By now the juggernaut bearing down on Nixon was unstoppable. Between July 27 and 30, the House Judiciary Committee passed three impeachment articles (obstruction of justice, abuse of power and defying subpoenas). I could not bear the righteous moralizing of the commentators or the self-serving comments of some Congressmen, even as I realized that had I been on that committee my duty would have been to vote with the majority. On July 31, Ehrlichman was sentenced to 20 months to five years for conspiracy and perjury. In destroying himself, Nixon wrecked the lives of many who had come into contact with him.
The President had returned to Washington on July 28. On July 31, Haig called me. The “smoking gun” had been found; one of the tapes given to the Special Prosecutor—conversations be tween Nixon and Haldeman less than a week after the Water gate break-in—left no doubt that Nixon was familiar with the coverup; he may in fact have ordered it. Impeachment was now certain, conviction highly probable. Haig’s role now—and to some extent mine—was to ease Nixon’s decision to resign, to give him the psychological support to do the necessary.
Haig was in touch with me every day thereafter. On Thursday, Aug. 1, he said matters were heading toward resignation, though the Nixon family was violently opposed. On Friday, Aug. 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, Aug. 5.
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. Those who had been working on Watergate matters full time had seen so many climaxes by now that they could not believe any single revelation could be the final one. Haig, it turned out, had a good sense of proportion.
On Monday, Aug. 5, the tape transcript was released from the White House. It covered three conversations the President had with Haldeman on June 23, 1972, in which he tried to halt the FBI investigation at least partly to protect people connected with his re-election committee. The transcript was released with a statement admitting that in concealing this conversation from his lawyers Nixon was responsible for a serious omission. But he went on to say that when the facts were brought to his attention he insisted on a full investigation and prosecution of those guilty: “The record 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 too late for that. The tape was the last straw; it provided the pretext for waverers to commit themselves to impeachment and for others 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 would not turn on Nixon. Privately I would steer him gently—if that was possible—toward resignation.
By that night, the reaction on which Haig told me the President’s decision would depend had become plain for all to see. The Senate Republican whip, Robert Griffin, asked for Nixon’s resignation. Vice President Ford dissociated himself, saying: “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, the President is not guilty of an impeachable offense.”
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 25th Amendment 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. I was convinced that Nixon 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.
Tuesday morning, Aug. 6, the Cabinet met at 11. It was obvious that as far as the Cabinet was concerned, Nixon was on his way out. Cabinet members crowded around Ford—not the usual scene at such meetings, 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. I had spent too many hours with him not to sense his panic.
Nixon began by saying that he wanted to talk about the most important subject before our nation; it was—bizarrely—inflation. Abruptly he switched to the subject on everybody’s mind. 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. 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. 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 hardly the issue. Impeaching a President was not the same as a parliamentary vote of noconfidence. What Nixon sought in his oblique way was a vote of confidence, an expression of sympathy for his plight, a show of willingness to continue the fight. All he encountered was an embarrassed silence.
Papers were being shuffled amid 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 had I known what has been disclosed in reference to Watergate in the last 24 hours, I would not have made a number of the statements I made. 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. 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.”
Nixon seemed to hear only the comment about inflation. He picked up a proposal Ford had floated a few days earlier of a summit of business and labor leaders to overcome inflation. 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. 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. Nobody is less likely to rebel than a President’s Cabinet. At meetings with Presidents, the normal tendency of senior Cabinet officers 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 cruel to Nixon to allow this to continue, and it would also have deprived his resignation of one important message: that our institutions remained vital and our procedures democratic. 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. “This is a very difficult time for our country,” I said. “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.”
Around 12:45 p.m., I returned to the Oval Office unannounced. I owed it to the President to say that his best service to the country now would be to resign. 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. He should leave in a manner that appeared as an act of his choice. Nixon said he appreciated what I said. He would take it seriously.
Haig told me later in the day that Nixon was tilting toward resignation; he was thinking about doing so late in the week and had asked Speechwriter Ray Price to begin work on a speech. But his family might change his mind. During the afternoon I faced many opportunities to dissociate from the President publicly, thereby precipitating a crisis. I refused.
Around 7 p.m., I had a phone call from Nixon. He had just 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.
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. Nixon did not return to the subject; the relevant papers were prepared but never signed.
Wednesday, Aug. 7, Haig told me that Nixon would be meeting that afternoon with key Republican leaders of the Congress: Senator Hugh Scott, Congressman John Rhodes and the respected conservative Senator Barry Goldwater. That might prove decisive. At 5:58 p.m. Haig called. Could I come right over to the White House? 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 to emigrate to a foreign land: attempting to say goodbye to something familiar and beloved, to absorb it so that one can never be separated from it. In the process, sadly, one loses it; the self-consciousness of the effort destroys what can only be possessed spontaneously.
Nixon turned. He seemed composed, almost at ease. He had decided to resign, he said. The Republican leaders had reinforced his instinct that there was not enough support in Congress to justify a struggle. The country needed repose. He could save our foreign policy only by avoiding a constitutional crisis. He would speak to the nation the next evening, Thursday, Aug. 8; he would resign effective at noon Friday, Aug. 9. He hoped I would stay on to 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 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 himself, 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. If I did not in fact embrace him, I felt as if I had.
That evening near 9 the phone rang. It was Nixon, alone in the Lincoln Sitting Room. Could I come over right away? 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 slouched in the brown-covered chair, his legs on the settee, a yellow pad on his lap—a last crutch. 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. 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 hourlong, relatively businesslike meeting. There is also an unfeeling account of an out-of-control President beating his fist on the carpet and railing against a cruel fate. Neither fits with what I remember. 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. 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.
It was only natural 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 what we had done together? He kept pouring out questions, seeking some succor in his loneliness.
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 and that America’s credibility must not be squandered. 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 affirmed the impossibility of an international order that excluded China. 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. He identified the need of the industrial democracies for a rededication to common purposes. He broke through the hatreds of the Middle East and showed a road toward peace. And he was beginning to educate the American people to the permanent challenge of responsible American involvement in the world.
To be sure, Nixon had failed as an educator. He had been too unsure of himself to inspire not simply by technical virtuosity but by nobility of purpose. He had not met the moral challenge.
Nixon in the final analysis had provoked a revolution. He had been re-elected by a landslide in 1972 in a contest as close to being fought on ideological issues as is possible in America. Overwhelmingly, the American people had chosen the moderate conservative course, not the radical liberal. For reasons unrelated to the issues, 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. It was evident that he could hardly bear the thought of the indignity of a criminal trial. Neither 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. He had built better than he knew: nearly a decade later, the basic categories of our public discourse on international affairs—China, the Middle East, the strategic balance, energy policy, new initiatives with allies—are those established during his years.
To professional Nixon haters, this may seem a maudlin rendition of a self-inflicted denouement that was entirely justified. I was too close to events to see it that way. That night of Aug. 7,1 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, Nixon started escorting me to the elevator. He stopped at the door of the Lincoln Bedroom and suggested that he and I pray there together. There was no good way to put a period to such a tempestuous career. I am not sure that this was not as meaningful as any and more appropriate than most.
Nixon recalls that he invited me to kneel with him and that I did so. My own recollection is less clear on whether I actually knelt. In whatever posture, I was filled with a deep sense of awe. A passage from Aeschylus ran through my mind—as it happened, 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.
After about half an hour in the Lincoln Bedroom I returned to my White House office. Soon Nixon called. I must not remember our encounter that evening as a sign of weakness, he said. How strange is the illusion by which men sustain themselves! 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 sharing with me his last free night in the White House. He had conducted himself humanly and worthily.
