Excerpt: Elizabeth Drew’s ‘Washington Journal’
This is an excerpt of Elizabeth Drew’s ‘Washington Journal’
— -- SEE ELIZABETH DREW TOMORROW ON "THIS WEEK."
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AFTERWORD
“A man is not finished when he is defeated.He is finished when he quits.”
Since Richard Nixon left office, we’ve learned a number of things about him that shed light on how he got into such terrible trouble, how he handled the biggest crisis of his crisis-ridden life—and more of what was going on inside the White House while we were watching, agape, from the outside. Moreover, looking back at the events of 1973–1974 offers new insights as to what Watergate was really about.
Down and Out in San ClementeWhen friends and acquaintances picked up Nixon’s phone calls from San Clemente shortly after he arrived there, they heard a deeply depressed man, sometimes in tears about having been brought so low, convinced that “they” would never relent: “They won’t be satisfied until they have me in jail,” Nixon said. He also fell ill from a serious recurrence of phlebitis, contracted during his Middle East trip in June, shortly before he left the presidency. A later recurrence almost killed him.Yet for all his self-pity and sense of persecution by his “enemies,” Nixonhad a striking degree of self-knowledge. In a startling conversation with an aide in the early weeks of his exile, Nixon reflected on what had brought about his downfall. He said to the aide, “What starts the process are the laughs and snubs and slights that you get when you are a kid. But if you are reasonably intelligent and if your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance, while those who have everything are sitting on their fat butts.” He had appointed tough guys as his aides, he said, because he wanted people around him who were, like him, fighters. He went out for high school and college football, and the fact that he had no real athletic ability “was the very reason I tried and tried and tried. To get discipline for myself and to show others that here was a guy who could dish it out and take it. Mostly, I took it.”If he was poorer and physically weaker than others his age, he triumphedby working harder than they did, and: “You get out of the alley and on your way.” But then came the danger—and the trouble: “In your own mind you have nothing to lose, so you take plenty of chances. It’s a piece of cake until you get to the top. You find that you can’t stop playing the game because it is part of you . . . So you are lean and mean and resourceful and you continue to walk on the edge of the precipices because over the years you have be- come fascinated by how close to the edge you can walk without losing your balance.”“This time it was different,” the aide responded.“Yes,” Nixon replied quietly, “This time we had something to lose.”His political career had been marked by unlikely comebacks. Only three others had lost a presidential race and then gone on to win one, and none of them in modern politics—Jefferson, Jackson, and Cleveland. When, two years after losing the presidential election to Kennedy, Nixon lost the California gubernatorial election, it was generally assumed that he was finished, as there were no more high political offices he could run for and win. Conceding the California race, he famously told the press corps, “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.”His memoir, oddly named Six Crises (1962), approached his autobiography from an unusual perspective: each chapter described a time when, as he saw it, he’d been confronted with a challenge so great that it was a crisis, and he’d prevailed. Nixon talked about the book frequently, urging people to read it. (When Nixon met Mao on his breakthrough trip to China, in 1972, the wily Chinese leader flattered and preempted him by telling him he’d read Six Crises—before Nixon had a chance to tout it. Each had read up on the other, and Nixon for his part recited some of the Great Leader’s philosophical thoughts.) Nixon even instructed his staff to make sure that the “plumbers”—the ragtag group, most of them veterans of the failed Bay of Pigs operation against the Cuban communist leader Fidel Castro, who conducted the famous Watergate break-in and other underhanded and illegal acts against the president’s “enemies”—read the chapter about his confrontation with Alger Hiss. As soon as Nixon was elected to the House of Representatives, in 1946, at the height of the Red Scare, he sought and won a seat on the communist-hunting Un-American Activities Committee as a forum for getting attention—and his pursuit of Hiss, a suspected spy for the Soviet Union, brought Nixon to national attention and propelled him into the Senate. Hiss, then a respected member of the Eastern establishment (which Nixon so hated), ultimately went to jail for perjury, though later evidence arose that appeared to confirm Nixon’s charges. A mere two years and some devious pre-convention maneuvers later, Nixon was on the Republican ticket as the party’s vice presidential candidate. But then, facing charges of corruption through a slush fund collected by his friends and supporters, he fought to stay on the ticket by giving the “Checkers speech”—another chapter in Six Crises.
face distorted in agony, this was the climactic moment of the drama. Such a confession to criminal behavior would have been dramatic indeed, had Nixon actually said it. But the line in the script for the play and the movie omitted the first several words in the sentence that Nixon had actually said— which can be heard on recordings of the interviews—and an ellipsis was substituted, so that the script read, “. . . I was involved in a cover-up as you call it.” The audience of course could know nothing of the ellipsis, and so it was deceived into believing that Nixon had made a damning disclosure when no such thing has occurred. It made for high drama, but it wasn’t true. The actual line uttered by Nixon, when Frost pressed him to confess that he had more than made “mistakes,” that crime may have been involved, was, “You’re wanting me to say that I participated in an illegal cover-up. No.” On the doctored line rested the plot’s conceit that the canny Frost had bested the shrewd, evasive Nixon. The play had been set up as a David/Goliath confrontation: thus the sequence of the names in the title Frost/Nixon.
by openly criticizing the administration’s policies in Vietnam, saying that the president should show more sensitivity to the concerns of student protestors. Nixon had turned to Mitchell to do his dirty work and get rid of Hickel, but Hickel refused, and Nixon had to carry out the unpleasant mission himself.
from Ronald Reagan. (Ford was constrained to jam in a trip to China of his own during the primaries.) Soon after his heady China trip, Nixon planned a six-week worldwide tour, but a number of heads of state sent word that they had no time to see him, and his two former Secretaries of State, Kissinger and William Rogers, told him that such a trip was ill-advised. Nixon failed to grasp that it was too soon since he had been forced to leave office to start playing world leader again, though he agreed to postpone that trip. He did appear at the Oxford Union, where he was greeted with jeers but at the end of his appearance received a standing ovation. Upon his return, Nixon told a reporter his guiding philosophy: “A man is not finished when he is defeated,” Nixon said. “He is finished when he quits.”
to the White House supposedly to give him advice. The meeting was held at night so that no press would be around to ask questions and take pictures of Clinton and Nixon together.
Newspaper stories began to appear hailing Richard Nixon’s latest comeback—reminiscent of all the times in his career when he was down and seemingly out and pundits would call on him and return to announce a “new Nixon.”
and bitter row occurred when Naftali, with great effort, mounted a more honest—and far tougher—Watergate exhibit. The Nixon Foundation made hundreds of suggestions for changes to the new exhibit, including the omission of certain episodes, but all of them were ignored. In 2011, Naftali was forced out. While a long search for a new director was supposedly taking place, Nixon’s allies unveiled a new exhibit called “Patriot, President, Peacemaker,” which covered Nixon’s entire life but left out Watergate altogether. The Nixon backers explained that Watergate was already covered in the permanent exhibit—which of course covered the rest of Nixon’s life as well.
room and talk. Nixon didn’t know how to begin the conversation—but after an uncomfortable pause a congressman asked him to talk about foreign policy. Whereupon Nixon brightened and performed his lengthy disquisition about what was going on in the world and leaders he had known, enthrall- ing his audience. He even made a couple of prescient comments about the forthcoming presidential election.
What, In the End, Was Watergate?
The plumbers’ first attempt to get into the DNC headquarters was through an elaborate ruse in which they staged a dinner within the Watergate building, which, they figured, would provide them a way to get into the DNC offices later. But the burglars ended up spending the night locked in a closet. On the second attempt they got as far as the DNC office, but they’d failed to bring the right equipment to break the lock on the door. So one of the burglars had to return to Miami to obtain the proper tools for their mission. The burglars did succeed in getting into the DNC offices on the third try, on Memorial Day weekend of 1972—but they made a hash of the job. (The bug on O’Brien’s phone didn’t work, and the documents they photographed were barely readable.) A highly dissatisfied John Mitchell ordered the burglars to go back to the DNC’s Watergate offices and get it right. But they got a bit careless with tape.
It was from this conversation between Nixon and Haldeman that the famous 18 ½ minute erasure was made. Though the “18 ½ minute gap” remained a mystery during Watergate and for a long time after—White House aides had tried to place the blame on Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods—the evidence is compelling that Nixon had sat at Camp David working the keys to delete a large portion of this dangerous conversation. But what remained was incriminating enough—the cover-up was being planned right then and there. The disclosure of these conversations three days after the discovered break-in put the lie to the countless statements Nixon made to the public as to when he learned of any White House role in the break-in, or any attempt to cover it up.
Government will always create opportunities for corruption. And not everything that is politically influenced is corrupt—and there’s more public alertness. The orgy of excitement over faux scandals in the fall of 2013 brought home the truth that scandals are a lot of collective fun for the press— certainly more so than the details of the federal budget. The difference lies in whether there’s systematized corruption sanctioned at the highest levels—as occurred during Watergate.
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