One Year of Watergate Was Not Enough

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"I would like to add a personal word with regard to an issue that has been of great concern to all Americans over the past year. I refer, of course, to the investigations of the so–called Watergate affair. As you know, I have provided to the special prosecutor voluntarily a great deal of material. I believe that I have provided all the material that he needs to conclude his investigations and to proceed to prosecute the guilty and to clear the innocent.

"I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations of this matter to an end. One year of Watergate is enough."

Richard Nixon
Jan. 30, 1974

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Earlier this week, as Barack Obama was about to deliver his State of the Union address, George Condon wondered in the National Journal if the State of the Union ever really changes anything.

After writing of the successful State of the Union speeches — the ones that managed to set the congressional agenda — Condon observed that "the biggest failure to set the congressional agenda was Nixon's in his 1974 speech."

Forty years ago today, Richard Nixon delivered what turned out to be his final State of the Union address. It is not remembered for Nixon's assessment of the state of the union or his ideas for improving it — although those were offered on that night in 1974. History remembers that speech as the one in which Nixon urged an end to the Watergate investigations. "One year of Watergate is enough," he memorably said.

That is what the State of the Union speech was about in 1974. The agenda was Nixon's survival. Nixon had tried everything else to divert attention from Watergate. He wanted to shift attention to anything, but he couldn't do it.

One year of Watergate wasn't enough for the people who sat in that joint session of Congress 40 years ago tonight — and that was Nixon's fault. If he had been honest with the American people from the beginning, if he had confessed his involvement, admitted it had been a huge mistake and asked for forgiveness, I believe he would have been forgiven. The American people are a forgiving bunch.

But he insisted on concealing his involvement until he had been proven to be a liar — and that made his guilt even more difficult for his defenders to bear.

In that audience 40 years ago tonight were lawmakers who had participated in the Watergate hearings the year before and who would participate in the impeachment hearings in the House Judiciary Committee that summer. Their questions had not been answered satisfactorily. The evidence they sought had not been provided to them. There was more work to be done.

Back at the White House, Nixon's chief of staff, Alexander Haig, had been exploring endgame strategies, including the possibility of Nixon receiving a presidential pardon — even the possibility of Nixon granting one to himself.

Nixon must have known the stakes when he went to Capitol Hill to deliver his address 40 years ago tonight.

And I'm reasonably sure he knew, as he rode back to the White House later that night, that he had not made the sale.

Oh, he had a trick or two left up his sleeve, but Nixon's days were numbered.

Nixon's Turning Point

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Forty years ago today, it became much more difficult for Richard Nixon's defenders to argue against the barrage of Watergate–related charges he faced.

In my opinion, it was the point of no return for Nixon.

Through most of 1973, the Watergate story progressively ensnared Nixon, but, in those days, the talk was not so much about which illegal acts he might have committed but rather how and whether his presidency would be affected. I don't recall anyone suggesting, even in jest, that Nixon might not serve his full term.

That changed on this day in 1973.

Until this day, it had been relatively easy for Nixon to maintain plausible deniability, even after the existence of his taping system was revealed in the Senate Watergate hearings. It had been largely his word against former White House counsel John Dean's.

Naturally, those who were investigating the case wanted to have access to the tapes. After all, they could verify who was telling the truth and who wasn't. But Nixon refused, insisting the tapes were protected under the principle of executive privilege and because subjects involving national security were discussed in the conversations — and his defenders supported him as long as they could.

One of Nixon's solutions to the standoff over the tapes was to offer transcripts of the conversations to investigators. He would explore that option in greater public detail in the spring of 1974, but the job of transcribing subpoenaed tapes for that purpose began in 1973 shortly after the recording system's existence had been revealed. Transcribing the tapes was a task to which White House secretaries were assigned, including Nixon's longtime personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods.

It was while transcribing one of the tapes in late September 1973 that Woods claimed to have accidentally erased a portion of it while answering a phone call. Her original estimate was that roughly five minutes of a June 20, 1972, conversation had been erased.

Woods later amended her statement, saying that she might have accidentally erased as much as six minutes of the tape, but she strongly denied being responsible for the rest of the erasure.

H.R. Haldeman's notes (consisting of two legal pads of paper) suggested that the conversation, which was between Nixon and Haldeman, was at least in part about Watergate.

Nixon's lawyers had been told of the erasure before they sat down on Nov. 14, 1973, to listen to the tape, and they expected to find an erasure. But it went on longer than five minutes — many minutes longer, not seconds. Eventually, it was determined that 18 minutes and 15 seconds of the conversation had been erased — and the gap appeared to be the result of not one but several erasures. This could be determined by changes in pitch.

The inescapable conclusion was that the gap was not accidental.

This had been suggested earlier in the month by "Deep Throat," Bob Woodward's secret source in the early days of the investigation. Deep Throat told Woodward there were "gaps" in some of the tapes, implying they were the result of deliberate erasures.

At the time, there was some doubt among Nixon's lawyers whether the conversation was even covered in the subpoena. But, by the time they reported their findings to Al Haig, the White House chief of staff, the lawyers had determined that the conversation was, in fact, included in the subpoena.

The lawyers discussed their options and finally decided that, if they didn't tell the judge what they knew and the special prosecutor found out about it some other way, they could be suspected of destroying evidence.

Thus it was that, on this day in 1973, Nixon's lawyers informed the judge in the Watergate trials, John Sirica, of their discovery, which, in turn, was made public.

Sirica appointed an advisory panel of experts (nominated by Nixon's lawyers and special Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski) to examine the tapes. An "index and analysis" of the existing tapes was given to him five days later. The clamor for the tapes grew louder, not softer.

Nixon's defense was starting to fall apart — irretrievably.

Al Haig

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Al Haig on March 30, 1981: "I am in control here."

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I was in college the day Ronald Reagan was shot.

CNN was still quite new, and it had been nearly 20 years since the Kennedy assassination, but I learned a truism about broadcasting that day — when the president gets shot, every broadcasting outlet in the country will have someone on hand to report on it.

That isn't as self–evident as you might think. We have only had one successful presidential assassination since TV came on the scene so the ground rules are still emerging. Reagan survived his assassination attempt, and the two "attempts" on Gerald Ford's life are hardly worth mentioning, but, from that (thankfully) limited number of experiences, some things are clear, and the pervasive presence of the media makes me think of what Willie Sutton said about banks. That's where the money is.

I hope this country never has to deal with a presidential assassination again, but if it does, I firmly believe TV Land and the Game Show Channel will send correspondents — even if they're only temps.

Anyway, I don't remember which network I watched the day Reagan was shot. It didn't seem to matter. Regular programming had been interrupted on all of them.

But the thing I still remember to this day is Al Haig seizing the lectern and declaring, "I am in control here."

I was watching with some of my buddies, and I remember how we all looked at each other in amazement. The secretary of state had just elbowed his way past the speaker of the House and the Senate president pro tempore on the official presidential succession list in a single sentence.

Mind you, my friends and I were hardly Reagan supporters. So, in hindsight, it probably isn't surprising that, during what was probably, for many, a time that was made anxious by the uncertainty surrounding the president's condition, we were focused on what we saw as a power grab by Alexander Haig.

Turned out, though, a lot of people got that impression.

I don't mind telling you, I found Haig to be a scary person, even scarier than I found Reagan to be. I didn't like Reagan's political philosophy, but at least he was somewhat amiable. Haig just came across as mean, in my opinion.

Of course, anyone who served as chief of staff in the final months of the Nixon presidency was bound to look somewhat menacing. Probably a by–product of keeping your back to every wall in every room in the West Wing while watching for sudden movements in front of you.

It's always possible, I guess, that those were qualities he acquired while he was on MacArthur's staff in Korea or being cited for valor in Vietnam. If so, they came in handy in the Nixon White House, when Haig reportedly kept the ship of state afloat behind the scenes while gently steering Nixon in the direction of resignation. If that is true, the nation probably owes Haig a debt of gratitude for sparing it an unprecedented crisis.

I guess he stayed on after Nixon's resignation out of some sense of loyalty to the nation and/or the presidency. But he left after Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon unleashed a firestorm of criticism, and Haig was replaced by Donald Rumsfeld — yes, THAT Donald Rumsfeld.

(I still don't know whether to blame Ford or Haig for that one.)

Actually, it's been kind of a long time since I gave Haig much thought. He resigned as secretary of state in 1982 and made an unsuccessful run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988. I've heard that he did some TV work in the years since (well, natch, can anyone imagine an emcee who would be cuddlier than Alexander Haig?), but I had mostly forgotten about him until I heard this weekend that he had died at the age of 85.

Apparently, with his military background, he will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

I don't mean to be flippant about Haig's death, but talk of his death and funeral reminds me of a line from Mark Twain.

I forget the context. But it was indisputably Mark Twain.

"I did not attend his funeral," said (or wrote) Twain, "but I wrote a nice letter saying I approved of it."