Personal History (92 page)

Late in January 1974, I went to a dinner at the Clark MacGregors’ for the new Vice-President and Mrs. Gerald Ford, which says a lot about where MacGregor was, at least by then. It’s interesting, too, that the Fords were willing to have dinner with me even though he was Nixon’s new vice-president. Also, I was seated at dinner next to Haig, who seemed to be feeling more friendly toward me with each new revelation from the White House.

The following week, on February 6, members of the House of Representatives voted 410 to 4 to proceed with the impeachment probe and to give the Judiciary Committee broad subpoena powers. Trying to keep all his hatred of the press, and particularly of the
Post
, within the confines of
the White House proved too much for the president. He attended Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s ninetieth-birthday party and told reporters waiting outside that she had no doubt managed to keep young “by not being obsessed by the Washington scene,” adding, “If she had spent all of her time reading the
Post
or the
Star
she would have been dead by now.”

Later in February, Haig invited Meg, Ben, and me to lunch at the White House—clearly a kind of reaching out. The whole feeling in early 1974 was the opposite of what we had experienced during the preceding months of strain, worry, and anguish. By this time, we were all undoubtedly on a high because we had been vindicated. Still, our satisfaction was to a large extent vitiated by dismay at the extent of what really was going on in the Nixon White House.

After I’d been to the country for the weekend, Meg asked me, with just the right note of incredulity in her voice, “Have you heard the latest?”—and then proceeded to tell me of the backdating of the deed for the papers Nixon had given as a gift to the National Archives for the proposed Nixon Library. The deed had been falsely backdated to before the effective date of a law curbing tax deductions for such gifts. Nixon had claimed deductions of nearly half a million dollars over four years. I also remember that my reaction then was “How wonderful.” I realize that sounds vindictive, but the fact is that, after we had been under assault for so long, it naturally felt good to have such revelations unfolding one after another, far beyond our reporting or even our wildest imaginings. Meg said, “The next time you make one of your speeches saying, ‘This certainly gives us no satisfaction. We are only doing our bounden duty,’ God will strike you dead.”

Again, we were happy to have everything corroborated further when, on March 1, 1974, indictments were handed down by a grand jury for seven former Nixon-administration and campaign officials for allegedly conspiring to cover up the Watergate burglary.

What next? On May 9, the House Judiciary Committee began formal hearings on the possible impeachment of Nixon. Though some of my friends, including André Meyer, suggested that the
Post
was trying to “extract every last drop of blood” from the president, I believed that we were following and reporting the impeachment process in a reasoned and dispassionate way, and replied to André, “I hardly see how anyone, no matter how ill-intentioned, could pervert this … to ‘extracting every last drop of blood.’ … It really has more to do with what is best for the country now and in the future, than it has to do with this president—who no longer matters, whereas the country does.” Privately, I felt that impeachment was right, but my personal opinion didn’t get mixed up in the paper’s ongoing reporting.

In mid-May it was revealed that Nixon’s talk with Haldeman and Dean about economic retaliation against The Washington Post Company’s television-station licenses had been cut from the tape before its release. This was widely reported in the papers, including our own. As a result, I received a contrite letter from Joe Alsop, who, on the whole, had continued to stick by the president and with whom I had had a serious argument about whether the administration was connected to the license challenges. Joe wrote me:

It was a generous letter from Joe, one I’m sure he wrote with a great deal of sadness and lamentation for something irretrievably lost.

Watergate continued on its way toward an ending none of us could have imagined two years earlier. Even as late as the summer of 1974, amazing as it may seem after all that had been revealed and all the constitutional processes that had taken place—the grand juries, the courts, the congressional committees—Nixon was still blaming the press for his predicament, saying at one point that, if he had been a liberal and “bugged out of Vietnam,” the press would never have played up Watergate. Despite Nixon’s protestations to his supporter Rabbi Baruch Korff that Watergate would be remembered as “the broadest but thinnest scandal in American history,” it went on being revealed as anything but.

On July 8, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments in a historic special session in the case of the
United States
v.
Richard M. Nixon
. What was at stake was whether the Court would order the release of the White House tapes. The next day, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino divulged many of the differences between what the White House had released and what the committee had found on certain tapes,
indicating that Nixon had played an active role in the cover-up, which was still going on.

On July 24, 1974, events moved inexorably forward as the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Nixon had no right to withhold evidence in criminal proceedings and ordered him to turn over the additional White House tapes that had been subpoenaed by Jaworski. On July 27, 29, and 30, respectively, the House Judiciary Committee adopted three articles of impeachment, charging President Nixon with obstruction of justice, failure to uphold laws, and refusal to produce material subpoenaed by the committee.

Editorially, the
Post
did not come out for resignation, as many other papers did. We believed, as an independent paper, that people would behave wisely and judiciously if given the information necessary to make their decisions, and that the process should be allowed to work.

Finally, on August 5, the long-anticipated “smoking gun” turned up. Three new transcripts were released by the White House, recounting conversations between Nixon and Haldeman on June 23, 1972, six days after the original break-in. The tapes showed that the president had personally ordered a cover-up and that he had directed efforts to hide the involvement of his aides in the break-in through a series of orders to conceal details about it known to himself but not to the FBI. This was such a dramatic and obviously final development that I left Martha’s Vineyard, where I had gone for my August vacation, and flew immediately to Washington.

Nixon initially said that he would not resign, that he believed the constitutional process should be allowed to run its course. All ten Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee who had voted against impeachment then announced they would vote in favor of at least the obstruction-of-justice article. We led the paper with the possibility of Nixon’s resignation, but made no predictions, despite speculation on every side.

On August 8, President Nixon announced that he would resign the next day. I stayed at the paper all that day. Together, many of us watched Nixon’s television appearance about his decision to resign. Phil Geyelin had dinner at the Madison Hotel, across the street from our offices, and wrote on a napkin a rough draft of an editorial on the resignation. When it was typed, he sent it to me with a note: “This is one you probably would want to take a look at.”

On August 9, the
Post
produced a twenty-two-page special section on the Nixon years. Along with a few people in my office, I watched the weird speech Nixon made before leaving the White House, fairly incoherently talking to his staff in the East Room about his mother, who seemed to be on his mind a great deal. The unreality of the whole thing hung all around
us. After the long months that had stretched into years, it was so strange to be watching what none of us had ever imagined happening. It all seemed both world-shattering and confusing. A miracle of sorts had taken place—this country was about to change presidents in an utterly democratic way, with the processes that had been put into place two centuries before working in this unprecedented situation.

At the
Post
, we received a lot of unpleasant phone calls, many readers expressing the sentiment that they imagined we were all popping champagne corks to celebrate the result we had wanted from the beginning—in short, the “I-hope-you’re-satisfied” school of thought. What I mostly felt was relief, mingled with anxiety. Until the smoking-gun tape had turned up, nothing had been certain; right up to the last few days of his presidency, it seemed possible that Nixon could hold on. Now the unease about where all of it was leading was over.

Immediately after watching Nixon’s speech and before he’d left Washington, I returned to the Vineyard to continue my vacation. When I got back to the quiet of my house there, on the island that always gives me a sense of peace and remoteness from everyday life, I turned on the television and heard a voice referring to President Ford. It was quite shaking. Then and only then did I experience pure relief. I actually felt a weight leave my shoulders. It was over. Nixon was gone, Ford was president, and, indeed, “our long national nightmare” was over. The relief came from having a
nice
, open, honest, and nonthreatening president.

One of the final touches to Watergate occurred just after Nixon had left Washington. Bob Woodward came to my office with the most wonderful present—an old-fashioned wooden laundry-wringer. It was signed by the six men who had worked throughout those years to keep the story alive: Ben and Howard, Bob and Carl, Harry Rosenfeld and Barry Sussman. I loved having this symbol, so indicative of the pressure we had felt during Watergate. An antique dealer had called Bob to say he would be willing to sell the old wringer in case he wanted to consider giving it to me. Ever cautious, Bob had asked how much. “Ten,” the man replied. “Ten what?” Bob asked. “Ten dollars,” came the answer. Bob snapped up the deal, and I received the much-cherished wooden wringer that sits in my office still, over twenty years later.

W
HEN
I
RETURNED
to Washington in September, I thought life might finally get back to normal after two solid years of constant stress over Watergate. Little did I realize that the “normal” I was thinking of had wholly changed. What I wanted was to be out of the limelight, and I wanted the paper to be out of it, too. But that was far from what happened. To begin with, we still had the challenges to our stations hanging over our
heads. The denouement finally came at the end of 1974. The Miami challenge was withdrawn November 26, and one of the Jacksonville ones in January 1975. The other two were denied by the FCC in April and July 1975, the judge ruling that because of “overt deception practiced in the filing of the St. John’s application no finding could be made that the grant of its application would be in the public interest.” Again, we were fortunate that the challengers seemed so sure of winning through their political connections that they really never made any kind of a case.

More even than Nixon’s resignation, this was the end of Watergate for us. By then we had been fighting this battle against venality for two years in the case of two of the challenges and two and a half in the latter two. We had paid a heavy price, not only in money but in concern, distraction, and erosion.

On December 5, 1974, both Ben and I were invited to a dinner at the Ford White House, where I was seated at the table with the new president—an exciting symbol that the whole sad affair of Watergate was over. (An amusing sidelight on Ford’s elevation to the presidency came when tee shirts were printed with his picture on them, together with the caption, “I got my job through The Washington Post,” a slogan also used by our classified-ad department.) By then, Ford had granted a full, free, and absolute pardon to Nixon, which I thought premature, believing that he should have extracted at least some sort of admission of guilt for it. I suspected that more awful deeds lurked unexposed—now likely never to surface. I’m sure Ford was under a lot of pressure to get the whole disastrous affair “behind us.” But Nixon’s associates paid an even higher price than he did. Resigning the presidency was a high price indeed, but his associates mostly went to jail, whereas he was able eventually to work his way back into being some sort of elder statesman, even contributing to thinking about foreign policy in the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

By the end of 1973, we—the paper and certain individuals on it—began to get a number of awards. As I wrote someone, “It is a happy problem.” I picked up two of the biggest press awards, the John Peter Zenger and the Elijah Parish Lovejoy. I think some of these awards should have gone to others, particularly Ben, which I believe didn’t happen because a kind of reverse sexism was at work.

Fortunately, who got what award didn’t cause any kind of problem in Ben’s and my relationship. In fact, when, early in 1974, a media-industry newsletter named me “outstanding newspaper executive,” with Ben as runner-up, I found it especially ironic since I was still having nothing but travail as a newspaper executive. I realized, however, that Watergate was on everybody’s mind at the time, and the editors of that report didn’t look at the overall picture.