Further Notes on Nixon's Downfall

The wounds were reopening; the Watergate debate was reviving. Henry Kissinger scoffed at the notion that he had ever called Richard Nixon "our meatball President. " En route to Dallas to deliver a foreign policy address, he asked: "What does that mean--meatball, meat head? I never used the word like that." Was Nixon drinking a lot and contemplating suicide as Watergate brought him down? "I saw no evidence of it, "said President Gerald Ford as he campaigned in Fresno, Calif. Had James St. Clair, Nixon 's chief Watergate attorney, flown off to Boston at a critical time without listening to the most damaging Watergate tape? "On that weekend, Washington just wasn 't a good place to be," he declared.

The rash of comments and no-comments erupted over the new Bob Woodward-Carl Bernstein book on Watergate, The Final Days. After TIME summarized the book's highlights in last week's issue (March 29), the New York Daily News and the Associated Press produced similar stories. At week's end, Newsweek, which is printing excerpts from the volume, released large sections of it. Finally, the Washington Post printed its own summary of the book's main disclosures.

Despite the pro forma disclaimers, Woodward and Bernstein weave a brisk and convincing narrative in their sequel to the bestselling All the President's Men. They do not alter the broad outlines of the now-familiar drama of Watergate. But with their spare, police-beat style, they do manage to pin down each painful, often poignant detail as the curtain dropped on a collapsing President and an embittered staff:

Facing the end, Nixon talked openly of suicide to his trusted aide, Chief of Staff Alexander Haig. "You fellows in your business," Nixon told the temporarily retired general, "you have a way of handling problems like this. Somebody leaves a pistol in the drawer. I don't have a pistol." It was, suggest the authors, "as if he were half asking to be given one." After that incident, Haig passed orders that Nixon not be allowed any pills, fearing he might take an overdose.

Nixon's two sons-in-law, Edward Cox and David Eisenhower, also worried that the President might attempt suicide. Seeking outside help, Cox telephoned Michigan Senator Robert Griffin. He reported that Nixon had been "walking the halls" of the White House late at night, "talking to pictures of former Presidents." The President, warned Cox, might be in a mood to kill himself. David also told friends that he thought the President might "go bananas" and seemed convinced that he "would never leave the White House alive."

The deterioration showed in Nixon's drinking habits. He would turn up at the office at noon with eyes already so glazed that Treasury Secretary William Simon was reminded of a "windup doll." Nixon let himself ramble incoherently at private dinners. At a pre-Christmas dinner in 1973 with a few intimates, including Political Adviser Bryce Harlow and Senator Barry Goldwater, he was unable to express himself. "Bryce, explain what I'm saying to Barry," he pleaded several times. Next day Goldwater called Harlow, asking, "Is the President off his rocker?" Replied Harlow, "No. He was drunk."

Pat, too, began to drink alone in the closing weeks. Despondent and withdrawn, she was embarrassed one noon when surprised by kitchen help as she was filling a tumbler with bourbon. She would spend long hours in her pale yellow bedroom, often returning her luncheon tray with the food untouched.

The book implies that Pat and Dick had long been cool toward each other --too cool to be able to confront each other as the end neared. Pat had confided to a physician that they "had not been close since the early '60s." Pat rejected her husband's advances, and this, the book says, "seemed to shut something off inside Nixon."

Pat had seriously considered seeking a divorce after her husband lost the election for Governor of California in 1962. She urged him not to seek office again, but stuck it out stoically when he did. When the two dined alone, the silence was so uncomfortable that servants rushed about to meet the Nixons' obvious wish to get the meal over with as quickly as possible.

The book dwells on the somewhat odd dining and drinking habits in the White House. It reports that Nixon preferred a 1966 Chateau Margaux wine with dinner. On the yacht Sequoia, he instructed stewards to serve him this $30 wine, wrapped in a towel to obscure the label, while his guests got a $6 vintage. Ron Ziegler, Nixon's beleaguered press aide, had special drinking habits too: he would not take his White House cocktails unless the glass bore the presidential emblem. He even wanted his coffee served in a cream-colored Lenox china cup and saucer bearing the presidential seal, identical to the cups Nixon used.

Despite this evidence of hero worship, Nixon was not close to Ziegler--or, really, to anyone. Certainly, he did not feel that he could confide in his new Vice President. In fact, Nixon was convinced that Gerald Ford was incapable of ever assuming the presidency. Still, his political advisers, including Barry Goldwater, pushed for Ford to replace the denounced Vice President, Spiro Agnew. After choosing Ford with considerable reluctance, Nixon turned to Goldwater and snapped: "Here's the damn pen I signed Jerry Ford's nomination with."

Ironically, it was Henry Kissinger to whom Nixon turned when he could no longer keep his emotions in check. The book's most moving scene describes how Nixon summoned Kissinger to the small Lincoln Sitting Room in the White House living quarters. Nixon had been drinking. To Kissinger's relief, the President said he was going to resign. He was full of self-pity. "Will history treat me more kindly than my contemporaries?" he asked. Then he began sobbing. Trying to be fatherly, Kissinger reminded the President that he would be remembered for his peacemaking.

"Nixon got down on his knees," the book relates. "Kissinger felt he had no alternative but to kneel down, too. The President prayed out loud, asking for help, rest, peace and love. How could a President and a country be torn apart by such small things?

"Kissinger thought he had finished. But the President did not rise. He was weeping. And then, still sobbing, Nixon leaned over, striking his fist on the carpet, crying, 'What have I done? What has happened?'

"Kissinger touched the President, and then held him, tried to console him, to bring rest and peace to the man who was curled on the carpet like a child."

Drained by the ordeal, Kissinger returned to his office. The phone rang. It was Nixon. Following custom, Kissinger's aide Larry Eagleburger listened on an extension--and was appalled. The President was drunk, rambling. Eagleburger hung up. The distraught Nixon requested of Kissinger: "Henry, please don't ever tell anyone that I cried and that I was not strong."

The fact that Kissinger obviously did tell someone is not surprising, given the book's descriptions of Kissinger's real attitude toward the President. Kissinger not only called Nixon "our meatball President" in front of aides, but at various times used such harsh terms as irrational, insecure, maniacal, dangerous, our drunken friend, like a madman, and said he possessed a "second-rate mind." He also thought Nixon was antiSemitic. Kissinger, explains the book, "saw in the President an antagonistic, gut reaction which stereotyped Jews and convinced Nixon that they were his enemies." One sign of that attitude was Nixon's frequent protest, "The Jewish cabal is out to get me."

On policy matters, Kissinger was impressed at times by Nixon's pragmatism in world affairs, but feared that he was not sophisticated enough to make the really complex policy decisions without help. "If the President had his way, we'd have a nuclear war every week," Kissinger sometimes claimed. When a Kissinger aide prepared a National Security Council briefing book on NATO for Nixon, Kissinger was impressed by it but ordered it rewritten nonetheless--to make it easier for the President to read. "Don't ever write anything more complicated than a Reader's Digest article for Nixon," he advised.

Distrusting the President, Kissinger set up a system of either taping or having an aide monitor every telephone conversation between the two. After such conversations, Kissinger would come out of his office, find out which of his secretaries had been listening, then ask: "Wasn't that the worst thing you ever heard in your life?" Once the eavesdroppers heard Nixon drunkenly pass along his friend Bebe Rebozo's advice on the Viet Nam War; another time they heard Nixon say of American servicemen killed or wounded in one major battle: "Oh, screw 'em." The secretaries also heard Nixon make what they considered "nasty references about the inferior intelligence of blacks."

Kissinger was fearful that Nixon's close aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman (he called them "idiots" and "the Nazis") might somehow learn of these transcripts of conversations. Kissinger spirited the documents off to the Pocantico Hills, N.Y., estate of Nelson Rockefeller, for whom he had long worked. But when Kissinger was reminded by one of his legal advisers that classified information must be retained on Government property, he retrieved the papers and hid them in Washington.

According to Woodward and Bernstein, Kissinger's monitoring of telephone calls was not confined to Nixon. Beginning in 1970, a Dictabelt machine began automatically taping nearly all his calls. Even some of his personal chats with his present wife, Nancy Maginnes, were monitored by secretaries, who would remind him of any social engagement he might have made.

Kissinger, the book goes on, kept pressuring Nixon to make him Secretary of State for both substantial and petty reasons. He feared that Nixon, in his deteriorating condition, might do something rash in foreign affairs; as Secretary, Kissinger would be in a better position to block it. He also was contemptuous of William Rogers, who then held the job. He considered Rogers weak and inept and actually went out of his way to humiliate the Secretary. Kissinger finally threatened to quit if he could not have Rogers' post; Nixon yielded. But when Nixon sent Haig to tell Rogers he must step down, the deeply hurt Secretary replied: "Tell the President to f___ himself." He later cooled off and dutifully resigned.

With Kissinger running foreign relations, it was Haig who tried to hold domestic policies together whenever proposals requiring decisions came up from the various departments. By then Nixon was totally preoccupied with Watergate. Haig is portrayed as performing heroically, maintaining brutal hours and an outward front of confidence about Nixon's surviving in office. Privately, he startled one White House aide by confiding: "He's as guilty as hell." Haig's personal opinion of Nixon was that he was "an inherently weak man who lacked guts." But to Haig, the good of the nation required that no one on the staff undercut the President so long as he insisted on fighting it out.

He kept insisting, right to the end. At one point, at the request of the special prosecutor, Federal Judge John J. Sirica had ordered the White House to produce a Dictabelt that Nixon claimed to have made to summarize a meeting with his estranged counsel, John Dean, on April 15, 1973. Nixon, who apparently had never made the recording, asked one of his lawyers: "Why can't we make a new Dictabelt?" The lawyer was understandably appalled that Nixon, himself an attorney, would consider concocting evidence for the court.

After the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Nixon must turn over the tapes of 64 conversations to Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski, the President telephoned Watergate Lawyer J. Fred Buzhardt. "There might be a problem with the June 23 tape, Fred," Nixon said. He was referring to the tape of a conversation he had had with his principal aide, Haldeman. When Buzhardt heard the tape, he knew immediately that Nixon was finished. It showed indisputably that Nixon had lied in claiming he had national security in mind when he asked top CIA officials to urge FBI Director L. Patrick Gray to hold up an investigation of Watergate burglary funds that had been channeled into Mexico. The tape made it obvious that both Nixon and Haldeman feared the money would be traced back to the President's re-election committee. The motive was purely political and self-protective--despite Nixon's repeated claims to the contrary.

Haig, Buzhardt and St. Clair, now united in the inescapable conclusion that Nixon must quit, set in motion a delicate maneuver to get the President to reach the decision on his own. Certain that he would rebel if pressured to resign, they persuaded him that the tape's contents must be made public. They knew there would be a tremendous outcry when Americans realized that Nixon had been lying to them all along. The strategy, of course, worked. The reaction was swift and overwhelmingly angry--and it told Richard Nixon what his advisers could not, dared not tell him.

That anger has not yet subsided, and it may yet hurt Gerald Ford for having pardoned Nixon so abruptly. When Ford hit Fresno last week in his bid for election, demonstrators carried placards that focused almost exclusively on the pardon. DOES NIXON DRIVE A FORD? asked one. BEG YOUR PARDON, said another. NIXON'S GHOST IN THE WHITE HOUSE, read a third. One Ford aide found some consolation in the timing of the Woodward-Bernstein book. "At least it's coming out now with quite a few months to die down and be forgotten, " he said. That could prove to be just wishful thinking.

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