"THE FEAR OF GOD"

By Henry Kissinger

On Tuesday, April 17, two days after the dramatic weekend that first brought home to me the nature of Watergate, the President disclosed that a month earlier he had ordered a new investigation of the Watergate breakin; it had produced "real progress finding the truth." Contrary to his previous orders, White House personnel would now be permitted to appear before the Senate Watergate Committee; however, no wrongdoer on the White House staff would be granted immunity from prosecution. Some Nixon supporters were certain that the statement ended Watergate. The culprits had obviously been discovered; the matter could now be left to judicial processes. In reality, the primary significance of the White House statement was to begin Nixon's mortal struggle with White House Counsel John Dean. Nixon was now throwing down the gauntlet by denying Dean immunity and attempting to deprive him of any hope of making a deal with the prosecutor to save his skin.

After a White House dinner for a visiting dignitary that evening, at a small party also attended by Vice President Spiro Agnew, I received a phone call from the President. He said that the refusal to grant immunity would throw "the fear of God into any little boys" who might attempt to escape their responsibility by dumping on associates. Nixon asked out of the blue whether he should fire Haldeman and Ehrlichman; he was heartbroken, he said, even to have to ask the question. I was dumbfounded; if Nixon held that view, he must be in mortal peril. Not possessing any basis for judgment, I ventured a formulation from which I never deviated: whatever would have to be done ultimately should be done immediately, to end the slow hemorrhaging.

Agnew came in as I was putting down the telephone. In a somewhat contemptuous, unfeeling manner, Agnew said that Nixon was kidding himself if he thought he could avoid firing Haldeman and Ehrlichman. He would be lucky to save himself.

Agnew's acid comment dramatized the ambivalent relationship that almost inevitably grows up between the only two nationally elected officials of our Government. Nixon never considered Agnew up to succeeding him. He occasionally said, only partly facetiously, that Agnew was his insurance policy against assassination. My impression that evening was that Agnew was not exactly heartbroken that his tormentors on the White House staff might be taken down a peg. Through the initial period of Watergate, Agnew remained conspicuously aloof. And when his own purgatory started, the White House, including Nixon, reciprocated by dissociating from him. Agnew's icy detachment from his chiefs travail brought a premonition of imminent disaster. A Vice President eager to succeed would hardly be so cutting unless convinced that Nixon would not be decisive in the 1976 nominating process.

As April drew to a close, in almost every conversation, Nixon asked me in his elliptical manner whether Haldeman and Ehrlichman should resign, without giving me any reason for it. It was a strange query. Not once did Nixon tell me his version of events. He maintained in private the same posture he had adopted in public, that every revelation was new to him.

On Sunday, April 29,1 was in New York when I received a phone call from Nixon at Camp David. Nearly incoherent with grief, he told me that he had just asked Haldeman and Ehrlichman to resign. Richard Kleindienst, the Attorney General, had also submitted his resignation. John Dean was being fired. The President said he needed me more than ever. He hoped I was abandoning any thought of resignation.

Monday evening, April 30, Nixon went on television and, in a distraught presentation, announced the wholesale purge of his Administration. It was impossible to believe that this rattled man could be ushering in a new era. His words were self-exculpatory; his demeanor did not convince one of his innocence. It was not the cold recital of available facts some of us had hoped for; but it was not a staunch defense of the record either. It fell between the two stools, defining rather than mitigating disaster. No one watching Nixon's desperation and anguish could avoid the impression that he was no longer in control of events.

New disclosures now burst upon the public: the details of the original Watergate break-in and wiretapping; the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist; the coverup; the use of governmental agencies to harass political opponents; and such juvenile escapades as the so-called enemies list--which in effect really amounted to a list of those not to invite to White House dinners, something that exists tacitly in every Administration. The immature second level of the Nixon White House managed to turn this triviality into another national scandal.

The President lived in the stunned lethargy of a man whose nightmares had come true. The constant undercurrent of his life had been the premonition of catastrophe. The inchoately expected disaster having finally struck, Nixon seemed unable to do other than endure it, and at the pace set by his critics. He was reluctant to transcend it by putting out the entire truth all at once--because he genuinely did not know it or had suppressed it in his mind or knew that he was already technically guilty of obstruction of justice. So he simply endured passively, never sharing his knowledge with anyone, defending himself lackadaisically with evasions and half-truths, going through the motions of governing without the concentration or the frenetic bursts of energy that had produced the achievements of his first term.

In his growing loneliness, what Nixon needed above all was a keeper of the gate, someone to buffer him from the conflict that he now had even less desire to handle directly. On the evening of May 2, I received a telephone call from Rose Mary Woods, his touchingly loyal secretary who had been banished to the periphery by Haldeman but who was now back as one of Nixon's principal props. Nixon wanted to bring in Alexander Haig as chief of staff, she told me, for a week or two. He was afraid I might resent seeing my former subordinate in a technically superior position. She hoped that when Nixon told me the next morning, I would not give him a hard time; I should remember that he needed bolstering and support. She was, of course (she said), calling on her own without her boss's knowledge. (The odds were that he was standing beside her, prompting her while she talked.) It was vintage Nixon: the fear of confrontation; the indirect approach; the acute insight into my reaction; and the attempt to soften it through a preposterous charade that would get him over the first hurdle.

Nixon was right, as usual, in his psychological estimate of me. It is always difficult to reverse the relationship with a subordinate. Yet I realized that coherence had to be restored to the White House. Nixon could not function without a strong chief of staff to shield him from the day-to-day management of the bureaucracy and to implement his decisions, and Haig was the only possible choice.

Haig tactfully called on me the next morning. He would not accept the position without my blessing, he said; it was only for a week or so anyway. This was, of course, nonsense. Given his high commitment to service, Haig would not refuse a request by the President no matter how I might feel about it. I told Haig with conviction that he had to accept, even though it would probably mean the end of his military career. Haig replied that when he had gone on patrol in Viet Nam, he had risked not only his career but his life; he had no right to abandon his Commander in Chief in distress. He was shamingly right.

Soon Nixon, not yet ready for a direct confrontation, telephoned. Infinitely ingenious, he had come up with an irresistible argument for Haig's appointment: it was designed to enhance my influence; it was aimed at, of all people, Agnew. Haig was essential, said the President, to keep Agnew from "trying to step into things. Well, Agnew can't--we just can't allow that to happen." It was mind boggling to think that a Chief Executive needed a high-powered chief of staff to control a Vice President who was in no position to "step into things." At any rate, Nixon seemed vastly relieved when I told him that I had urged Haig to accept. It was one of Nixon's best decisions. Whatever his future services to our country, Haig earned the gratitude of the Republic during Watergate, when he held the Government together.

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