The Final Days

Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781439127650
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

"An extraordinary work of reportage on the epic political story of our time" ( Newsweek )—from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthors of All the President's Men. The Final Days is the #1 New York Times bestselling, classic, behind-the-scenes account of Richard Nixon's dramatic last months as president. Moment by moment, Bernstein and Woodward portray the taut, post-Watergate White House as Nixon, his family, his staff, and many members of Congress strained desperately to prevent his inevitable resignation. This brilliant book reveals the ordeal of Nixon's fall from office—one of the gravest crises in presidential history.

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

THIS was an extraordinary mission. No presidential aides had ever done what they were about to do. J. Fred Buzhardt and Leonard Garment settled into their first-class seats on Eastern flight 177 from Washington, D.C., to Miami. They had reached an inescapable conclusion, and had reviewed the reasons over and over. Garment had a list on a yellow legal pad—now twenty-two or twenty-three items. It was a bleak and very unpleasant business.

The two men left behind a cool Saturday in Washington. It was November 3, 1973. The only good news for the White House that day was an unexpected strike at the Washington Post. The newspaper that morning had been only a real-estate section.

For most of the travelers, the flight was an occasion for relaxation, the beginning of a vacation. But Buzhardt and Garment were grim and tense as they rehearsed their presentation.

They were both lawyers. For the past six months they had handled President Richard Nixon’s Watergate defense. They had become close friends. Because the two men, seemingly so different, had agreed about this mission, their advice might carry some weight. They knew they would not be facing a receptive audience, but together they might be persuasive: Garment, the liberal, intellectual New Yorker, and Buzhardt, the conservative, practical Southerner. They sometimes thought of themselves as reflecting two sides of the Nixon personality—good and bad, some would say, or hard and soft. It was not that simple.

Buzhardt nervously tapped his hand on the armrest. His West Point class ring struck the metal. The “1946” was nearly worn from the setting. A slightly hunched figure with thick glasses and a slow, deliberate manner, Buzhardt came out of the political stable of Senator Strom Thurmond, the archconservative South Carolina Republican. Thurmond’s preoccupation was the military, and as an aide to the Senator in the 1960s, Buzhardt had developed an extensive network of informants among the Pentagon’s officer corps, meeting them at times in all-night drugstores. Later, as general counsel to the Defense Department, he had been in charge of making the best out of the military horror stories of the early 1970s—the Mylai massacre, the Pentagon Papers, Army spying, unauthorized bombing raids in Southeast Asia, multimillion-dollar cost overruns by defense contractors.

He had come to the White House to make the best of Watergate for Nixon, and since then Buzhardt had spent a lot of time with the President. “Now, you’re a Baptist,” Nixon would say to him before arriving at one decision or another, “this is right, isn’t it?” And Buzhardt, balking, would say he didn’t think it was his job to give moral advice—he was a lawyer.

Garment had been one of Nixon’s law partners in New York. He was distinctly the odd man out in the Nixon White House: a Democrat among Republicans, a liberal among conservatives, a theatergoer among football fans, a Jew among fundamentalists. His relationship with Nixon was personal, not political. He was the philosopher in the court.

Some six months before, Garment had been alone with Nixon when the President had decided he had no choice but to ask for the resignations of his two top aides, H. R. (Bob) Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman. Nixon had seemed crushed by the weight of the decision, and Garment had found the President’s torment strangely reassuring. Nixon would never cut his two top men loose if he was hiding the truth, Garment had reasoned. It showed the President’s innocence in a simple human way.

Just before the President had gone to tell Haldeman and Ehrlichman that they must resign, he had said to Garment, “Last night I went to sleep and hoped I’d never wake up.”

Now Garment and Buzhardt were on their way to Key Biscayne to recommend that the President resign.

FROM THE Miami Airport, a White House car took them across Biscayne Bay to the Key Biscayne Hotel. They checked into the villa next to the one occupied by the President’s principal deputies, General Alexander M. Haig, Jr., the White House chief of staff, and Ronald L. Ziegler, the press secretary.

Haig, forty-eight years old, a career Army officer, had risen from colonel to four-star rank in the four years that he served as chief assistant to the President’s foreign-affairs adviser, Henry A. Kissinger. Ziegler, thirty-four, the chief holdover from the Haldeman-Ehrlichman regime, was a former Disneyland guide and assistant to Haldeman at an advertising agency. The Nixon Administration’s purest creation.

The lawyers knew they would have to first make their case to Haig—maybe Ziegler too. Then, perhaps, they would see the President, who was in his quarters at 500 Bay Lane, across the narrow peninsula.

Buzhardt and Garment had dinner together and reviewed the situation once again. Hardened in their conviction, they met afterward with Haig and Ziegler in one of the villas.

They couldn’t function as lawyers anymore, Garment and Buzhardt said. Their work consisted of pooling ignorance. They couldn’t get the evidence to defend their client, even if it existed. The President wouldn’t give them access to it. Instead, he gave them excuses.

In defending himself, the President had planted time bombs, Garment said. Nixon had concealed, he had hedged, he had lied. Some of the bombs had already gone off, and the rest lay ticking. Individually the problems might be manageable, but taken together they were insurmountable. They all interlocked, and the single thread that linked the problems together was the President’s tapes. The lawyers represented a President who had bugged himself, who had blurted his secrets into hidden microphones. They had not yet heard the tapes, nor seen any transcripts of them. The President would not permit it. They were told to mount a defense, but were not given the information to do so. They could no longer assume their client’s innocence, not unless they had evidence to the contrary.

Garment took the yellow legal pad from his briefcase and looked at the roster of allegations against the President: that International Telephone & Telegraph had virtually bribed him with a donation to his 1972 reelection campaign; that he had cheated on his income taxes; that he had used government funds to vastly improve his estates in Key Biscayne and at San Clemente, California; that he had backdated the deed to his vice-presidential papers in order to claim a half-million-dollar tax deduction (“the Presidential Papers Caper,” Garment called it).

There was more: that the President had raised the price of milk supports in exchange for campaign contributions from the dairy industry; that his two principal campaign officials—former Attorney General John N. Mitchell and former Secretary of Commerce Maurice H. Stans—had sought improperly to influence the Securities and Exchange Commission as quid pro quo for a $200,000 contribution from a swashbuckling international swindler named Robert Vesco. Then there was the so-called “brother problem”—allegations that the President’s two brothers and a nephew were also involved in the Vesco transaction and in other questionable business deals. The President’s closest friend, Charles G. “Bebe” Rebozo, was also under investigation, for accepting an unreported $100,000 contribution from billionaire Howard Hughes.

Perhaps some of the allegations were unsupportable, Garment said, and some of them were obviously guilt by association. “But they’re all sharks in the water.”

And Nixon still had to account for what had been done in the White House: the Huston plan expanding covert domestic intelligence activities—wiretapping, breaking and entering, mail opening; the 1971 break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist; the “Plumbers” unit which investigated news leaks; the seventeen wiretaps on reporters and Administration officials; orders to the Central Intelligence Agency to have the Federal Bureau of Investigation limit the initial investigation into the break-in at the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic National Committee; payments to the burglars to buy their silence.¹

There would be at least another year of government investigations into the conduct of the President and his men, Garment said. The Senate Watergate Committee, headed by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, was still in business. One special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, had been fired—just two weeks ago—and another, Leon Jaworski, had been hired. In the aftermath of the so-called Saturday Night Massacre, when Cox had been fired and Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and his deputy resigned, the House of Representatives appeared ready to authorize a deadly serious impeachment investigation. That inquiry would not be directed at the President’s aides, or his campaign advisers, or his friends, but at Nixon himself. And the President had abandoned his legal defense to the tapes. With nothing more than the President’s word to go on, Haig himself had gone to the Hill on Wednesday and told Republican Senators that the tape of a crucial meeting on March 21 between Nixon and his former counsel, John Dean, was exculpatory. Did he really believe that? If it was exculpatory, why hadn’t Nixon let Haig or the lawyers listen to it? Or to any of the other tapes, for that matter?

Finally, there were the various court actions. Criminal indictments of Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Mitchell were assured in the cover-up. The trial, or trials, would be a spectacle. The tapes would be played. Richard Nixon would be in the courtroom—on the tapes for sure, maybe as a witness and possibly as a defendant.

“A lot of sharks in the water,” Garment said again.

“Typical in today’s sick atmosphere,” Haig responded. Pursuing Nixon had become a national mania. Watergate was crippling the Administration. There seemed to be a momentum which was beyond control.

Ziegler was puzzled. He had heard much of the same before, though usually from the press, not from members of the White House staff. The President himself had heard it all and seemed confident that he would win in the end. Why were the lawyers so panicked? Why was their tone so ominous?

Buzhardt answered in his slow South Carolina drawl. The President had hidden evidence, first from his lawyers and then from the courts. Then he had proposed to manufacture evidence to take the place of what was missing. He might even have destroyed material that was under subpoena. He had proposed to obstruct justice and had tried to entangle his lawyers in the attempt. The cover-up was continuing and the President was dragging them all into it. Buzhardt himself had now been called to testify publicly in the courtroom of United States District Court Judge John J. Sirica. If the right questions were asked, his testimony would be devastating to the President, Buzhardt warned.

Ziegler was clearly angry. Haig lit one of his Marlboro Light cigarettes and, primarily for Ziegler’s benefit, asked Buzhardt to review the ugly details. Haig already knew most of them.

The chronology would make everything apparent, Buzhardt said. Several days before the Haldeman-Ehrlichman resignations, the President met with Assistant Attorney General Henry E. Petersen, the man in charge of the Justice Department’s initial investigation into Watergate. In the course of defending himself against accusations that John Dean had made to federal prosecutors, Nixon told Petersen that he had a “tape” of his meeting with Dean on April 15; it would prove that he was not involved in the cover-up, Nixon said.

Archibald Cox, shortly after his appointment as special prosecutor, consulted with Petersen, who quoted the President as saying, “I have Dean on tape.” On June 11, Cox sent a letter to the White House asking for the April 15 “tape.”

Buzhardt, who had not yet learned of the existence of the President’s secret automatic taping system, took Cox’s letter to the President. “There is a Dictabelt, that is what I was talking about with Petersen,” Nixon told him. He said it was his normal practice to dictate his recollections at the end of each day.

Buzhardt was confused. Why had Petersen quoted the President as saying, “I have Dean on tape”? He asked Nixon if there was also a tape of his meeting that day with Dean.

The President insisted there was not. Petersen had misunderstood, he had misquoted him. There was only the Dictabelt.

Buzhardt then called Petersen, who stuck by his story.

Meanwhile, the President said he would not surrender the Dictabelt to the special prosecutor; he had an “executive privilege” to insure the confidentiality of his papers and other materials. Accordingly, Buzhardt dispatched a letter to Special Prosecutor Cox on June 16, explaining that although there was a Dictabelt of the President’s recollections of April 15, it would be inappropriate to provide it. Buzhardt took care not to specifically deny the existence of a tape-recording of the President’s meeting with Dean. He was suspicious. A few weeks later, Buzhardt learned from Haig that all the President’s meetings and phone calls were recorded by an automatic taping system.

The existence of the system was disclosed publicly in July, and Cox subpoenaed the recordings of nine Nixon meetings and conversations, including the one of April 15. Once again citing executive privilege, Nixon refused to provide any tapes. Cox took the matter to court and was upheld in the Court of Appeals. On October 20 Cox was fired. A storm of protest followed. Nixon reversed ground and agreed on October 23 to turn over the nine tapes.

But then the problems mounted. Buzhardt started a search for the tapes. Two either were missing or had not been recorded on the automatic system. One of the two was of the April 15 meeting. The lawyers tried to find the exact explanation. The handling and accounting of the tapes, they discovered, was atrocious—records had been kept on scraps of brown paper bags. Nixon, Haldeman and Rose Mary Woods, the President’s secretary, had all checked out recordings at various times, but it was impossible to determine who had taken what and when.

Buzhardt went to Nixon and said that the April 15 Dictabelt would have to be supplied. Technically it was called for in the subpoena just as the missing April 15 tape was. If they could supply at least the Dictabelt, Sirica’s suspicions—and the public’s—might be diminished somewhat.

But, incredibly, Nixon sent word through Haig that he couldn’t find the Dictabelt. “Come on,” Buzhardt had said to the general, “the President assured me there was a Dictabelt. I didn’t write that June 16 letter without checking with him very carefully.”

The search for the missing Dictabelt had consumed the lawyers during the past few days. The President found what he said were his handwritten notes of the meeting. But there was still no Dictabelt. Buzhardt warned the President how bad it would look if the court was told that both the tape and the Dictabelt for the same April 15 meeting were missing.

The President’s reply was chilling: “Why can’t we make a new Dictabelt?” Nixon was suggesting that the problem be solved by dictating a new recording from the handwritten notes. They would submit it to the court and attest that it was the original. By even suggesting that evidence be manufactured, the President had attempted to obstruct justice, Buzhardt said. Judge Sirica had already been informed of the two missing tapes and was conducting an inquiry in open court. Buzhardt would probably be the next witness called. Did Haig and Ziegler understand what he might have to testify to?

The problem was fundamental, added Garment. The President’s willingness to manufacture evidence showed how desperate he had become. It demonstrated that the President had neither respect for the law nor an understanding of it. Buzhardt’s testimony could establish what the President had denied for months: that it had been his intent all along to cover up, to conceal, to fabricate.

To make matters worse, Buzhardt said, the President was still insisting there was a Dictabelt of that April 15 meeting. Nixon was personally continuing the search for it. Suppose he produced a Dictabelt? There would be no assurance that he had not undertaken to dictate a new recording on his own. Admittedly, it was a terrible suspicion to entertain, but the President’s actions had created it. Crucial evidence was missing, perhaps even destroyed. The lawyers couldn’t trust their client. He had lied too many times bef...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Authors’ Note
• Cast of Characters
• Chronology
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Photographs
• About Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
• Index
• Copyright