[Editor’s Note: Kathy Olmsted, awesome as ever, joins us to talk about Nixon. Perhaps you all could lean on her to just suck it up and join the blog? Here’s an argument to use: she wouldn’t have to post any more often than she already does.]
On this day in 1974, White House chief of staff Alexander Haig walked into President Richard Nixon’s study in his compound in San Clemente and gave him the decision just handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in United States of America v. Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States. The president scanned the text and then exploded, snarling epithets about his three appointees who had joined the rest of the court in the 8-0 decision. The court had ruled that the president must surrender the audiotapes of several oval office conversations to the Watergate special prosecutor. Thus began two of the most dramatic weeks in U.S. presidential history, with rumors of coups, nuclear attacks, and drunken Nixonian fits, culminating with the nation’s sigh of relief as the voice of the Silent Majority left the White House for the last time.
The decision itself was a victory for the presidency, if not for the individual president named in the case. Apparently as a means to convince the conservatives on the court to support the unanimous decision, the court enshrined the general concept of executive privilege in the nation’s supreme law. But in this particular case, the court continued, executive privilege did not apply. The tapes contained evidence relevant to criminal trials, and the president must give them up.
The president knew how catastrophic this decision was for him. For years, he had directed his aides to use the government’s powers to spy on and harass his political enemies; when one of the espionage teams was caught breaking into the Democratic National headquarters in the Watergate building on June 17, 1972, he had personally directed an immense cover-up of that burglary and many other associated crimes. As the Supreme Court delivered its decision, the House Judiciary Committee was considering articles of impeachment against him for these crimes. Yet despite the sworn testimony of several of his former aides against him, Nixon had thought he had a good chance of holding onto his office. The Congress was filled with men like Congressman Charles Wiggins and Senate Barry Goldwater who regarded the Watergate scandal as a liberal conspiracy to get a Republican president.
But one particular tape subpoenaed by the special prosecutor worried the president. On the morning of the Supreme Court decision, Nixon called his lawyer in Washington, Fred Buzhardt, to warn him about some possible difficulties ahead. “There may be some problems with the June 23 tape, Fred,” the president said.
Buzhardt went immediately to the tightly guarded White House vault containing the tapes, put some earphones on his head, and listened with growing horror to the president’s conversation with his top aide, Bob Haldeman, on June 23, 1972, six days after the Watergate break-in. The tape answered Senator Howard Baker’s famous question, which Baker had actually designed to exonerate Nixon: “What did the president know and when did he know it?” Plenty, it turned out. On the tape, the president could be heard ordering the Watergate cover-up. He instructed aides to tell the CIA to intervene in the FBI investigation of the burglary, on the specious grounds that the break-in was actually a top-secret CIA operation to protect the nation’s security, instead of a White-House sponsored plot to destroy the president’s domestic political opponents. The tape was the piece of evidence the president’s opponents had been seeking, Buzhardt realized; it was the smoking gun.
The news of the tape rippled through Washington as Haig, after hearing the tape himself, began to alert Nixon’s top supporters that their president might not have been completely honest with them. Vice President Gerald Ford announced that he had concluded “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 to the American people, the President is not guilty of an impeachable offense.” In plain English, the vice president was saying the president should leave office. Representative Wiggins, the president’s biggest defender on the House Judiciary Committee, read the transcript and announced bitterly that he and others had been “led down the garden path” by Nixon. Goldwater was even pithier. “Nixon should get his ass out of the White House – today!” he told his Senate colleagues when he learned of the tape. The Arizona senator, then viewed as the dean of Washington conservatives, visited the president, warning him that if it came to a trial only ten senators might support him, with six of those, including himself, still undecided. The Republicans were closing ranks. Nixon was bad for the party, and he had to go.
Nixon’s supporters were jumping ship, but what would the president do? His aides feared the worst. Haig, after hearing a cryptic Nixon comment about soldiers being left alone in a room with a gun, ordered the White House doctors to seize Nixon’s pills. Some aides worried that the president was frequently drunk, irrational, and out of control. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger had even bigger concerns. He met with the joint chiefs and extracted a promise from them that they would not accept any presidential orders that did not come through Schlesinger. In other words, if the president tried to start a coup, Schlesinger was determined to stop it. Anthony Summers even argues that Schlesinger took away Nixon’s ability to launch a nuclear war.
In the end, with every other option closed to him, the president went quietly. He released the transcript of the smoking gun tape on August 5, and four days later resigned. He chose to let the television cameras record his last speech in the White House (“Oh, Dick, you can’t have it televised!” Pat Nixon warned, and one can see her point). The film of that moment contains the perfect epitaph for the Nixon presidency:
23 comments
July 24, 2008 at 4:44 pm
eric
Perhaps you all could lean on her to just suck it up and join the blog?
Hey, Kathy, why don’t you just join the blog?
July 24, 2008 at 4:45 pm
eric
I mean, you wouldn’t have to post any more often than you already do.
July 24, 2008 at 4:54 pm
neocynic
And there’d be all that “sucking it up” you could take credit for.
July 24, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Vance Maverick
Did Nixon make real use of these tapes? Or were they a compulsion, a self-inflicted Achilles heel, a sort of thermal exhaust port without which he couldn’t have been brought down?
July 24, 2008 at 5:32 pm
U.S. News and Info » Alert - “United States”
[…] United States of America v. Richard M. Nixon, President of the … By ari On this day in 1974, White House chief of staff Alexander Haig walked into President Richard Nixon?s study in his compound in San Clemente and gave him the decision just handed down by the US Supreme Court in United States of America v. … The Edge of the American West – https://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com […]
July 24, 2008 at 6:21 pm
politicalfootball
Back in, oh, 2004 or so, I used to argue that bad as Bush was, Nixon was worse. Obviously there’s no longer any serious contest in that regard, but I think the pivotal moment for me was the realization that, placed in a circumstance similar to Nixon’s, Bush would burn the tapes without a second thought.
To answer Vance’s question, I think Nixon’s intent regarding the tapes was always that they be used for historical documentation. So they met his purpose, though not in the way he imagined.
For me, the most interesting part of this interesting post was the reminder that the entire Republican Party was not as hopelessly corrupt back than as it is today. I had forgotten, for instance, that Ford helped push Nixon out the door.
Kathy should join formally join the blog, if you ask me.
July 24, 2008 at 6:26 pm
Vance Maverick
I took Kathy’s aside on the doctrine of executive privilege as a hint toward that comparison, pf. And yes, join up already, Kathy.
July 24, 2008 at 6:32 pm
ari
The lurkers have already sent me hundreds of e-mails. They REALLY want Kathy to join the blog! Don’t disappoint the lurkers, Kathy.
July 24, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Larry
I recently read Kathy Olmsted’s excellent “Challenging the Secret Government,” which gave me absolutely no reason to hope or expect that there will ever be anything close to a thorough investigation of the nefarious activities of the Bush administration. She should join your blog, though, to continue shining the light of her intellect on how the world actually works.
July 24, 2008 at 7:56 pm
ac
I get it, what with the Detroit riot post and now this, you guys are providing a review of Nixonland BY STEALTH.
July 24, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Linda S.
I wonder what compelled him to say something like THAT, after his own unraveling?
July 24, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Linda S.
(^ in reference to the video clip)
July 24, 2008 at 8:22 pm
politicalfootball
I remember that video clip, but my memory of it was as a profoundly self-serving bit of hypocritical horseshit. It never occurred to me to regard it as “the perfect epitaph for the Nixon presidency” – which it really is.
EOTAW needs to get a regular poster with this kind of insight. Is Kathy O. available ?
July 24, 2008 at 8:32 pm
washerdreyer
This blog is lacking in gender diversity. Where are all the woman bloggers?
July 24, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Vance Maverick
Also, the recent additions threaten to dilute the Davis-centricity of the blog. We need another Aggie!
July 24, 2008 at 9:02 pm
kathy
Nixon missed the irony of his remarks, I’m afraid. And to answer Vance’s question, he never imagined that he would have to surrender the tapes; he was the president, after all.
July 24, 2008 at 10:46 pm
Vance Maverick
This is the briskest overview I’ve seen of the Siegessäule speech. Complete with photo of the lone McCain supporter.
July 25, 2008 at 7:46 am
Russell Belding
I remember the Nixon speech, listening to it live on the radio. Although as anti-Nixon as a 14-year-old could be, by the previous evening I had started to feel the slightest bit sorry for him. I give him credit for at least a small bit of self-awareness with his “then you destroy yourself” remark. Of course, it, along with “my mother was a saint,” was more than a little self-pitying.
July 25, 2008 at 9:10 am
TF Smith
What is worse:
1) Starting a needless 5-year-long war, or
2) Prolonging a needless war for five years?
Compare and contrast Nixon’s Land War in Asia (TM) with Bush II’s Land War in Asia (TM)?
Remember, it is one of the two great classic blunders…
July 25, 2008 at 9:21 am
neocynic
There’s the question we need to ask: is Dubya stupid enough to trust a Sicilian when death is on the line?
July 25, 2008 at 11:19 am
TF Smith
If only he’d spent the last few years building up resistance to iocane powder…
July 27, 2008 at 1:32 am
Dave
very interesting
http://www.cruelbreed.com
July 30, 2008 at 3:10 am
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