent of the public still thought that Nixon was doing a good job as President — the lowest figure since polls were taken.
The controversy over SALT was symbolized by the supposed conflict between Schlesinger and me. We both denied major substantive disagreements, which was true, and implied that there was no dispute, which was not. It was an old-fashioned struggle for turf, made insoluble by the absence of a functioning Presidency. It is not necessary for present purposes to rehearse the debate. The fact is that it should never have occurred. But it illustrated the precariousness of America’s position in the world in the summer of 1974. Our system requires a strong President to establish coherence; as Presidential authority disintegrates, so does the ability to settle disputes. The prospects for the Administration were frightening if impeachment proceedings were to be added to the existing malaise.
Foreign countries were watching with awe and confusion the growing paralysis of one of the key supports of the international system. They could not believe what was happening; except for a few especially sophisticated leaders, all thought that the harassment of Nixon might subside at any moment. And even when during the course of July the unthinkable became more and more obvious, our adversaries showed amazing restraint — in what was perhaps the greatest tribute to the foreign policy of the Nixon Administration.
We, especially Nixon, had been talking about a “structure of peace” for years, perhaps to a point where critics were gagging at the phrase. No doubt Nixon did not moderate his customary hyperbole as he grew more and more desperate. And yet when he was reduced to impotence, when every minor-league American bureaucrat dared to challenge him with impunity, foreign leaders almost without exception remained silent and respectful. Some did so because they expected him to recover, but for the vast majority it was because they had been drawn into the orbit of our design. Almost all thought that they were better off with the international system as it existed than with any alternative that they could imagine. The Soviets wanted to preserve the option of détente as a counterweight to China; the Chinese needed us as a counterweight to the Soviets; the industrial democracies harassed us when it was safe but their new leadership relied on us for security and progress; the nations of the Middle East had no alternative to the peace process under our aegis. We had built better than we perhaps knew; the greatest tribute Nixon received was the quiescence of the nations of the world while he lay mortally wounded.
Only in the Aegean, where the primeval hatreds of Greeks and Turks flared again on Cyprus, did we have to endure an international crisis in those last weeks of Nixon’s office, and it was not that they took advantage of Nixon’s plight or even calculated it in their decisions. It was an eruption of old frustrations and oppressions; but nonetheless it laid bare the vulnerabilities of a divided Administration with a President in no position to impose coherence. I must leave a full discussion of the Cyprus episode to another occasion, for it stretched into the Ford Presidency and its legacy exists unresolved today. I touch on it here only to the extent that it illuminated the fragility of our policymaking process and because it showed that foreign policy claimed our energies even as we were steeling ourselves for the final act of Nixon’s tragedy.
Greeks and Turks first came into contact when the Turks burst out of Asia and systematically reduced the Byzantine Empire, finally occupying Constantinople in the year 1453 and later coming to rule Cyprus in 1571. From then on, the fates of the two peoples had been intertwined, generating hatreds out of reciprocal cruelties made more bitter by their inability to escape their interdependence. For a while, major offices of state in the Ottoman Empire were held by Greeks who were then better educated and more experienced; their conquerors relieved their frustrations by frequent pogroms until the Greek population in Turkey was to all practical purposes eliminated by massacre and expulsion in the early 1920s. The two nations continued to coexist (if that is the word), the Greeks remembering Turkey’s military predominance, the Turks obsessed by their fear of Greek intellectual subtlety — each convinced that in the end the other was out to rob it of its birthright; each seeing itself the victim and prepared to preempt fate by wreaking vengeance on its neighbor. The Greek-Turkish conflict has belonged to the blood feuds of history.
After World War II, the old enemies Greece and Turkey were allies in NATO with a common stake in the security of the eastern Mediterranean. But their atavistic bitternesses found a focus in the island of Cyprus, forty-four miles from mainland Turkey, with a population 80 percent Greek and about 20 percent Turk — a lethal cocktail.
As in many other nations of mixed nationalities, a tenuous civil peace had been possible while the island was under foreign rule. But when the British granted independence to the island in i960, with Britain, Greece, and Turkey as guarantors of its internal arrangements, the subtle Greek Orthodox Archbishop Makarios III, leader of the Greek Cypriot community and of the campaign against British rule, found himself obliged to concede a degree of self-government to the Turkish minority, offensive to all his notions of government or nationality. He did not have his heart in it, and with independence he systematically reneged on what he had promised, seeking to create in effect a unitary state in which the Turkish minority would always be outvoted. The history of independent Cyprus was thus plagued by communal strife, and in 1967 Turkey’s threat to intervene militarily was aborted only at the last moment by a strong warning from President Johnson. It had become since an article of faith in Turkish politics that this submission to American preferences had been unwise and would never be repeated. I had always taken it for granted that the next communal crisis in Cyprus would provoke Turkish intervention.
Makarios nevertheless continued to play with fire. In 1972 he introduced Czech arms on the island for the apparent purpose of creating a private paramilitary unit to counterbalance those set up by the constitution. In 1974 he again took on the Greek-dominated National Guard in an effort to bring them under his control. Greece was then governed by a military junta, violently anti-Communist, deeply suspicious of Makarios’s flirtation with radical Third World countries, which it took to be a sign of his pro-Communist sympathies. It therefore encouraged plans to overthrow him and install in Cyprus a regime more in sympathy with Greece, oblivious to the fact that an overthrow of the constitutional arrangements on Cyprus would free Turkey of previous restraints. Ankara was, to be sure, at least as disquieted by the trend of Makarios’s policy as Athens, but to the Turks the preferred solution was a federal state amounting to de facto partition. Uniting Cyprus with Greece would in Turkish eyes doom the Turkish community and jeopardize Turkish se-curity interests on the island. No reassurance was possible. After all, the Turks remembered how they had handled a similar problem five decades earlier by exterminating the minority.
On July 15 — six days after my return from the Soviet Union and Europe — Makarios was overthrown in a coup d’état just as he returned from a weekend in the mountains; he was nearly assassinated. He was replaced by an unsavory adventurer, Nikos Sampson, known as a strong supporter of union with Greece. A crisis was now inevitable.
There was nothing we needed less than a crisis — especially one that would involve two NATO allies. Whomever we supported and whatever the outcome, the eastern flank of the Mediterranean would be in jeopardy. And our government was neither cohesive enough, nor did the President have sufficient authority, to sustain a prolonged period of tension.
The issue immediately became entangled in our domestic politics. Greece was a military dictatorship; hence, all groups critical of our approach to human rights urged us to turn on it as the instigator of the upheaval; failure in Cyprus would, it was hoped, produce the overthrow of the hated Greek colonels. This view was held passionately not only among traditional opponents of Nixon; it was the dominant conviction in the State Department; the Secretary of Defense moved toward it increasingly as the week progressed.
To me the issue was more complicated. I thought it most unlikely that Turkey would tolerate the union of Cyprus with Greece. That Turkey was driving toward a showdown was obvious — at least to me. A good test of whether a country is seeking a pretext for military action or a basis for a compromise is whether it can live with its own proposals. If they are inconsistent with its real interests and with its previous stands, one can be pretty certain that a casus belli is being prepared. That was the case with the Turkish position in the first week of Makarios’s overthrow. It would be difficult to imagine a foreign leader more unpopular in Turkey than Makarios. He had been blamed, with considerable justice, for the plight of the Turkish minority on Cyprus. During previous crises Turkey had insisted on his removal. Suddenly Ankara put forward the demand that Makarios be returned to office. The motivation had to be that Ankara calculated Athens was even more reluctant to see Makarios restored; Ankara presumably was counting on using the Greek refusal as a pretext to move its army into Cyprus. (There was also the slight technical problem that for about a day no one knew whether Makarios was alive and if so where he could be found.)
Turkey’s demands left little doubt that it was planning to intervene. Explicit condemnation of the Greek junta by the United States would have turned a likelihood into a certainty. A Greek debacle was in my view probable; only a regime that had lost touch with reality would take on both Makarios and Turkey over the Cyprus question. My view, as I was to explain to a WSAG meeting of July 21, was that the Greek government was unlikely to survive its follies. That made it all the more necessary that the United States not be seen in Greece as the agent of its humiliation. At the same time, we could not without cost resist a Turkish invasion because that would be considered as objectively supporting the Greek junta. In any case, only the threat of American military action could have prevented a Turkish landing on the island; this was an impossibility. My consultations with Congressional leaders produced the unanimous advice that we should not get involved at all. We could not avoid diplomatic engagement in a NATO crisis, but in the last three weeks of Nixon’s Presidency we were in no position to make credible threats or credible promises — the instrumentalities of diplomacy.
During the week of July 15 I therefore dispatched Joe Sisco to London, Ankara, and Athens. Britain, as one of the guarantor powers, was seeking to mediate between the parties. Sisco’s mission was to help Britain start a negotiating process that might delay a Turkish invasion and enable the structure under Sampson in Cyprus to fall of its own weight. But Turkey was not interested in a negotiated solution; it was determined to settle old scores. On July 19 it invaded Cyprus, meeting unexpectedly strong resistance.
We faced a strategic dilemma. We wanted to keep both Greece and Turkey in the Alliance; we sought to prevent unbridgeable fissures. The dominant view of the bureaucracy during the first week was expressed at the WSAG meeting of July 21. Two days after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus had started, Schlesinger urged a conspicuous dissociation from the Greek government, a withdrawal of American nuclear weapons from Greece, and an end to home-porting arrangements in Greece for the US Sixth Fleet. To force my hand the proposal was helpfully leaked to the Washington Post. For my part, I was convinced that the junta in Athens would not last out the week but I was certain that if we were perceived as the cause of Greece’s debacle we would pay for it for years to come. Whatever one’s view of the wisdom of our previous policy toward the Greek junta, a Greek-Turkish war was not the moment to dissociate ourselves. Our immediate task was to stop the war; to remove nuclear weapons from Greece while Turkey invaded Cyprus would eliminate all restraints on Turkish military action. I also feared that if we once withdrew nuclear weapons we might never be able to return them — setting a dangerous precedent.
Nixon was in San Clemente and, while I briefed him regularly, he was in no position to concentrate or decide between my basic view and Schlesinger’s, especially not in a rapidly changing situation. The preoccupation with Watergate had reached a point where we were losing even the ability to transmit papers bearing on vital foreign policy matters instantaneously between the President and the White House. So many documents relating to Watergate were being moved over the circuits to San Clemente that on July 19 I had had to ask for special priority for cables bearing on the Cyprus crisis.
During the night of July 21–22, we forced a cease-fire by threatening Turkey that we would move nuclear weapons from forward positions — especially where they might be involved in a war with Greece. It stopped Turkish military operations while Turkey was occupying only a small enclave on the island; this created conditions for new negotiations slated to start two days hence, with the Turkish minority obviously in an improved bargaining position and with some hope of achieving more equitable internal arrangements.
On July 22, the junta in Athens was overthrown and replaced by a democratic government under the distinguished conservative leader Constantine Karamanlis. Within days, the mood in America changed. The very groups that had castigated us for our reluctance to assault Greece now wanted us to go into all-out opposition to Turkey. We were being asked to turn against Turkey over a crisis started by Greece, to gear our policies to the domestic structures of the governments in Athens and Ankara regardless of the origins or merits of the dispute on Cyprus, to take a one-sided position regardless of our interest in easing the conflict between two strategic allies in the eastern Mediterranean, and to do all this in the very weeks that the United States government was on the verge of collapse. For two weeks we maintained our tightrope act, but during the weekend following Nixon’s resignation the crisis erupted again, culminating in a second Turkish invasion of the island. While Ford struggled to restore executive authority over the next months, a freewheeling Congress destroyed the equilibrium between the parties we had precariously maintained; it legislated a heavy-handed arms embargo against Turkey that destroyed all possibility of American mediation — at a cost from which we have not recovered to this day.
But even in the third week of July it was clear that we were losing control over events. Foreign policy, as I have repeatedly stated, is the mastery of nuance; it requires the ability to relate disparate elements into a pattern. That coherence was rapidly disintegrating.
Our internal disputes were no longer geared to substance; they had become a struggle for preeminence. Schlesinger and I battled over turf continually; every issue, whether it was SALT or human rights or Cyprus, became a source of tension between us. The bureaucratic struggle reduced my dominance only to create a deadlock; for it could not be resolved by a President in extremis three thousand miles away. The merit of our respective positions is now irrelevant. I made the key point to Haig on the morning of July 21: It was impossible to keep going through crises with the procedures we were now following; sooner or later something would get out of hand. The unspoken corollary was that our own constitutional crisis had to be brought to an end if the nation was to avoid catastrophe.
THE climax finally announced itself. It was heralded by the United States Supreme Court. On July 24 it ruled by a vote of 8 to o that executive privilege, though a valid doctrine grounded in our constitutional history, could not prevail over the impartial administration of justice. The President must turn over to Judge John Sirica the sixty-four tapes subpoenaed for the cover-up trial of the six former White House aides. Nixon’s lawyer announced his compliance at once. But for those of us who knew Nixon’s way of talking, the ruling spelled the end; if the tapes did not prove legally fatal, they would be politically.
Yet Nixon, still in San Clemente, would not discuss Watergate during our frequent daily conversations, or at least did not refer to the substance of the issues. We went over the day’s foreign policy events in a routine fashion. Now and then he would mention one or another Congressman — usually a conservative Democrat from the South — to whom it would be useful to pay attention; the vote in the House on impeachment was expected to be that close.
I began a discreet investigation into the mechanics of impeachment. According to the Constitution, the House of Representatives by a majority vote may impeach, or accuse, the President of specific charges — acting much like a grand jury in our judicial system. The Senate then sits as trial judge and jury presided over by the Chief Justice of the United States; a two-thirds vote is necessary to convict, that is, to remove the President from office.
Nixon’s fate thus resolved itself into arithmetic: whether there was a majority in the House for impeachment and whether one-third plus one could be mobilized in the Senate to oppose. Senator Jacob Javits told me that he did not expect the Senate trial to start before November; the outcome would not be certain until late January. It was a horrendous prospect. In the light of what we had just been through, a further five-month period with even weaker executive authority was unthinkable. Worse, Javits predicted that Nixon would be forced to be “in court” for the greater part of the trial.
I therefore intended to ask Nixon to institute a small group to act in his place when he was not available, with his authority and subject always to his review. The group I had in mind was Ford, Schlesinger, Simon (now Treasury Secretary), Haig, and me. I intended to suggest that the bipartisan Congressional leadership — Senate Democratic leader Mike Mansfield and Republican leader Hugh Scott, Speaker of the House Carl Albert and House Republican leader John Rhodes — be invited to meet with this group twice a week to be briefed on major policy issues. Such a system could at best keep matters reasonably under control although it was quite unsuited for crisis management or serious planning. Luckily, it never had to be created.
Meanwhile, foreign policy claimed its routine. And I report its manifestations here because they in fact took more of my time than the denouement of the Nixon Presidency. The day after the Supreme Court ruling, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher paid his first official visit to America. Naturally he wanted to meet the President. Genscher and I had met for the first time on June 11, the day of my Salzburg press conference. He had invited me to nearby Bad Reichen-hall on German soil to begin the process of improving German-American relations frayed by the Year of Europe and the vacillations of the end of the Brandt period. Genscher was then a novice in foreign policy, without either prior experience or independent study. Still, I was impressed by his strong, self-confident manner and perceptive questions. It was not the ideal day for a calm discussion. He did not bring up my press conference; I did not raise it. Only as I was leaving did I say that I had had to lance the boil; I did not think the new investigation I had requested would end in my resignation; if I had thought that, it would not have been worth staying in the first place. I had also briefed him in early July, as I have noted, on my way back from the Moscow summit.
Genscher turned out to be the rare phenomenon of a man who, coming to diplomacy late in life, shows an extraordinary talent for it. He understood that Germany’s exposed position permitted no complicated maneuvers. He made his impact by steadiness, good judgment, shrewdness, decency, and the ability to evoke confidence. Through my term in office and that of my successors, he became known as a leader to take with the utmost seriousness; one whose views were reassuring when supportive and a welcome warning on the few occasions we disagreed. For me, our personal friendship has been one of the rewards of my public life.
On this occasion I took him, on July 25, to San Clemente to meet Nixon. On the way west, we stopped in North Dakota to inspect a field of Minuteman missiles and the one ABM installation remaining (since closed for budgetary reasons). It was the first time I had seen either. (The principal reason for my visit was to help out Senator Milton Young of North Dakota, ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, who was in a fight for reelection and had been a staunch supporter.)
There is always something abstract and esoteric in the contemplation of nuclear strategy. The visit made it more tangible and at the same time, paradoxically, more abstract. It is an awesome sight. Flying over fields of missiles capable of destroying humanity on the basis of a single decision by an individual of normal fallibility, whatever the safeguards, evokes a latent uneasiness about the human condition. Here are weapons in a state of readiness for which there is no precedent in history, yet for whose use and consequence no practical experience is possible. The abstract relationship of decision-makers to the weapons on which their strategy depends is shown by the attitude toward testing them. No Min-uteman has ever been test-fired from an operational silo even without a warhead — no Secretary of Defense has wanted to run the slight risk that some malfunction might cause a burning rocket to fall on American territory; all test-firings have been from a special silo at Vandenberg Air Force Base on the Pacific coast. No more than one Minuteman at a time has ever been tested, despite the fact that our strategy depends on multiple launches in an extremity. (Of course the Soviets must have similar problems.) All this suggests the inherent fragility of fashionable theories of hair-trigger response or reliance on general nuclear war.
Moreover, the abstractness of these weapons has another dimension: Their vulnerability requires that they be kept in a state of readiness so high that it cannot be increased; hence, they are almost useless for diplomatic purposes. In a crisis one cannot raise their alert status — as, for example, with bombers — to warn that things are getting serious. In the Middle East alert of October 1973, one component of our forces whose readiness was not enhanced and that therefore curiously did not contribute to this diplomatic pressure was the backbone of America’s military power, the 1,054 intercontinental ballistic missiles in our arsenal.
No previous generation of statesmen has had to conduct policy in so unknown an environment at the border line of Armageddon. Very few top leaders (Nixon being a notable exception) have had as many hours to study the issues of nuclear strategy as the experts have had years. They risk becoming the victims of the simplifiers — mindless pacifism on the left and on the right the equally mindless insistence on treating the new technology as conventional. Will we, I wondered, forever maintain the sense of proportion that does not stake the fate of mankind on a single judgment — and the fortitude to shun the pacifist temptation that will abandon the world to the most ruthless? Genscher and I toured the facilities impressed by the professionalism and dedication of the personnel and by the technical marvel of both weapons and warning installations. But they did not relieve the unease at the fact that the survival of our civilization must be entrusted to a technology so out of scale with our experience and with our capacity to grasp its implications.
I introduced Genscher to Nixon on July 26, two days after the Supreme Court decision. I was shocked by the ravages just a week had wrought on Nixon’s appearance. His coloring was pallid. Though he seemed composed, it clearly took every ounce of his energy to conduct a serious conversation. He sat on the sofa in his office looking over the Pacific, his gaze and thought focused on some distant prospect eclipsing the issues we were bringing before him. He permitted himself no comment about his plight. He spoke rationally, mechanically, almost wistfully. What he said was intelligent enough and yet it was put forth as if it no longer mattered: an utterance rather than an argument. The night before, he had addressed the nation on television about inflation — another incongruity in the effort to maintain some semblance of normality twenty-four hours after the devastating Supreme Court decision. Genscher congratulated Nixon on his remarks; the President looked at him with grateful melancholy, more like a professor being praised for an academic paper than a chief of government about to implement a program.
After Genscher and I met the press — and he replied noncommittally to a question about a possible Presidential trip to Germany — we walked along the edge of the cliff overlooking the Pacific. “How long can this go on?” asked Genscher suddenly. It was the key question. What would happen to our allies if the Presidency remained paralyzed? Genscher wanted to know. What about the structure of peace, so banal in its rhetoric, so fateful in its reality? I made reassuring noises that there was bound to be an early resolution, that we were prepared to act decisively as we had in the October alert. It was all make-believe. The question, once having been asked, hung in the air. In a way it supplied its own answer.
That afternoon I broke an unspoken rule between Haig and myself. We had both shied away from ever mentioning the possibility of Nixon’s resignation; it had become an implicit agreement that it would not do to show doubt even to each other; it was our duty to keep the government going. But things had gone too far; a catastrophe was clearly imminent. So in his little office overlooking the Pacific, right next to the President’s, I asked Haig Genscher’s question: “How long can this go on?” Haig seemed tired. He did not know how it would end, he said. He was unfamiliar with the tapes being turned over; they were being reviewed. But, like me, he was convinced that a “smoking gun” would emerge sooner or later, if not from this batch then from some other. Nixon said too many things that he did not really mean to be able to withstand this kind of scrutiny. What did I think Haig’s duty was? I had worked with Haig long enough to be sure that he had thought deeply about it and had pretty much decided on a course of action. The question was more designed to gather intelligence than to seek guidance.
I said that since the end of Nixon’s Presidency was now inevitable, it was in the national interest that it occur as rapidly as possible. Haig and I had a special responsibility to end the agony if that was in our power and to bring about a smooth transition. And yet we were in a difficult position. An impeachment trial had to be avoided at nearly any cost. But Nixon’s fall must not occur as the result of a push by his closest associates. If at all possible, he had to resign because his own judgment of the national interest dictated it. Or else he should be brought to this realization by elected officials. We who owed our governmental positions to Nixon had a duty to sustain him in his ordeal; perhaps this would give him the strength for what must be done — after all, he had never failed at a moment of decision. We should not discuss the plight of the President with those able to affect his fate or lend ourselves to the impression that his closest aides were wavering. Our service would consist of loyalty to the President. The end — for the sake of everyone’s perception of our country — could not be the destruction of the President by his own appointees.
Haig said he agreed completely; he surely had come to the same conclusion independently. When the critical point arrived, he added, he would almost certainly know this before I did. He would then get in touch with me. He counted on me to stand shoulder to shoulder with him as we had so often in the past.
Only those who lived through the fervid atmosphere of those months can fully appreciate the debt the nation owes Al Haig. By sheer willpower, dedication, and self-discipline, he held the government together. He more than anyone succeeded in conveying the impression of a functioning White House. He saw to it that decisions emerged from predictable processes. He served his President loyally but he never forgot his duty to his country. To be sure, only a man of colossal self-confidence could have sustained such a role. His methods were sometimes rough; his insistence on formal status could be grating. But the role assigned to Haig was not one that could be filled by choirboys. He had to preserve the sinews of America for its indispensable mission of being the last resort of the free, the hope of the oppressed, and the one country that with all its turbulent vitality could be relied upon to walk the paths of mercy. It is not necessary that in an hour of crisis America’s representatives embody all of these qualities so long as they enable our country to do so.
Haig performed unique services before and after the fateful last month of the Nixon Presidency. He will never deserve better of the Republic than during that tragic and frenetic period when he sustained the President while moving him toward the resignation that Nixon dreaded, resisted, and yet knew increasingly to be inevitable. Haig kept the faith with his President and he kept it with the institutions of this country. Without him, I doubt that a catastrophe could have been avoided.
By now the juggernaut bearing down on Nixon was unstoppable. The very next day, July 27, a Saturday, the House Judiciary Committee passed its first impeachment article by a vote of 27 to 11, with six Republicans joining all the Democrats. The charge was obstruction of justice. I watched the proceedings on television for a few minutes and I was sick about our country and about the personal horror that had befallen the President with whom I had worked for five and a half years. I could not bear the righteous moralizing of the commentators or the self-serving comments of some of the Congressmen even as I realized — and perhaps because of it — that had I been on that committee my duty would have been to vote with the majority. On July 29, the Committee approved its second article of impeachment, charging the President — by a vote of 28 to 10 — with abuse of power. That day the formation of a committee called Conservatives for the Removal of the President was announced. All the old bastions were crumbling. The Senate was getting ready for the impeachment trial by asking its Rules Committee to review relevant rules and precedents. On July 30, the House Committee voted a third article of impeachment — by a vote of 21 to 17 — charging the President with unconstitutionally defying its subpoenas. On July 31, John Ehrlichman was sentenced to twenty months to five years for conspiracy and perjury. The personal tragedies were mounting. In destroying himself, Nixon had wrecked the lives of almost all who had come into contact with him.
The President had returned to Washington on July 28. On July 31, Haig called me for an urgent appointment. It was one of the rare occasions he came to the State Department. Usually we met in his office at the White House after some interdepartmental meeting I had attended in the Situation Room. He wasted no time. The “smoking gun” had been found; one of the tapes turned over the day before to the Special Prosecutor — an Oval Office conversation between Nixon and Haldeman on June 23, 1972, less than a week after the Watergate break-in — left no doubt that Nixon was familiar with the cover-up; he may in fact have ordered it. Impeachment was now certain, conviction highly probable. We needed to coordinate our efforts. Should he inform defenders of Nixon not to go too far out on a limb? I said that the tape was bound to become public. Either the Special Prosecutor or the House Judiciary Committee was certain to leak it; the White House might consider preempting this by publishing the tape itself with whatever explanatory comment might be possible. Approaching any of Nixon’s defenders was not Haig’s job, I counseled; in the longer term it would make him the villain. Haig’s role now — and to the extent possible mine — was to ease Nixon’s decision to resign. The most important task before him — which no one else could carry out — was to give Nixon the psychological support to do the necessary.
Haig was in touch with me every day thereafter. Usually I started my day at the White House in a brief meeting with him. On Thursday, August 1, he said matters were heading toward resignation though the Nixon family was violently opposed. On Friday, August 2, he told me that Nixon was digging in his heels; it might be necessary to put the 82nd Airborne Division around the White House to protect the President. This I said was nonsense; a Presidency could not be conducted from a White House ringed with bayonets. Haig said he agreed completely; as a military man it made him heartsick to think of the Army in that role; he simply wanted me to have a feel for the kinds of ideas being canvassed. A big meeting was taking place over the weekend at Camp David, including Nixon’s closest confidants (which clearly did not include me) to chart the course. Whatever the decision, the damaging tape would be released on Monday, August 5, to give the White House an opportunity to put it into perspective. Nixon would not make his final decision until he could judge the public reaction. I wondered then, was the tape more marginal than Haig had at first believed? Haig did not show me a transcript, saying it was just then being prepared. I was somewhat at a loss to judge whether months of harassment had caused Haig to overreact or whether we really were at the end of the line.
We were heading for some kind of catharsis in substantial ignorance of its nature. I knew that those who had been working on Watergate matters full time were by now inured to the public impact; they had seen so many climaxes that they could not believe any one revelation could be the final one. And there is a momentum to power and to the office of the Presidency that makes it hard to face the fact — even when one knows it intellectually — that a term in office is drawing to a close. The routine of decision creates the illusion that authority is undiminished even when it has nearly evaporated. That inability to come to grips emotionally with the end of one’s power — so noticeable when a Presidential term draws to a close in the normal way — was even stronger as the Nixon Presidency was collapsing.
I suspected that Haig’s judgment of the impact of the tapes was correct. Still, I spent the weekend in my office not preparing for the transfer of power but getting ready for testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee scheduled for the following Thursday — August 8 — on the subject of détente. The Committee’s Chairman, Senator Fulbright, had called the hearings weeks before to permit a balanced, philosophical exploration of East-West relations. Our opponents from both sides of the spectrum jumped at the opportunity to assault Nixon’s foreign policy. Former servants of liberal administrations as well as hardliners were queuing up for the chance to testify — presumably not in defense of the Administration’s approach.
On Sunday afternoon, August 4, Ron Ziegler’s assistant Diane Sawyer stopped by to check some public relations items before going to Camp David to confer with Ziegler. I asked her whether any of it made any sense in light of the tape about to be released. Beautiful, clever Diane was nonplussed. She had not read the tape but she was beginning to think that there would never be a climax, simply an endless hemorrhaging. “As likely as not,” she said, “the tape will be drowned out in the political uproar.”
By now we were living in a surrealistic world. Its victims had coexisted with a nightmare for so long that it had come to seem the natural state of affairs. They had reduced their peril to a banality and therefore could not believe in its culmination. On Monday morning, August 5, I talked to Nixon. He complimented me on the monthly meetings I had arranged with the leadership of the House of Representatives. Still, he warned, I had to remember most of the Democrats were enemies. The Democrats worth cultivating were the Southerners; I should invite them to a briefing. Vice President Ford, he was sure, would be happy to arrange it. Not a word about Watergate or the imminent release of the tape.
I called Ford as the President had requested. I have never asked Ford what he thought I was doing — probably that I was trying to bring myself to his attention prior to the imminent transfer of power. But he played it straight. Yes, he would be glad to arrange such a meeting with his old friends in the House of Representatives. No, he did not think it would do much good. In his view the battle in the House, while still close, was going to be lost. Yes, we should stay in touch; perhaps I should come by for one of my regular briefings soon.
Early in the afternoon, Ziegler called. He thought I should have a preview of a portion of the tape that would be released around 4:00 P.M. But the advance indication Ziegler brought to my attention did not concern Watergate. It was an exchange between Nixon and Haldeman on whether Rogers had to be included in a meeting in which I would brief Nixon upon my return from China or whether a photograph with Nixon would be enough. Ziegler thought I would be amused. I was appalled; there had to be more to the tape than this. If there was not, Haig had lost his sense of proportion; if there was, Ziegler had abandoned his grip on reality.
I had to wait until 4:00 P.M. to find out, like everyone else, when the tape transcript was released from the White House. Haig, it turned out, had a good sense of proportion. The transcript consisted of three conversations the President had had with Haldeman on June 23, 1972, a week after the break-in, in which he tried to order a halt to the FBI investigation at least partly because he wanted to protect people connected with his reelection committee. The transcript was released together with an extremely defensive Presidential statement admitting that the cover-up had political as well as national security implications, and that in concealing this conversation from his lawyers the President was responsible for a serious act of omission. But the President went on to say that despite these mistakes the basic truth remained, that when all the facts were brought to his attention he insisted on a full investigation and prosecution of those guilty: “I am firmly convinced that the record, in its entirety, does not justify the extreme step of impeachment and removal of a President. I trust that as the Constitutional process goes forward, this perspective will prevail.”
It was much too late for that. The tape proved to be the last straw; it provided the pretext for all waverers to commit themselves to impeachment; it gave others a pretext to abandon Nixon. By now there had been too many shocks; everybody wanted to get it over with.
I was flooded with phone calls asking for my comments. I refused them. There were hints that I should condemn Nixon and thus force his resignation. I rejected them. I had charted my course. I would not turn on Nixon. Privately I would steer him gently — if that was possible — toward resignation.
At almost every crucial turning point in the Watergate saga, there seemed to be, incongruously, a dinner in my honor by the Chinese Liaison Office in Washington. On April 30, 1973, the Chinese had toasted the end of the Watergate affair when Nixon had dismissed Haldeman and Ehrlichman. On October 19, the evening before the “Saturday night massacre,” they had been pleased at the thought that the Stennis compromise would be the end of the whole inscrutable business. Now on Monday evening, August 5, much of the Washington Establishment was assembled at the Chinese Liaison Office to honor me. But clearly Watergate — or at least the Nixon portion of it — was drawing to a close. There was no mood of celebration. Many of the dinner guests had worked to destroy Nixon; a few were even then gloating while piously protesting their dismay at the turn of events. But the dominant feeling was one of awe — beyond righteousness, transcending the hatreds of a lifetime. For a fleeting moment there was a sense that we might all be in danger, that the public spectacle of the destruction of a President was more than a society should be asked to endure.
Our Chinese hosts inquired whether there would be any change of policy if Nixon left office — the first time they entertained that possibility in speaking to me. They asked whether I would stay on; obviously, continuity was important to them. In my toast I assured them that the relationship between our two countries was based on permanent factors, but I was careful to use no language that the journalists present could interpret as taking the President’s departure, by resignation or by impeachment, for granted.
By the end of the dinner the reaction on which Haig told me the President’s decision would depend had become plain for all to see. Four Republicans who had voted against impeachment on the Judiciary Committee said that they would vote for it when it reached the House floor. The Senate Republican Whip, Senator Robert Griffin, asked for Nixon’s resignation. Vice President Ford dissociated himself in a statement saying that
the public interest is no longer served by repetition of my previously expressed belief that, on the basis of all the evidence known to me and the American people, the President is not guilty of an impeachable offense.
By now, I was approached by many concerned people urging me to bring matters to a head by threatening to resign unless Nixon did so; a few even suggested I invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution and declare the President incapacitated. It was unthinkable. It was not only that a Presidential appointee had no moral right to force his President to resign; it would also be an unbearable historical burden for a foreign-born to do so. Though Haig told me that Nixon was still hesitating, I was convinced that in the end he would do the right thing and that it was important for the nation that he be perceived as having come to this conclusion on his own.
The next morning, Tuesday, August 6, a Cabinet meeting had been scheduled for some time for 10:00 A.M. It was shifted to 11:00 when the President was late reaching the Oval Office. When I entered the Cabinet Room it was obvious that as far as the Cabinet was concerned, Nixon was on his way out. Ford stood behind the Vice Presidential chair talking affably to the Cabinet members crowding around him — not, to put it mildly, the usual scene in Cabinet meetings with functioning Presidents, where the Vice President is treated politely but as a supernumerary. I was sitting in my place to the right of the Presidential chair when Nixon walked in, setting off a scramble for the seats. It was impossible not to feel sorry for this tormented man. I had spent too many hours with him not to sense his panic; I knew the bravado was only skin-deep.
Nixon began the meeting by saying that he wanted to talk about the most important subject before our nation; it was — bizarrely — inflation. He commented on how he had vetoed $35 billion of appropriations even during Watergate. The time ahead would be even tougher.
Abruptly he switched to the subject on everybody’s mind. He thanked the Cabinet for having supported him through all difficulties. He was aware what a blow the tape of June 23, 1972, was to his case. He asked for nothing from his Cabinet officers they might find personally embarrassing or contrary to their convictions. They could serve their country and the President by running their departments well in the trying months ahead. As for him, he was aware that there was sentiment for his resignation. He had gone through difficult times before; he also had some achievements to his credit. He would have to consider not only his personal preferences but the office of the Presidency. If he resigned under pressure, he might turn our Presidential system into a parliamentary one in which a President could stay in office only so long as he could win a vote of confidence from the legislative branch.
That was, of course, hardly the issue. Impeaching a President was not the same as a parliamentary vote of no-confidence. I was convinced that Nixon was not delivering a political science lecture. What he sought in his oblique manner was a vote of confidence from his Cabinet, some expression of sympathy for his plight, a show of willingness to continue the fight, some statement that the battle to maintain his Presidency was in the national interest.
But all he encountered was an embarrassed silence. Papers were being shuffled amidst much fidgeting when Ford at last ended the impasse: “Mr. President, with your indulgence I have something to say.” Nixon nodded, and Ford continued:
Everyone here recognizes the difficult position I’m in. No one regrets more than I do this whole tragic episode. I have deep personal sympathy for you, Mr. President, and your fine family. But I wish to emphasize that had I known what has been disclosed in reference to Watergate in the last twenty-four hours, I would not have made a number of the statements I made either as Minority leader or as Vice President. I came to a decision yesterday and you may be aware that I informed the press that because of commitments to Congress and the public, I’ll have no further comment on the issue because I’m a party in interest. I’m sure there will be impeachment in the House. I can’t predict the Senate outcome. I will make no comment concerning this. You have given us the finest foreign policy this country has ever had. A super job, and the people appreciate it. Let me assure you that I expect to continue to support the Administration’s foreign policy and the fight against inflation.3
Nixon seemed to hear only the comment about inflation. He told Ford that his position was correct but it was not exactly clear that he was referring to Watergate. For he picked up a proposal Ford had floated publicly a few days earlier of an economic summit of business and labor leaders to overcome the inflation problem. There was some desultory talk on that subject as well as about the new agricultural appropriation bill. Attorney General William Saxbe interrupted: “Mr. President, I don’t think we ought to have a summit conference. We ought to be sure you have the ability to govern.” George Bush, then Chairman of the Republican National Committee, took up the theme. The Republican party, he said, was in a shambles; the forthcoming Congressional election threatened disaster. Watergate had to be brought to an end expeditiously. He did not say so but everyone in the room knew the corollary: The only way Watergate could end quickly was for Nixon to resign immediately.
It was cruel. And it was necessary. For Nixon’s own appointees to turn on him was not the best way to end a Presidency. Yet he had left them no other choice. If he had genuinely sought the opinion of his Cabinet, he should have asked a few of the senior members to the Oval Office, perhaps individually. It would have been a much better gauge of the mood of his associates than this performance by desperate men impelled by the presence of their colleagues to make a record, unsure of what it was for which their support was being solicited. It was vintage Nixon. Fearing individual rejection, he had assembled the largest possible forum; hoping for a group vote of confidence, he sought to confront them with a fait accompli and thereby triggered their near-rebellion.
There is no body less likely to rebel than a President’s Cabinet. Every member owes his appointment to the President and derives his authority from him. I have seen meetings between Presidents and senior Cabinet advisers since the days of John Kennedy; their normal tendency is deference, occasionally bordering on obsequiousness. If Nixon’s Cabinet officers felt impelled to say what they did, they must have felt that they had been deceived on Watergate; if they felt free to say it, their judgment must have been that Nixon’s days were numbered. But it was too unfeeling toward Nixon to allow this to continue, and it would also have deprived his resignation of one important message: that our institutions remained vital, our procedures democratic, our future infused by the national spirit of optimism of which Watergate threatened to rob us. More than enough had been said. The Cabinet owed it to the President not to deprive him of self-respect or his almost certain departure of dignity. So I took the floor as the senior Cabinet officer:
We are not here to offer excuses for what we cannot do. We are here to do the nation’s business. This is a very difficult time for our country. Our duty is to show confidence. We must demonstrate that the country can go through its constitutional processes. For the sake of foreign policy we must act with assurance and total unity. If we can do that, we can vindicate the structure of peace.4
Afterward, I went out to the driveway in front of the West Wing of the White House. Several Cabinet members were making statements as they were leaving. I stepped before the television cameras and sought to offer some reassurance to the American public and to convey steadiness to foreign governments:
[T]he foreign policy of the United States is always and continues to be conducted on a bipartisan basis in the national interest and in the interest of world peace. When questions of peace or war are considered, no foreign government should have any doubts about the way in which foreign policy will be conducted.5
Around 12:45 P.M., I returned to the Oval Office unannounced. Alone with the President, I told Nixon of my comments to the media. Neither they nor my remarks to the Cabinet were the full story, I said. Having worked closely with the President for five and a half years, I owed it to him to say that his best service to the country now would be to resign. It was one thing to show fortitude in the face of political attack as he always had. But, I continued, an impeachment trial would preoccupy him for months, obsess the nation, and paralyze our foreign policy. It was too dangerous for our country and too demeaning to the Presidency. In my view, he should leave in a manner that appeared as an act of his choice. No matter what his decision, I concluded, I would not repeat these views outside the Oval Office.
Through all the tormented deliberations of the past week, Nixon had never sought my views. Nor did he do so now. He said he appreciated what I said. He would take it seriously. He would be in touch.
Then there was silence. Haig told me later in the day that Nixon was again tilting toward resignation; he was thinking about doing so late in the week and had asked speechwriter Ray Price to begin work on a resignation speech. But it would be a close call; in the evening his family might change his mind again. During the course of the afternoon I faced many opportunities to dissociate from the President publicly, thereby precipitating a crisis. I refused.
Later that evening, around 7:00 P.M., I received a phone call from Nixon that made no reference to what had occurred earlier in the day and was convulsing the nation. He had just — as a matter of a bureaucratic routine that followed its own drummer — received an Israeli request for long-term military assistance. He would disapprove it, he said. In fact, he would cut off all military deliveries to Israel until it agreed to a comprehensive peace. He regretted not having done so earlier; he would make up for it now. His successor would thank him for it. I should prepare the necessary papers.
Was it retaliation for our conversation of a few hours ago — on Nixon’s assumption that my faith made me unusually sensitive to pressures on Israel? Or was it the expression of a long-held belief? Almost certainly both. I told Haig about the conversation. Nixon did not return to the subject; the relevant papers were prepared but never signed.
The next day, Wednesday, August 7, I began with two hours at my White House office so as to be available for talks with Haig and with the President. Nixon did not call for me, but I learned from Haig that he (Haig) was making “progress.” He was encouraging old friends of the President who stood by him in difficult times to tell him frankly about the prospects in Congress. There would be a meeting that afternoon between the President and a delegation of key Republican leaders of the Congress: Senator Hugh Scott, Congressman John Rhodes, and the respected conservative Senator Barry Goldwater. That might well prove decisive.
Despite the mounting tension, I spent the day conducting foreign policy, partly to maintain the appearance of normality. I asked Brent Scow-croft and Larry Eagleburger — on a strictly personal basis — to prepare what in bureaucratese is called a “scenario” for the eventuality of resignation: how to notify foreign governments and in what order; who would get letters and what they would say; what foreign ambassadors, if any, the new President should receive. I would submit this to Ford for his approval once the decision was made.
I met with State Department staffers working on my détente statement for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; I had a meeting on the Cyprus crisis; I lunched with Deputy Secretary of State Robert Ingersoll; I had meetings with Jordanian Prime Minister Rifai and Moroccan Foreign Minister Dr. Ahmed Laraki. The consultations on next steps in the Middle East could hardly have taken place under more preoccupying circumstances.
At 5:58 P.M. Haig called me, interrupting a staff meeting on the Middle East with Sisco, Saunders, and Atherton. Could I come right over to the White House? He did not tell me the reason. It was not necessary; the decision had obviously been made. When I entered the Oval Office, I found Nixon alone with his back to the room, gazing at the Rose Garden through the bay windows. I knew the feeling from the time when as a boy I had left the places where I had been brought up to emigrate to a foreign land: attempting to say goodbye to something familiar and beloved, to absorb it, so to speak, so that one can never be separated from it. In the process, sadly, one loses it imperceptibly because the self-consciousness of the effort destroys what can only be possessed spontaneously. I knew the way each minute would now seem infinitely precious and inexorably terminal; I felt his torment of seeking both to prolong the moment by an act of will and to get it over with. And I understood above all that there was absolutely nothing I could do or say to ease the solitary pain he was experiencing.
Nixon turned when he heard me. He seemed very composed, almost at ease. He had decided to resign, he said. The Republican leaders had reinforced his instinct that there was not enough support left in the Congress to justify a struggle. The country needed some repose. He could save our foreign policy only by avoiding a constitutional crisis. He would speak to the nation the very next evening, Thursday, August 8; he would resign effective at noon Friday, August 9. He hoped I would stay on to help the new President continue the foreign policy of which he was so proud.
The effort seemed to drain him and I feared for his composure. “History,” I said, “will treat you more kindly than your contemporaries have.” What I remember is that at that moment I put my arm around him, bridging at the end the distance that had separated us on the human level all these years. Nixon does not report it in his memoirs. So perhaps it did not happen and I only felt like doing it. Or perhaps when writing his book Nixon did not want to admit that he needed solace, an emotion that he considered weak but that was in fact the most human reaction possible. It makes no real difference. At the moment of his fall, I felt for Nixon a great tenderness — for the tremendous struggle he had fought within his complex personality, for his anguish, his vulnerability, and for his great aspirations defeated in the end by weaknesses of character that became destructive because he had never come to grips with them. And if I did not in fact embrace him, I felt as if I had.
I was at home having dinner that same evening with Nancy, my children, and my dear friend the columnist Joseph Alsop when near 9:00 P.M. the phone rang. It was Nixon, alone in the Lincoln Sitting Room. Could I come over right away? There had been many calls like this on happier occasions, for example, the evening in 1971 when we knew that the China breakthrough had become a reality. This, however, was the end, not the beginning, of an adventure. And nothing could be more poignant than that at the close of his political career Nixon was left with the one associate about whom he was the most ambivalent, who made him uneasy even while counting on him to embody the continuity of his achievements.
I found Nixon sitting in a characteristic pose, slouched in the brown-covered chair, his legs on the settee, a yellow pad on his lap — a last crutch at the moment of despair. A reading lamp threw a thin beam on his chair; the rest of the room was in shadows broken only by the distant lights from the White House grounds. Other memories crowded in: I had called on the President there when the White House was besieged by passionate and vocal Vietnam protesters in the tens of thousands. Often I had sensed in that room the tangible aura of concentrated power. Now all was silence and solitude.
There are several accounts of our encounter that night. Nixon has me summoned from my office for an hour-long, relatively businesslike meeting. There is also extant an unfeeling account of an out-of-control President beating his fist on the carpet and railing against a cruel fate.6 Neither fits with what I remember. There is no doubt that the meeting lasted nearly three hours. Nixon was not calm or businesslike. Nor was he out of control. He was shattered and he would not be worthy of further reflection had it been otherwise. But he was also in control of himself. There was no doubt he was deeply distraught; but I found his visible agony more natural than the almost inhuman self-containment that I had known so well. To have striven so hard, to have molded a public personality out of so amorphous an identity, to have sustained that superhuman effort only to end with every weakness disclosed and every error compounding the downfall — that was a fate of biblical proportions. Evidently the Deity would not tolerate the presumption that all can be manipulated; an object lesson of the limits of human presumption was necessary.
It was only natural, in a way, that Nixon should spend his last solitary evening in the White House seeking to distill some positive meaning from all those years of exertion. What would history say of him? That he made a difference? Was the world a safer place? Could we go over some of what we had done together? He kept pouring out questions, seeking some succor in his loneliness without either being able to believe what he was told or daring to reject it.
What is the meaning of a political life? How does one assess a trend in international politics? Even in the best of times, no judgment is more tenuous than an assessment of the significance of a statesman’s actions. History is infinite compared to the human lifespan and the human perspective is even more foreshortened. Conventional wisdom often runs counter to the necessities of history, especially in times of great upheaval. The statesman has built truly only if he perceives the trend of events and puts it into the service of his purposes. For that task his scope is not unlimited. If he confines himself to riding with the trend, he will soon become irrelevant; if he goes beyond the capacity of his people, he will suffer shipwreck. If politics is the art of the possible, stature depends on going to the very limits of the possible. Great statesmen set themselves high goals yet assess unemotionally the quality of the material, human and physical, with which they have to work; ordinary leaders are satisfied with removing frictions or embarrassments. Statesmen create; ordinary leaders consume. The ordinary leader is satisfied with ameliorating the environment, not transforming it; a statesman must be a visionary and an educator. Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.
In his way, in the field of foreign policy Nixon met the test of his encounter with destiny. He understood what was at stake in the world. In the midst of unbridled emotions, he held fast to the truth that America’s credibility must not be squandered, especially by its leaders. He fought for America’s honor in distant jungles into which his predecessors had committed our troops, convinced that we had no right to abandon those who had depended on us and that tens of millions would curse the abdication his critics wished to impose on us. Against the rhetoric of a lifetime, he bravely affirmed the impossibility of an international order that excluded China, a quarter of the human race. Contrary to the simpler categories of an earlier period, he perceived that resistance to Communist aggression requires a psychological foundation that positions America as the defender of a structure of peace open even to our adversaries should their ambitions yield to the imperatives of coexistence. He identified the need of the industrial democracies for a moral rededication to common purposes. He broke through the congealed hatreds of the Middle East and at the very height of his agony showed a road toward peace where all had been frustration. And he was beginning to educate the American people to the permanent challenge of responsible American involvement in the world so that they might avoid their historical oscillation between extremes of crusading and of abdication, between impetuosity and naiveté.
To be sure, Nixon had failed in the task of educator. He had been too unsure of himself to inspire his society not simply by technical virtuosity but by nobility of purpose. He had not met the moral challenge. And he was now paying the price for at a minimum neglecting that aspect of his trust.
Nixon in the final analysis had provoked a revolution. He had been reelected by a landslide in 1972 in a contest as close to being fought on ideological issues as is possible in America. Neither Nixon nor George McGovern was a charismatic figure, to put it mildly. The American people for once had chosen on philosophical grounds, not on personality. Overwhelmingly, they had chosen the moderate conservative course rather than the radical liberal. For reasons unrelated to the issues and unforeseeable by the people who voted for what Nixon represented, this choice was now being annulled — with as-yet unpredictable consequences.
So the verdict of history would be mixed. But I did not recite my caveats that evening; he would hear enough of that in the lonely months ahead — most tellingly from himself. I spoke less philosophically and more anecdotally than I write here but to the same effect. Occasionally Nixon interrupted to ask me to drink some brandy with him as we had done in happier days after some accomplishment. It was evident that he could hardly bear the thought of the indignity of a criminal trial for a former President. And neither, in truth, could I. If this came to pass, I told him, I would retire from office. And I believe I would have.
I kept returning to the theme that the judgment of history would be less severe, that it would remember his major achievements. But Nixon was not easily consoled. “It depends who writes the history,” he kept saying. He did not do justice to himself in these desperate hours. He had built better than he knew: Nearly a decade later, the basic categories of our public discourse on international affairs — China, the Mideast, SALT and the strategic balance, energy policy, new initiatives with allies — are still those established during the years of upheaval now coming to an end.
To professional Nixon-haters, all this may seem a maudlin rendition of a self-inflicted denouement that was entirely justified. I was too close to events to be able to see it that way. That night of August 7, in any event, I was nearly shattered by the human tragedy of the President seeking a solace beyond anybody’s capacity to furnish.
Near midnight, after about two hours in the Lincoln Room, I prepared to leave. Nixon started escorting me to the elevator through the long hallway that bisects the Presidential residence. He stopped at the door of the Lincoln Bedroom. And he suggested that he and I pray there together. There was no good way to end that evening or to put a period to such a tempestuous career. And I am not sure that this was not as meaningful as any other and more appropriate than most.
Nixon’s recollection is that he invited me to kneel with him and that I did so. My own recollection is less clear on whether I actually knelt. It is a trivial distinction. In whatever posture, I was filled with a deep sense of awe which seemed its own meaning so that I did not know exactly what to pray for. A passage from Aeschylus kept running through my mind — the verse that, as it happened, was a favorite of one of Nixon’s obsessions, Robert Kennedy:
Pain that cannot forget
falls drop by drop
upon the heart
until in our despair
there comes wisdom
through the awful
grace of God.
Shortly after midnight — after about a half hour in the Lincoln Bedroom — I returned to my White House office. Scowcroft and Eagleburger were waiting for me; Eagleburger had come over from the State Department to be on hand if I needed him. Within a few minutes, Nixon called. I must not remember our encounter that evening as a sign of weakness, he said. He hoped that I would keep in mind the times when he had been strong. How strange is the illusion by which men sustain themselves! There were many occasions that Nixon identified with strength that had made me uncomfortable. This evening when he had bared his soul I saw a man of tenacity and resilience. And so I told the stricken President that if I ever spoke of the evening, it would be with respect. He had honored me by permitting me to share with him his last free night in the White House where so many memories united us. And he had conducted himself humanly and worthily.
The next morning, Thursday, August 8, resignation was transmuted from the tragic to the routine. During my sojourn at my White House office, Haig told me that Nixon would see Ford at 11:00 A.M. to tell him formally of his plan to resign the next day. I worked on draft letters for the new President to send to key heads of government. I also went over a plan for the new President to meet all of the ambassadors accredited in Washington in regional groups. It was important to demonstrate that a firm hand was taking over. There were many interruptions. Some Cabinet members called asking whether they should publicly announce their readiness to continue in office. I counseled against it; they should not seem to try to deprive the new President of options. Friends offered advice on how to resist assaults on my position after the change of administration. I was not in the mood for it. I had seen the beginnings of two Presidential terms. I knew that whatever decisions the new President might make now about formal assignments would not determine the ultimate hierarchy. Months of jockeying for position were ahead of us. I had no stomach for going through it all again. Yet there would be no choice; all that would come soon enough. This day we had to keep to fundamentals.
At 12:30 P.M. Vice President Ford called. He was calm and steady. He had just left the President, he said. He wanted to waste no time in urging me to stay on and to “stand with me in these difficult times.” These occasions always seemed to bring out the banal in me, or perhaps it is the incongruity between the immensity of the occasion and the nature of language. I said he could count on me: “You know the whole world depends on you, Mr. Vice President.”
Nixon was still President. I owed it to him to inform him of my conversation with Ford. I reviewed with Nixon how I would suggest to Ford to take the helm and reassure foreign governments. Nixon was appreciative of the call though apathetic. He offered no comments on substance.
At 3:00 P.M. I called on the President-designate in his office at the Executive Office Building. I had known Gerald Ford for many years. Over a decade earlier he had been a guest lecturer to my National Security Policy Seminar at Harvard. Since coming to Washington I had briefed him regularly, first as Republican leader of the House, for the past nine months as Vice President. We have since become such close friends that it is difficult to reconstruct my feelings at the time. I liked him immensely. Even then I knew he was a good and decent man. I had no idea how he would perform as President and almost certainly neither did he. But he seemed at ease, neither overawed nor falsely boastful. He urged me again to stay on and referred to the fact that we had always gotten along well. I pointed out that it was not his job to get along with me; it was my job to get along with him. We reviewed the scenario for informing foreign governments and demonstrating that the new President was firmly in control. Ford agreed to meet all the foreign ambassadors during his first twenty-four hours in office. He changed some of the letters to world leaders so that they sounded more like language he might use.
When I left his office after an hour and a half, I suddenly realized that for the first time in years after a Presidential meeting I was free of tension. It was impossible to talk to Nixon without wondering afterward what other game he might be engaged in at the moment. Of one thing you could be sure: No single conversation with Nixon ever encapsuled the totality of his purposes. It was exciting but also draining, even slightly menacing. With Ford, one knew that there were no hidden designs, no morbid suspicions, no complexes. And I reflected again on the wisdom of Providence. Gerald Ford was clearly not Nixon’s first choice as successor; John Connally was. But for that moment of near-despair I could think of no public figure better able to lead us in national renewal than this man so quintessentially American, of unquestioned integrity, at peace with himself, thoughtful and knowledgeable of national affairs and international responsibilities, calm and unafraid.
That night Nixon announced his resignation in a simple speech that was well delivered, without pathos. It stopped short of confessing guilt but it admitted mistakes — not an easy matter for one so proud. I watched the last minute of his speech in the Oval Office from behind the television cameras. When he was finished, Nixon stood for a moment or two ordering his papers and then he placed his hand on the top of Wilson’s desk before turning his back for the last time on the Oval Office. I caught up with him in the passageway next to the Rose Garden. I said: “Mr. President, after most of your major speeches in this office we have walked together back to your house. I would be honored to walk with you again tonight.”
So we walked along the corridor to the residence for the final time. By now we had uttered all the words possible. I repeated that history would treat him more kindly. And he repeated that this would depend on who wrote it. At the door of the residence, Julie Nixon Eisenhower was waiting. She wordlessly embraced her father and escorted him the rest of the way.
James St. Clair, Nixon’s lawyer, was in my office when I returned. I do not know what brought him there. He and I had exchanged only a few words during the preceding months. Now he obviously needed someone to talk to. He reviewed matter-of-factly the various stages of his experience: Nixon’s reluctance to inform even his own lawyer of what he was facing, making St. Clair’s job with his client similar to the Special Prosecutor’s. He was obviously bothered about whether he could have done better, whether something had been overlooked. “It was not a legal case,” I told him. “It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.”
The next morning Nixon’s Cabinet and White House staff were assembled for the last time, packed into the East Room. Many of us could remember the exuberance of two inaugural celebrations and the high hopes of being sworn in there. At 9:30 A.M., the military aide announced President and Mrs. Nixon, followed by the strains of “Hail to the Chief.” The poignancy was nearly unbearable. And then Nixon delivered a speech that was as rambling as the previous night’s had been disciplined, as emotional as the previous night’s had been controlled. It was too much. It was as if having kept himself in check all these years he had to put on display all the demons and dreams that had driven him to this point. He even wore glasses in public for the first time, symbolically forswearing the vanity and image-making of his career. It was horrifying and heartbreaking; and it was unavoidable. Nixon could not leave as the automaton that had been his public personality. I was at the same time moved to tears and outraged at being put through the wringer once again, so that even in his last public act Nixon managed to project his ambivalence onto those around him. When he was praising his mother, I wondered irrationally why he had omitted his wife, Pat, who without his capacity for make-believe must have suffered the most grievously of all.
And then that mood passed, too, as the anguish on the platform engulfed us all. In defeat and disgrace Nixon had at last prevailed; he had stripped us of our reserve; we were naked before these elemental feelings and our hearts in the end went out to this man who transcended his extremity by refusing to act as if he were defeated.
A few minutes later I stood on the South Portico of the White House, from which Nixon had always waved with foreign guests to the crowds that assembled for arrival ceremonies. Down below on the South Lawn, incongruously a red carpet stretched toward the waiting helicopter and an honor guard presented arms for the last time to the President and Mrs. Nixon accompanied by the Fords. The President-designate said a few inaudible words to President and Mrs. Nixon at the foot of the helicopter’s stairs. As he was about to board, Nixon turned to his colleagues for the last time with a wave of his arms that was intended to be jaunty but that conveyed more than anything that he had reached the end of his physical and emotional resources.
Soon the helicopter was just a tiny dot beside the Washington Monument and then it disappeared on the way to Andrews Air Force Base. Ford, President-designate for another ninety minutes, turned and strode firmly toward the White House, his arm around his wife’s shoulders. They were virtually alone; there was as yet no retinue of aides or visible security; Ford appeared subdued and yet confident.
I felt an immense relief. We had traversed a constitutional crisis without catastrophe. Whatever was ahead of us could not match in peril the period of the collapse of our executive authority. Somehow we had preserved a vital foreign policy in the debacle. Yet I reflected also that one cannot engage with impunity in a flirtation with the nihilistic. No one had taken over the Presidency in more challenging circumstances; great crises were surely ahead. And the prayer that had eluded me two nights earlier came to me as I watched Gerald Ford enter the White House: for the sake of all of us, that fate would be kind to this good man, that his heart would be stout, and that America under his leadership would find again its faith.