October 23, 1973

The House was back in -- and that meant resolutions of impeachment are introduced by Members of the House. Judiciary Chair Peter Rodino announced that his committee was beginning preparations for impeachment of the president.

October 22, 1973

On Sunday, the president and his staff could still pretend that they were going to win the battle with Cox; after all, even if some were squawking, if they really had rid themselves of not only Cox and retained the tapes but also disbanded the entire office of the Special Prosecutor, it would probably be a win.

The Saturday Night Massacre and the Presidency

"The recall of MacArthur, the steel seizure, and the dispatch of troops to Little Rock share still another notable characteristic: In each case, the decisive order was a painful last resort, a forced response to the exhaustion of all other remedies, suggestive less of mastery than failure -- the failure of attempts to gain an end by softer means" (Neustadt, Presidential Power, 24).


The Saturday Night Massacre, forty years ago yesterday, was critical in the public story of Watergate; it marked the point at which impeachment of the President of the United States became part of the normal political conversation. Indeed, one might say that it marks the point where the standard for a major presidential scandal became impeachment; ever since, from Iran-Contra to Lewinsky to, I don't know, whatever they're talking up on Fox News these days, everyone has been a lot quicker to bring up impeachment than they ever were before Richard Nixon needed three Attorneys General to fire a special prosecutor.

The Massacre was also one of the best illustrations of Richard Neustadt's key point about presidential power: that presidents do not, and can not, govern by command as a normal way of going about their business.

The problem for Nixon was that he was saddled with a special prosecutor who was, in his view, overreaching his mandate (and, at any rate, threatened the presidency by attempting to obtain White House tapes which would prove Nixon guilty of offenses he would surely be impeached and convicted for if they became public). Now, Archibald Cox was supposed to be independent, but he was still part of the Department of Justice. Could Nixon either get him to back off, or, even better, get rid of him?

In the event, the answer was: only by command. Persuasion utterly failed. Which ultimately meant that Nixon couldn't get what he wanted -- relief from a truly independent prosecutor.

Remember, "persuasion" for Neustadt doesn't really mean convincing someone that the president's preferences are good in some abstract way; it merely means convincing someone that to do what the president wants is in his or her own self-interest at that moment. That could involve an appeal to the good of the nation, but it's more likely to be done by some combination of bargaining and the sort of influence that the president's scope gives him. That is, the head of an agency might do what the president wants in order to receive budget support in the future, or the promise of a promotion to a bigger job, or perhaps threats to a political ally. Whatever is available; and while presidents have very limited powers of command, they have nearly limitless tools to use for this kind of persuasion. If, that is, they know how to use their office.

What Neustadt tells us is that the structure of the presidency and the executive branch is set up that way. Part of that is because command only works in particular circumstances; without fairly unusual conditions (Neustadt identifies five), it doesn't work at all. Part of it is that executive branch officials must obey multiple masters -- even when the president can technically fire them (as was the case for the Attorney General), they can often nevertheless ignore what he wants. Indeed, that's part of what happened here. Elliot Richardson simply refused to do what Nixon wanted, meaning that eventually Nixon needed to turn his lower-case order into a proper Presidential Order that Richardson could no longer ignore. And yet even here, Richardson resisted and resigned.

Why? Because Richardson had made a promise to the Senate -- that he would appoint a special prosecutor and let him do his work. Why? Because the Senate insisted; they would not confirm him otherwise. Why did Richardson keep his word to the Senate over his loyalty to the president? Because he was the sort of man who would do that. And why did Nixon appoint such a man to such a post, anyway? Because the politics of the situation required it during a time that spring when the outgoing Attorney General and the previous one were both implicated in wrongdoing, and during a time when the independence of Justice Department investigations of White House wrongdoing was under fire.

Nor is this the only time when executive branch refusal to go along with presidential plans mattered in the Watergate saga. Indeed: the whole thing started when Nixon's ("Huston") plan for domestic surveillance was shot down by the FBI, leading Nixon to bring an alternate version of that plan inside the White House. And while presidents generally can get their orders followed within the White House, it's the regular executive branch departments and agencies which have the expertise to carry out policy successfully.

Neustadt calls command -- director orders, rather than persuasion -- a "last resort" for a president:

Not only are these "last" resorts less than conclusive, but they are also costly...[D]rastic action rarely comes at bargain rates. It can be costly to the aims in whose defense it is employed. It can be costly, also, to objectives far afield (27).  

So he wrote, over a decade before Nixon's attempt at command was successful at ridding him of Archibald Cox, but at a terrible price indeed.

October 20, 1973

The Saturday Night Massacre

October 19, 1973

On a day in which the focus is far from him (although not too far, given that the tapes issue is in large part at that point about proving him right), John Dean finally gives up his effort to avoid prison. He pleads guilty to obstructing justice, accepting a prison term while promising continued complete cooperation.

October 18, 1973

Negotiations continue all week: Nixon, Haig, Richardson, Cox.

October 15, 1973

The Appeals Court had ruled against Richard Nixon in the battle over the tapes, but it left him an out: instead of appealing up to the Supreme Court, he could try to work out a deal. That's what begins now: the attempted Stennis compromise.

October 12, 1973

Nixon, perhaps energized by the multiple crises (the Yom Kippur War, the tapes war) acts quickly: just two days after Spiro Agnew resigned, he nominates House Minority Leader Gerald Ford for the VP vacancy. This, at least, was a pragmatic move designed to get someone confirmed. Unfortunately for Nixon, however, it also meant a president-in-waiting that no one in Congress worried about, which removed at least one important disincentive for eventual impeachment.

The fight that Nixon really wanted, however, was with the special prosecutor. Archibald Cox had just secured his first indictment (Egil Krogh, from the Plumbers). By the 12th, Nixon had already told Attorney General Richardson that with Agnew taken care of they could move to eliminating Cox; on the 11th, chief of staff Al Haig told John Connally that they were "going to fire Cox within a week or ten days."

Now on the 12th, with US and Soviet airlifts delivering supplies to the armies in the Middle East, the Circuit Court ruled that Nixon had to turn over the subpoenaed tapes to Judge Sirica. The pressure is building.

October 10, 1973

Elizabeth Drew:

October 6, 1973

The Yom Kippur War began.

October 1, 1973

I'll turn it over to Emery:

September 29, 1973

Nixon's handling of the tapes during this period is astonishing -- if, perhaps, understandable given the predicament he was in. His custody of this evidence (already subpoenaed, with the court fight continuing) was personal. Haldeman still had access during part of this time; now, on September 29, he, the tapes covered by the court case, and Rose Mary Woods (his longtime and loyal secretary) went to Camp David so she could start, with little assistance, preparing partial transcripts.

They then discover -- apparently, they didn't realize it until that weekend -- that two of the nine tapes the court had asked for didn't exist, thanks to glitches or holes in the taping system. They also discover how difficult the job actually is; Woods spent 29 hours that weekend, running the tapes over and over to try to make out as much as she could, without finishing the first one.

As Emery notes, Woods was working with the original tapes; no copies had been made, or any other safety precautions.

Of course, Nixon could have turned the tapes over to his lawyers...but clearly Nixon trusted Woods with the whole truth much more than he trusted his lawyers, at least until he could learn what he was up against.

August/September, 1973

I've fallen behind again, and so this will be a catch up post leading into the major events of October.

The Spiro Agnew story finally broke publicly in August, leading to a drawn out set of negotiations, feints, and jousting. Agnew battled through August and into September, but it was no good. He even attempted, at one point, to get the House to open impeachment proceedings against him, presumably figuring that party loyalty might save him in the Senate. But he was thwarted in that one by Majority Leader Tip O'Neill, who had, as Fred Emery says, another impeachment in mind.

With the Senate Watergate hearings now ended, the battle for the tapes, mainly at this point between Special Prosecutor Cox and the White House, was the main action. In August, Judge Sirica ruled that the tapes must be turned over to the court, where Sirica would further decide what Cox would get. Both sides appealed. In September, the Appeals Court floated another compromise involving transcripts authenticated by a third party, which the White House rejected.

Back on August 22, Nixon held a press conference. Practically every question was about Watergate; the only exceptions were two about Agnew, and the final question was about Cambodia.

The House Judiciary Committee was hard at work on basic research: how did impeachment work, anyway?

And Nixon's popularity stayed in the tank. Three Gallup polls were released in August and September 1973; Nixon's approval ratings were at 31, 36, and then 33 percent.

July 23, 1973

Nixon responds to the Ervin Committee's request for a handful of tapes:

July 16, 1973

The White House tapes are public. Alexander P. Butterfield is brought in as a surprise witness to the Ervin Committee, where he reveals -- and the White House then confirms -- that "President Nixon had listening devices in the White House that would have automatically tape-recorded his conversations with John W. Dean 3rd and other key figures in the Watergate case."

Leonard Garment

Leonard Garment, RIP. Garment, as those reading my Watergate posts know, succeeded John Dean as White House Counsel at the height of Watergate, and stayed on with Nixon until the end.

Garment probably wound up as the only, or at least the only high-ranked, Nixon White House staffer to actually enhance his reputation as a result of Watergate. In particular, he (as I'm planning to write in today's item!) was a strong voice against destroying the White House tapes. In addition, there's a later episode in which Nixon proposes to create evidence, and Garment is one of those who prevented it. Garment was a key person early in the "cover-up of the cover-up" phase, but was essentially a victim or unwitting dupe of that cover-up much more than a perpetrator. That is: the initial cover-up was a White House conspiracy against the rest of the nation; the cover-up of the cover-up was a Nixon conspiracy against, among others, many within the White House.

On the other hand...if Garment and other non-conspirators had resigned earlier on, it's very possible that Nixon's presidency would have been cut even shorter.

Unlike the case of Chuck Colson, it's unlikely that Garment takes any important Nixon Watergate secrets with him to the grave (okay: I don't know if Colson did know anything we don't know. But he was probably the last one left who might have. Liddy and some others might know things that we don't know, but they wouldn't be directly Nixon-related. At least probably not). To be sure: he's with Nixon after the tapes are turned off, so we only have is the accounts of those involved, but it seems quite unlikely that Nixon would have told Garment anything from before April 1973 that we don't know.

July 14, 1973

Turning again to Fred Emery for his account of Ervin Committee Counsel Sam Dash's reaction to yesterday's big news:

--

Dash took the precaution that Saturday of testing the revelation's impact on the one man it could make or break -- John Dean. One of Dash's assistant counsels, James Hamilton, remembers standing by the fireplace at Dean's home so as to gauge his reaction when Dash told him. "I will never forget it. John broke into this huge smile because he knew after all the work he'd done and his testimony and all the thought he'd given to what he had to say that he was right and he was convinced that the, the tapes would bear him out."

July 13, 1973

After John Dean's televised appearance, the Watergate Committee hearings had continued, with John Mitchell appearing and basically stonewalling. Soon after, Richard Nixon was hospitalized with viral pneumonia.

The way the committee worked was that, if possible, they pre-interviewed the witnesses before the full committee confronted them on live TV. On July 13, the pre-interview was with Alexander Butterfield -- the man who had run the president's daily schedule (and who now headed the FAA).

Here's Emery, taking up the story after the Democratic counsel had taken his turn with Butterfield.

--

For the Republican minority staff, Don Sanders got his turn after the first three hours of fencing. Sanders, who had been in the FBI, where it was common knowledge that the late Director Hoover had taped all discussions, wanted to get back to the Buzhardt memos. They looked like transcripts to him, and then there was Dean's suggestion that the president had taped him on April 15. He asked Butterfield whether to his knowledge any of the presidential conversations were taped.

--

Butterfield, as with the rest of them, had been told by the new White House counsel, Len Garment, not to volunteer anything but to answer every question truthfully, no matter what.

And Butterfield didn't even realize that when he answered in full about the taping system -- in the Oval Office, the EOB office, the phones, and Camp David -- that the committee didn't know about it yet (he assumed that Haldeman, all ready pre-interviewed, had spilled the beans).

But no -- the committee had no idea about it at all. All of a sudden, it was no longer a hopeless stalemate of John Dean's word against the president. Real evidence -- excellent evidence -- existed.

And with that...the story of Watergate, from this point on, is a legal battle for control of the tapes. I'll continue these posts, but there's really nothing more to it. Congress and the Special Prosecutor want the evidence; the president, as we shall see soon, resists (and, yes, I'll write about the question about destroying the tapes); and it will come down to the courts. They didn't know it at the time, but from what we know now there was no way for Richard Nixon's presidency to survive the evidence. And after all that had happened, there was no way that Congress would back down from demanding to see that evidence -- and a Special Prosecutor was in place who also would never back down. And Nixon's popularity was long gone; his last Gallup sounding, a few days earlier, had slipped to 39% approval.

That Friday the 13th, however, all that is still in the future. The committee staff in the room rapidly notify the committee, and they prepare the next steps.

June 25, 1973

It's worth just quoting the banner headline from the next day's New York Times:

DEAN TELLS INQUIRY THAT NIXON TOOK PART IN WATERGATE COVER-UP FOR EIGHT MONTHS; HE ALSO NAMES HALDEMAN AND EHRLICHMAN; ON STAND ALL DAY
Ex-Counsel Says He Warned President of a 'Cancer' Explosive Testimony Dean Tells Inquiry That Nixon Took Part in Watergate Cover-Up For 8 Months

It had been true to some extent ever since Haldeman and Ehrlichman (and Dean) left the White House at the end of April, but Dean's testimony, beginning on June 25, made it clear: Watergate was now about the President of the United States.

Not that his testimony was limited to his meetings with Nixon (and to hearsay accounts of Nixon's involvement before and after the break-ins). What he had to say was devastating, too, to Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell, at least.

But it was the accusations about the president which were going to be in the headlines. And, on this first day of his testimony, it was clear that whatever would eventually happen to the president's men in court, the big question of the scandal now was (as Howard Baker put it later in the week) "what did the president know and when did he know it?"

Dean just read his statement on that first day (here's a clip of the opening of this statement); he then took questions for four days. It was, without a doubt, a sensation.

Dean, however, had little proof of his most explosive charges against Nixon; again, a fair amount of it was just hearsay. And while the administration was by now in ruins, it was far from clear how the direct contradiction between what Dean was saying and what the president and those still loyal to him were saying would be resolved.

June 19, 1973

Everyone is still waiting for John Dean's public testimony to the Senate Watergate Committee, postponed now until later in the month.