Transcripts of the tapes released

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34132, 20 April 1976, Page 11

Transcripts of the tapes released

From ’’The Final Days**—the hook about President Nixon’s last days in the White House, bv Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

The White House compromise over the Nixon Watergate tapes demanded by Judge John Sirica fails. The president’s chief of staff. General Alexander Haig, demands that the Attorney-General. Elliot Richardson, fire the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. Richardson refuses and resigns. Haig turns to the Deputy Attorney-General, Willian Ruckelshaus, who also refuses and resigns. However, the No. 3 man in the Justice Department, the Solicitor-General, Robert Bork, agrees and Cox is sacked. Richardson, Ruckelshaus, and Cox are forced out of office in a single, dramatic sweep and the episode is immediately dubbed the “Saturday Night Massacre.” Nixon suffers another grievous wound. Equally damaging is the White House disclosure that some of the tapes demanded by Judge Sirica are missing and that there is a long gap on another.

By Christmas, 1973, the president could see that he faced grave difficulties on two fronts. His legal strategy had collapsed with the “Saturday Night Massacre,” the tapes that never existed, and the 18J minute gap. The impeachment investigation was beginning and a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, was turning out to be as diligent as the man Nixon had I sacked. There was specu- | lation about resignation, i His staff was restless. Worried and miserably j unhappy, the president ! asked a small group to join j him and his family for dinI ner on December 21: Bryce Harlow, a political adviser, i and his wife; Senator Barry j Goldwater, a leading Re- | publican, and Mary Brooks, ' the director of the Mint; i Pat Buchanan, a speech ! writer, and his wife; and Rose Mary Woods, his secretary. None of the lawyers was asked, nor was Haig. The president, waiting for all the guests to arrive, downed a quick Scotch in the Yellow Oval Room, the formal living room in the family quarters. At the dinner table, he sniffed the cork from the wine and pronounced the choice inadequate. A bottle more to his satisfaction arrived. President rambles During dinner he was 1 jovial at first, bantering I with those seated closest to him, but by the end of I the main course he had beI gun to ramble. I The group left the table I for after-dinner drinks and i more conversation. Nixon I seemed to be trying to ! reach out to each person ! —as if to convince him-

self that this was his team. Harlow thought. But the President was having trouble getting his words out. “Bryce, explain what I’m saying to Barry,” he said several times, after haying given up himself. Harlow would start to explain, but then the President would interrupt him. Watergate was mentioned. The President, observing that he was beset from all sides, offered a rapid-fire catalogue of the ways he might recoup his fortunes. But Republican support in Congress was limp, he said. Impeachment was a partisan issue, but his side didn’t seem willing to do what was necessary to defend him. He was a victim of circumstances, of uncontrollable forces. Buchanan thought. “The Old Man is tired and can’t hold his liquor well, especially when he’s exhausted.” The next day, Goldwater called Harlow: “Is the President off his rocker?” “No. He w r as drunk.” Goldwater was half convinced. Moodiness Nixon’s inability to handle more than one drink was well known to his intimates. During campaigns he had wisely chosen not to touch alcohol. But now, on too many afternoons, he started sipping in his office with his friend, Bebe Rebozo. On the mornings after, the president arrived in his office late, sometimes not until noon. Haig was worried that the press would learn about it, and he ordered that the time the president left his residence to go to work no longer be recorded. The Under-Secretary of the Treasury, William E. Simon, who frequently met Nixon in December,

often found the president dazed- Simon was reminded of a wind-up doll, mechanically making gestures with no thought as to their meaning. Nixon was increasingly moody — exuberant at one moment. depressed the next, alternately optimistic and pessimistic, especially in his nocturnal phone calls. He wondered aloud to Haig whether it was worth it to stick things out and fight, and then vowed he would never be driven from office. Back and forth, up and down. His motives were suspect, the president said; his words went unbelievecf by ail sorts of people. Maybe he should resign. What did Haig really think? Should he resign? No, Haig recommended each time. Nixon raised the possibility with his family as well. If it came down to surrendering any more tapes, he said, tie would burn the remaining recordings and quit. It was the only protest left him. The powers of the presidency were being stripped away, at his expense and also his successors’. Tapes devastating Seven tapes were already in Judge Sirica’s hands, and it was only a matter of time before they would become public at a trial. Haig wanted to blunt the impact of their disclosure in any way he could, to seize the issue on the president’s terms. Pat Buchanan [a Nixon speech writer] began reviewing transcripts of the tapes for Haig. In their raw state, the transcripts were devastating. But Buchanan believed there must be a way they could be used to support the notion of Nixon’s technical innocence and to discredit

John Dean (a former Nixon lawyer who testified that the White House was involved in the Watergate cover-up.] Buchanan looked at the tapes essentially as a public-relations problem. He believed there was a way to live with anything. If the media were properly handled, the damage could be minimised. He proposed to Haig that the White House take the initiative in releasing the transcripts, claim credit for candour, and float them out in the most favourable context before they were forced out under the worst circumstances. The key, Buchanan argued, was preparation and packaging, briefing the right members of Congress first, carefully timing the release of each individual transcript, accompanying their disclosure with detailed legal analyses written to the president’s advantage.

Haig endorsed the scheme and moved quickly to implement it, but he was forestalled by Bryce Harlow, who pointed out to Haig that he risked his job by rashly proposing to release tapes that he had never heard. •You're right — 1 haven’t seen them, said Haig. He lowered his voice. “And I don’t want to see them.” “You’d better read them tonight.” “I will and you will, too,” Haig directed. “We're both going to read them." Harlow stayed up until 3 a.m. reading and returned bleary-eyed to Haig’s office in the morning. "Al, those tapes will destroy the president," he said. “They'll kill him." But the transcripts, crudely edited by Nixon and the White House staff, were released on April 30. 1974, in a forlorn attempt to block further demands

by the special prosecutor and the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. which was considering impeachment. Leonard Garment, one of Nixon's lawyers, looked at the problem of the tapes in more dramatic terms. He could not undetstand why the presi dent had not destroyed them before their existence was publicly revealed. If Shakespeare had written this. Garment observed—or Pirandello, or Pinter, or even Mickey Spillane—it would be es sent.iai that Nixon undertake, but fail in, an at tempt at their destruction that he be tripped by a Secret Service agent as he ran t< the incinerator, or that he be apprehended ahis bathrobe caught m the door. That would at least lend authority to the drama. But lor the President first to record the evidence of his own shabby

complicity, and then to pre serve the tapes, was an act of transcendental lunacy Garment thought On Garment’s stage, hie was a process of being better than the worst side of oneself. But Nixon, he said, had a peculiar mon stei perched on his shout der that whispered into his ear —and on to his tapes With the release of the transcripts. Nixon had allowed America into the ugliness of his mind—as if he wanted the world to participate in the despoliation of the mvth of Presidential behaviour. The transcripts. Garment thought, were an invasion of the public's privacy, of its right not to know. That was the truly impeachable offence: letting everyone Next: Nixon's ethnic slurs, the loneliness of the First Ladx . Copyright to “t he Press" and the "New Zealand Herald," 1976.