Richard Nixon, the pariah: Things fall apart

Editor’s note: This article is one in a five-part series looking back on the life of one of Duke’s most infamous alumni — Richard Nixon. Read the previous installments on Nixon’s childhood and time at Duke, introduction to the political spotlight, road to the White House and the beginning of his presidency.

Content warning: This article includes antigay slurs, antisemitic tropes and xenophobic remarks made by Nixon. All slurs and vulgar language have been censored according to AP Stylebook rules.

The end starts with a roll of tape.

On June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a Watergate Complex security guard, noticed duct tape on the locks of some of the building’s doors. After removing the tape from the doors, he returned half an hour later to find the latches re-taped and quickly called the police.

The burglars’ spotter was busy watching a movie. He did not see the police officers arrive in front of the building, nor the officers’ activity on the sixth floor until it was too late. The police arrested five third-rate burglars, and a grand jury indicted them on Sept. 15, 1972. The news did not make the front page.

* * *

Bob Woodward, a journalist at The Washington Post, called up an “old friend” and “incurable gossip” soon after the break-ins. On June 20, he and his colleague Carl Bernstein would have their first meeting with “Deep Throat” — a White House informant with a pseudonym derived from a popular film who later revealed himself to be FBI Special Agent Mark Felt — and on Aug. 1, the two would publish an article revealing that one of the five arrested men had received a $25,000 check from the Nixon campaign.

* * *

“I think the country doesn’t give much of a s--- about it,” Nixon said. “… Most people around the country think that this is routine, that everybody’s trying to bug everybody else. It’s politics.”

But the president acquiesced and soon began months of shredding papers and threatening wives. 

* * *

The FBI eventually traced a connection between the five burglars, Everette Howard Hunt and James McCord — also one of the burglars. Hunt and McCord were officially former CIA officers, but the pair were also part of the Committee for the Re-election of the President.

The CRP — or CREEP, as it was unofficially labeled — was a group led by former Attorney General John Mitchell and consisting of several former Nixon staffers. Officially the fundraising wing of the 1972 Nixon campaign, CREEP also engaged in aggressive, often illegal tactics to reelect Nixon, including money laundering and interference in the 1972 Democratic primaries.

Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy were also members of the White House Special Investigations Unit, a covert team of “plumbers” who responded to security “leaks” to the press created in response to the damning picture painted by the Pentagon Papers leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, a RAND researcher who had worked on the study for the government.

On Sept. 3, 1971, a team of “plumbers” under Liddy and Hunt’s guidance successfully broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. While they did not find useful dirt on Ellsberg, the break-in set a dangerous precedent. Almost ten months later, the plumbers would plant surveillance equipment at the Watergate Hotel in hopes of finding incriminating information about Democratic Sen. George McGovern, Nixon’s opponent in the upcoming elections.

At its heart, CREEP was simply the execution of the same sentiment Nixon shared with Jerry Voorhis’ aide 25 years ago: “I had to win. That’s something you don’t understand. The important thing was to win.” 

* * *

The FBI breathing down his neck, two reporters from The Washington Post doggedly pursuing the scandal — it would have been painful for anyone, but for someone like Nixon, it was torture. 

The more the president distanced himself from Watergate, the worse it became.

Weeks before the election, Woodward and Bernstein published a series of articles implicating the Nixon campaign further. The pair uncovered that Mitchell was behind a “secret fund” to sabotage the Democrats. Then they reported that the FBI had connected the break-in to Nixon’s staff. Soon after, they detailed a host of “dirty tricks” CREEP had used to try and reelect the president.

In October, CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite broadcast the pair’s developing story to the nation. Though the two segments combined for only 22 minutes of airtime, that was all it took. 

* * *

In hindsight, Watergate and the controversy that followed were unnecessary.

After several foreign and domestic policy successes in his first term, Nixon’s victory was all but assured. Alabama Gov. George Wallace did not run in the 1972 elections, leaving his share of voters to Nixon while McGovern divided his party after a chaotic vice presidential vote at the Democratic National Convention.

Nixon would blow out McGovern with 60.67% of the popular vote to his 37.52% and 520 electoral votes to the Democrat’s 17.

“We win elections not simply for the purpose of beating the other party or the other person but to get the opportunity to do good things for our country,” the president told his supporters on Election Day. He did not mention how he paid off the burglars with hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep them quiet before voters went to the polls.

* * *

In January 1973, a jury convicted Liddy and McCord of conspiracy, spying and burglary. The latter conspirator confessed that there was a widespread cover-up. That February, the Senate would start publicly televised special hearings on the Watergate break-in.

There was scarcely a headline that didn’t mention Watergate. As resignation after resignation — from Ehrlichman, from Haldeman, from the attorney general — flooded his desk, the president decided to play Checkers again.

On April 30, 1973, Nixon announced Counsel to the President John Dean III’s resignation — reports would later come out that he had actually been fired — alongside Ehrlichman and Haldeman’s, “two of the finest public servants it has been [his] privilege to know.” He would replace Attorney General Richard Kleindienst with Elliot Richardson, who would later appoint Archibald Cox to conduct his independent investigation into Watergate.

“Who, then, is to blame for what happened in this case?” Nixon asked in his address to the nation. For the crimes committed by individuals, they must “of course” bear the penalty. But he would not blame his subordinates — “people whose zeal exceeded their judgment and who may have done wrong in a cause they deeply believed to be right” — for what took place in the White House and the 1972 reelection campaign.

It would be the “cowardly thing to do.” 

“In any organization, the man at the top must bear the responsibility. That responsibility, therefore, belongs here, in this office. I accept it,” he said. “And I pledge to you tonight, from this office, that I will do everything in my power to ensure that the guilty are brought to justice and that such abuses are purged from our political processes in the years to come, long after I have left this office.”

* * *

Nixon called Haldeman that night. Haldeman was strong, he said. He was going to “win this son of a b---.” Could he make some calls to gauge public reaction, “like the old style?” No, Haldeman was right. “Don’t call a goddamn soul.”

“God bless you boy. God bless you,” Nixon told Haldeman. The president had been nursing a drink, and he spoke with slow, slurred speech. “I love you like my brother.”

* * *

On July 16, Nixon’s deputy assistant Alexander Butterfield went before the Senate and admitted that the Nixon administration had tapes — lots of them. Thus began a yearlong struggle for the tapes, culminating in the Supreme Court’s July 1974 decision requiring Nixon to hand them over.

Recovering from pneumonia, Nixon heard Butterfield’s confession lying on his hospital bed. His counsel advised him to destroy the tapes — nobody would blame him for trashing his personal property. There was no subpoena. The window was wide open.

But Nixon did not listen. Destroying the tapes could be viewed as obstruction of justice, however gray the area might be. The courts would respect his presidential privilege and not demand they be handed over.

And besides, as biographer John A. Farrell later wrote, those tapes “were the record — the certification, for himself and others — of his accomplishments. Nixon prized his tough and, he thought, noble decisions on Vietnam, China and the Soviet Union — and planned, with the selective use of the recorded conversations, to buff his image for history in his memoirs.”

They were his legacy, and he would not erase them.

* * *

The National Archives, which was granted official control of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in 2007, periodically releases the tapes to the public. Today, about 3,000 of the 3,700 hours of tapes have been released, and less than 5% of the recordings have been transcribed or published.

Their contents were, and continue to be, shocking and confusing. Nixon would proclaim that he was “the most tolerant person on [homosexuality] of anyone in ‘this shop,’” then declare that the Bohemian Grove club was “the most f---gy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that San Francisco crowd. I can’t shake hands with anybody from San Francisco.” He would also refer to Blacks as “animallike,” Indians as “sexless” and Pakistanis as “primitive.”

Jewish people were a particular target for Nixon’s vitriol. They were “born spies,” he said. He would find the “meanest right-wing nominees” for the judicial branch. “No Jews. Is that clear? We've got enough Jews. Now if you find some Jew that I think is great, put him on there." He believed that they controlled the news — “The New York Times [and] The Washington Post are totally Jewish."

Nixon would privately call marijuana “not particularly dangerous … But on the other hand, it’s the wrong signal at this time” — all the while publicly launching an “all-out offensive” on drugs. Though he released no comment when the Supreme Court announced its January 1973 decision on Roe v. Wade, he said in the tapes that “there are times when abortions are necessary … when you have a [B]lack and a white, or a rape.”

* * *

Nixon offered a written summary of the tapes. Cox declined. Nixon ordered Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused and resigned. Nixon ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox. Ruckelshaus refused and resigned. Solicitor General Robert Bork fired Cox.

* * *

On Oct. 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel. The night of Oct. 24, Nixon called Kissinger, “as agitated and emotional as [Kissinger] had ever heard him.” He had been drinking again. His enemies were trying to kill him, the president said. “And they may succeed. I may physically die.”

Chief of Staff Alexander Haig did not wake Nixon up when his advisers ordered a readiness alert that night. The president of the United States was in no mental state to make serious decisions.

The Yom Kippur War ended Oct. 25 after a second ceasefire, but not before the United States went from DEFCON 4 to 3.

“The tougher it gets, the cooler I get,” Nixon crowed at the press.

* * *

“And in all of my years in public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I can say that in my years of public life that I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook,” Nixon said at a Nov. 17 news conference.

“Well I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got.”

* * *

Nixon’s loyal secretary Rose Mary Woods testified Nov. 21 that she accidentally pressed her foot on the “record” pedal instead of “stop” button for five minutes when playing a June 20, 1972, tape — three days after the Watergate break-ins — inadvertently deleting the recording. Her testimony did not account for the remaining 13 minutes of static, especially given that she would have had to manually press the “play” button while stretching to hold the foot pedal to “record” to begin a new recording as she claimed.

The tape contained four to five separate erasures that would require “the kind of hand operations that couldn’t have been performed by a foot pedal.”

* * *

“Something Daddy said makes me feel absolutely hopeless about the outcome,” Tricia wrote in her diary. “… He has cautioned us that there is nothing damaging on the tapes; he has cautioned us that he might be impeached because of their content. Because he has said the latter, knowing Daddy, the latter is the way he really feels.”

* * *

The Supreme Court unanimously ordered the Nixon administration to release the remaining tapes on July 24, 1974.

The contents of the tapes were now public, including the one from June 23 that would come to be known as the “smoking gun.” The president had preserved a recording of himself ordering the FBI to abandon its investigation of the Watergate break-in. Nixon warned his family just over a week later that he might have to resign to avoid certain impeachment.

* * *

Early in the morning of Aug. 7, Nixon was met with a note on his pillowcase when he went to bed that dawn.

“Dear Daddy,” Julie wrote. “I love you. Whatever you do I will support. I am very proud of you. Please wait a week or even ten days before you make this decision. Go through the fire just a little bit longer. You are so strong! I love you … Millions support you.”

* * *

“You fellows, in your business, you have a way of handling problems like this,” the president told Haig. “Somebody leaves a pistol in the drawer.” Nixon’s expression turned despondent. “I don’t have a pistol,” he brooded.

Haig told the president’s doctors to limit his access to pills.

* * *

On Aug. 7, Nixon called Kissinger to his office. Kissinger was expecting resignation, and he was relieved when Nixon confirmed his suspicion. Relieved is an understatement. As Woodward and Bernstein put it, he worried for months that the world might blow up — and was furious that the scandal had derailed his foreign affairs strategy.

The two men spoke about foreign policy, as they often did, then moved onto his resignation and how history would see him. Nixon hoped that history would treat him kindly.

Then the president began to sob.

“Henry, you are not a very orthodox Jew, and I am not an orthodox Quaker, but we need to pray,” he blurted out. As the two men knelt on the ground, Nixon prayed out loud. Kissinger stood up after, but Nixon stayed down. The president of the United States bowled over on the floor, weeping like a child. He cried out: How had it come to this? What had he done?

It took all of Kissinger’s instincts as a diplomat to comfort the president, who was mollified as he was told about his skills as a peacemaker, his talents and his future as an elder statesman. When the secretary of state left the room, knees weak, he told Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Lawrence Eagleburger and Deputy National Security Assistant Brent Scowcroft that the president was resigning.

“It was the most wrenching thing I have ever gone through in my life — handholding,” Kissinger said.

The phone rang. The men each picked up a receiver and heard gurgling sobs on the other end. The president was drunk, barely intelligible between slurred words and tears.

“Henry, please don't ever tell anyone that I cried and that I was not strong,” he said. Eagleburger hung up, his stomach churning.

* * *

The next evening, the president told the American people that he would resign.

* * *

Nixon’s staff gathered at the White House for a tearful goodbye. Flanked by his family, he was greeted by applause that lasted for four minutes.

“I think the record should show that this is one of those spontaneous things that we always arrange whenever the president comes in to speak,” he began.

Nixon could not help but snub the press, which he maintained, as he did at his “last press conference” a decade earlier, had to “call it as they see it.”

“But on our part, believe me, it is spontaneous.”

The White House was the best house in the world — not the biggest, or the oldest, but the best. That, he said, was because it had “a great heart, and that heart comes from those who serve.”

“Mistakes, yes. But for personal gain, never. You did what you believed in. Sometimes right, sometimes wrong,” he said. But there was something about public service that was far greater than oneself, far more than money — “because without our leadership, the world will know nothing but war, possibly starvation or worse, in the years ahead. With our leadership it will know peace, it will know plenty.”

There were “many fine careers,” he continued. His father ran the “poorest lemon ranch in California.” But he was a great man. Nixon’s mother would have no books written about her. He paused. His voice shook. But she was a saint. And he sighed. “Now, however, we look to the future.”

Nixon had quoted 26th president Theodore Roosevelt in his resignation speech, and the Duke graduate joked now that although he was “not educated,” he did “kind of like to read books.” Ed Cox, Nixon’s son-in-law, handed the president the book as he put on his glasses, the first time he had worn them in public. He drew from a diary entry written after the death of Roosevelt’s first wife: “And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went from my life forever.”

That was Roosevelt in his twenties, Nixon said. The young man who believed that the light had gone out of his life forever would become a great president, and a great former president at that — “always in the arena, tempestuous, strong, sometimes wrong, sometimes right, but he was a man.”

“We think that when someone dear to us dies, we think that when we lose an election, we think that when we suffer a defeat, that all is ended. We think, as TR said, that the light had left his life forever,” he said. “Not true.”

“It is only a beginning, always,” Nixon continued. “The young must know it; the old must know it. It must always sustain us, because the greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes and you are really tested when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes, because only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.”

Nixon was proud of the people who served him. With them, he shared a painful lesson that he learned too late.

“Always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty; always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

* * *

Nixon left the White House minutes later. Pat boarded the military helicopter on the South Lawn first, while her husband shook hands and kissed cheeks below. He went up the stairs, turned around, waved goodbye, raised two victory signs — and he was gone.

In the deepest valley

President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon a month later to his own political demise, and the former president returned to California as a political exile. He would make frequent international trips, sometimes at the invitation of world leaders and sometimes in defiance of the United States, and would advise future presidents in an attempt to rebuild his reputation as an elder statesman.

For Nixon, his seaside mansion, complete with a three-hole golf course, was a combination of Saint Helena and hell. He invited few people into his life, even as he began his slow return to the public eye.

The humiliated ex-president made no attempts to forgive or to be forgiven, but he expressed regret for Watergate. He resigned from the Californian bars and the U.S. Supreme Court, but his resignation from the New York bar was rejected. He was formally disbarred for obstruction of justice in 1976 and presented no defense.

Nixon signed a $600,000 deal for an exclusive interview with British journalist David Frost in 1975. Frost and Nixon would meet for 12 interviews, with a total 28 hours of content. Six hours would ultimately be aired in four 90-minute segments, but per the agreement, they were not broadcast until after the November 1976 election. After decades in politics, he still couldn’t shake his awkward streak.

There were three things that he and the American people hoped that Nixon would say, Frost told Nixon. First, that there was “probably more than mistakes, there was wrongdoing.” That Nixon abused the power he had as president or did not “fulfill the totality of the oath of office.” And that he “put the American people through two years of needless agony” and he was sorry.

Nixon went back and forth. Legalisms, misleading statements by the press, political attacks. 

“And it snowballed,” Frost remarked.

“It snowballed,” Nixon answered. “And it was my fault. I'm not blaming anybody else. I'm simply saying to you that, as far as I'm concerned, I not only regret it; I indicated my own beliefs in this matter when I resigned.”

“People didn't think it was enough to admit mistakes, fine. If they want me to get down and grovel on the floor; no, never. Because I don't believe I should.”

Some of his friends said there may have been a conspiracy to get him, Nixon said. “I don't know what was going on in some Republican, some Democratic circles, as far as the so‐called impeachment lobby was concerned. However, I don't go with the idea that there … that what brought me down was a coup, a conspiracy, et cetera.”

“I brought myself down. I gave them a sword, and they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I’d been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.”

* * *

In 1976, Woodward and Bernstein published “The Final Days,” an account of Nixon’s last months in office. Pat Nixon suffered a partially paralyzing stroke shortly after reading the book, which the former president blamed for the traumatic event. “I have nothing but contempt for them,” Nixon said of the two journalists. “I will never forgive them. Never.”

Pat sustained another stroke in 1983, followed by several bouts of cancer before her death in 1993. Nixon had been by her side when she died. Gaunt and pained, the man who had appeared so stoic before the American people sobbed inconsolably at her funeral. He was furious the Clintons did not attend.

Nixon died of a stroke in 1994, surviving Pat by exactly 10 months. He and his wife are buried side by side on the grounds of his childhood home. His gravestone is a simple black slab, the words from his inauguration speech carved in gold:

“The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.”

Editor’s note: Much of the information for this article was sourced from Farrell’s 2017 book “Richard Nixon: The Life,” Stephen E. Ambrose’s 1989 book “Nixon, Vol. 2: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962-1972,” Woodward and Bernstein’s 1974 book “All the President’s Men” and their 1976 book “The Final Days.”

---