Nixon's Secret (75 page)

Nixon had no way of knowing that Haig often mocked him behind his back, often mincing in a limp wristed manner to imply that Nixon and his best friend Charles “Bebe” Rebozo had a homosexual relationship.
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This is, to say the least, doubtful.

In addition to the tasks ordered by an increasingly distracted Nixon, Haig had his own agenda as chief of staff. “Nothing is possible without power,”
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Fritz Kraemer had told him time and again. As White House chief of staff, Haig would use his considerable power to conceal three things: his role in the wiretaps, his facilitation of the naval spy ring, and his connection to the White House “Plumbers.” This third cover-up is important, because it lends credence to the theory that Haig knew about the break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist as well as the Watergate break-ins well in advance. The possession of this knowledge allowed the tactful Haig to plot his maneuvers well in advance. As we have stated, Haig had a connection to Barker, Hunt, and the Bay of Pigs veterans. Phllip Gailey in the
New York Times
reported that Haig held regular progress meetings with the codirectors of the “Plumbers,” Egil “Bud” Krogh Jr. and David R. Young Jr., and worked as a liaison between the “Plumbers” and the National Security. When he obtained ultimate power in the White House, Haig would do everything in
his
best interest to bury these nefarious actions and bury the president alongside them.

Upon becoming chief of staff, Haig would slow walk Nixon to resignation, and then would skillfully broker the deal for Nixon’s pardon from Ford. Haig used his new position to wield control at a greater level than the departed Haldeman. “The changes were fundamentally that Al controlled everything—everybody and everything,” said Haldeman’s former aide Larry Higby.
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In order to radiate his increased clout, Haig would return to wearing his four-star uniform, even though he had largely worn the less-formal suit and tie during his days as Kissinger’s chief deputy.

Haig has been largely credited with keeping the government running while President Nixon was preoccupied with Watergate and was essentially seen as the “acting president” during Nixon’s last few months in office, and the power-mad general was not afraid to show it. At one point in his reign, when the new chief of staff found out about a staff meeting decision made without him he “began pounding the table with his fist . . . and said two or three times, ‘I am the chief of staff. I make all the decisions in the White House,’” said Nixon’s staff assistant Steve Bull. “We all thought he was crazy.”
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As Haig wielded his new power with shocking force, the reclusive Nixon backed into the shadows of the White House, increasingly sedated by drinks the general plied him with. “He’s just unwinding,” Haig told Kissinger at one point in March 1974, when an especially lubricated Nixon threatened to drop a nuke on Capitol Hill. “Don’t take him too seriously.”
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A series of significant events, manipulated by Haig, frame the general’s special interest in sinking the Nixon presidency. The first was Haig’s handling of the admission by Alexander Butterfield that made Watergate investigators aware of a taping system in the White House. On July 13, 1973, Butterfield had sat down with the investigators and admitted the president’s conversations in the Oval Office had been recorded. Butterfield was scheduled to divulge his secret in public testimony to the committee on Monday, July 16. Nixon was unaware of the admission or the impending testimony.

Haig had been definitely told of the taping system by his old comrade Butterfield in May 1973. Shortly after this conversation, Deep Throat began pushing Bob Woodward to look into Butterfield, and Woodward in turn pushed the committee. Haig had additionally learned of Butterfield’s admission to investigators and pending testimony, at the very latest, by Sunday, July 15.
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This is important because had Haig told the president that weekend about the impending testimony, Nixon
could have
invoked executive privilege and blocked Butterfield’s appearance before the committee. Laid up in Bethesda Naval Hospital with viral pneumonia, Nixon remained unaware about Butterfield’s admission or impending testimony. White House logs prove that Haig met with Nixon in the hospital on three separate occasions over the weekend—once on Saturday and twice on Sunday. In Nixon’s memoirs, he recalled that he “continued to take calls and see Ziegler and Haig,” while he was sick.
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Yet Haig neglected to inform Nixon that Butterfield was to testify until
Monday morning
. Woodward had also learned from a source about Butterfield’s admission that weekend. In an odd move, the
Washington Post
also decided to hold the story past Sunday, the day of the paper’s highest readership. No one wanted to tip the president off, and by the time Nixon found out, it was obviously too late. “I can’t conceive of that information being withheld from the president for an entire weekend,” said Press Secretary Ron Ziegler.
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When Nixon found out, he was, in his own words, “shocked.”
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The decision by Haig to withhold this information ensured that Butterfield would testify to the existence of the tapes and got the legal ball rolling for subpoenas to release them. Following Butterfield’s testimony, Haig developed an incredible lie, which he repeated many times: that he did not know about Butterfield’s testimony beforehand. “As I heard his (Butterfield’s) testimony, I thought,
oh my God
. And I ordered the whole taping be ripped out immediately,” Haig recalled on one occasion. “When Nixon says, in his memoirs, that I called him that Monday morning to tell him that Butterfield was going to testify, he is wrong. I didn’t know about it until I saw him on television.”
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One thing was true about Haig’s assertion—following Butterfield’s testimony, he controlled the fate of the tapes.

On July 19, Nixon noted in his bedside pad that he “should have destroyed the tapes after April 30, 1973.”
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In fact, Nixon still had the chance to destroy them. It is obvious that the White House tapes were central to Haig’s plan. Haig warned against Nixon’s better interest that destroying the tapes would “forever seal an impression of guilt in the public mind.”
31
Haig would later proclaim that the president’s decision
not
to destroy the tapes was his “big mistake.”
32

After Haig willed the revelation of the White House tapes, the general maneuvered for their release to the Watergate Committee. This was tricky and exemplified Haig’s deft double-dealing. Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox was looking into the Watergate scandal but also had begun sniffing into the Moorer-Radford naval spy ring.
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To continue effectively down the road to Nixon’s resignation while remaining relatively unscathed, Haig needed Cox gone. Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus admitted he would receive complaints “from Haig about Cox’s people—or about Cox himself—moving against some aspect of the charges against the White House that were unrelated to Watergate.”
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Cox, who Nixon referred to as “that fucking Harvard professor,” was looking into the White House “Plumbers,” which would lead to more of Haig’s unsavory actions.
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Attorney General Elliot Richardson had assured Haig that if Cox had asked for any more tapes, he
could not
support Nixon and
would not
agree to fire Cox. Yet, Haig convinced Nixon that Richardson
would
support Nixon’s withholding of any more materials and “support me in the controversy that was bound to ensue,” according to Nixon. This was patently untrue, but it convinced Nixon that Richardson was on their side. “Richardson’s resignation was something we wanted to avoid at all costs,” Nixon said later.
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If Nixon had known that Richardson supported Cox and would also not weigh in on requests for more tapes, he might have been less induced to fire Cox, and this of course was a tremendous threat to Haig.

In Haig’s retelling, Richardson had promised him that he would resolve the situation by offering an acceptable compromise to Cox, but later when Haig reached him and asked if Richardson was on board, the attorney general replied, “No, Al. I’m sorry, I’m not.”
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Haig added that Richardson’s voice was “very slurred.”
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The result of Haig’s deception was the Saturday Night Massacre on October 20, 1973, where to the utter shock of Nixon, Richardson and William Ruckleshaus promptly resigned and Cox had to be fired by Solicitor General Robert Bork. “While I fully respect the reasons that have led you to conclude that the special prosecutor must be discharged, I trust that you understand that I could not in the light of these firm and repeated commitments carry out your direction that this be done,” Richardson said.
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The move, orchestrated by Haig, greatly turned the public against Nixon.

Nixon’s own notes, recounted in his memoir, are instructive:

(1)   Cox had to go. Richardson would inevitably go with him. Otherwise, if we had waited for Cox making a major mistake which in the public mind would give us what appeared to be good cause for him to go would mean that we had waited until Cox had moved against us.

(2)   We must learn from the Richardson incident what people we can depend on. Establishment types like Richardson simply won’t stand with us when chips are down and they have to choose between their political ambitions and standing by the President who made it possible for them to hold the high positions from which they were now resigning.

(3)   As far as the tapes were concerned we need to put the final documents in the best possible PR perspective. We must get out the word with regard to no “doctoring” of the tapes.

(4)   We must compare our situation now with what it was on April 30. Then the action with regard to Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Gray, Dean, and Kleindienst did not remove the cloud on the President as far as an impression of guilt on his part was concerned. In fact it increased doubt and rather than satisfying our critics once they had tasted a little blood, they liked it so much they wanted far more. Since April 30 we have slipped a great deal. We had 60 percent approval rating in the polls on that date and now we stand at 30 percent at best.

(5)   Now the question is whether our action on turning over the tapes or the transcripts thereof helps remove the cloud of doubt. Also on the plus side, the Mideast crisis, probably if the polls are anywhere near correct, helped somewhat because it shows the need for RN’s leadership in foreign policy.

(6)   Our opponents will now make an all-out push. The critical question is whether or not the case for impeachment or resignation is strong enough in view of the plus factors I noted in previous paragraph.
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The final move by Haig, which proved to be the deathblow to Nixon’s presidency, was the 18 ½-minute gap found on the Watergate tapes. Historians and archivists have now argued for forty years over the 18 ½-minute gap in the tapes and what was erased. Various scientific methods have been used in an attempt to recall the words, all to no avail. The contemporaneous notes of Bob Haldeman are also missing, so determining what Nixon and Haldeman were talking about remains a mystery. I submit, however, that it is not the content of the gap but the act of erasure
itself
that was the motive of the person who erased the tape. I submit that there was
nothing
of note in the 18 ½-minute gap. In the end, it was not what was on the tapes that provided the final push to get Nixon out of office, but what
was not
on them. Nixon said that when he learned about the gap, “I practically blew my stack.”
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Nixon secretary Rose Mary Woods admitted to and immediately reported an inadvertent five- minute gap while she was transcribing tapes at Camp David. Nixon, Haig, and White House Counsel Fred J. Buzhardt were apprised of this accident erasure but Buzhardt strangely counseled that the erasure was not problematic because the conversation was not among those subpoenaed by the court. Buzhardt should have looked again. Was Buzhardt’s mistake an act of sabotage?

When the tape was ultimately turned over to the Special Prosecution Force, listeners were stunned to find the full 18 ½-minute gap, which was in fact six multiple erasures. The tapes were in the custody and control of Secret Service liaison on the White House staff Alexander M. Butterfield and were available to White House Counsel Buzhardt. At that juncture, Deep Throat specifically tipped Woodward and Bernstein about “deliberate erasures,” even though multiple other White House sources told the
Washington Post
that they didn’t think the tapes had been doctored or played with. Haig, one of the composite of sources that were dubbed Deep Throat by Woodward, set Nixon up with an erasure that was most probably hiding nothing of significance but still had the effect of bringing Nixon down. In December 1973, Haig testified that “perhaps some sinister force had come in and applied the other energy source and taken care of the information on that tape.” Judge Sirica then asked Haig if anyone had suggested to him who the sinister force might have been. “No, your honor,” Haig replied.
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After his effectual sabotage of the Nixon administration, Haig played an instrumental role in finally persuading Nixon to resign and negotiating his pardon. The pardon was as important to Haig as it was to Nixon. The Watergate scandal had gone far enough. A prolonged, extensive investigation of Nixon’s role in the matter would eventually turn up the unsavory revelation that many roads of inquiry led to Haig. It is vital to understand that Nixon did not particularly want the pardon. He communicated repeatedly that any pardon for his actions in Watergate or otherwise could not be rendered with a statement of admission by him. Although exhausted, deeply demoralized, and drinking, Nixon was prepared to go to trial if he was charged in the Watergate matter. “Haig described Nixon as a man dancing on the point of a pin,” Barry Goldwater said. “He was someone who could be set off in any one of several directions. It would be best not to demand or even suggest that he resign. Every time that thing had happened in the past, Nixon had reacted defiantly. The best thing to do would be to show him there was no way out except to quit or lose a long battle. Haig summed everything up succinctly: The President needs to know there are no more alternatives, no more options.”
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