Nixon's Nightmare: Fighting to Be Believed
HE had made his move. He had cleaned out his staff. He had faced the nation on TV. But Watergate still kept growing like a malignancy. Within less than a week after Richard Nixon had solemnly denied any personal involvement and promised to see justice done, one of his ousted aides threatened to implicate the President himself in a conspiracy to conceal White House involvement. The charge, whatever its ultimate authenticity and force, was only the latest of an incredible series of revelations and accusations that clouded the President's ability to govern and produced an unprecedented moral crisis for his Administration.
But first there came a remarkable and revealing interlude. On the day after his TV speech, the President strode solemnly into a meeting of his Cabinet. The members of his official family rose as one and applauded him. "I know that the American people are with you," said Secretary of State William Rogers. Added Republican National Chairman George Bush: "I want you to know that Republicans everywhere are strongly supporting you." White House Counsellor Anne Armstrong, the highest-ranking woman in the Administration, spoke up: "The people understand and appreciate what the President is doing."
Shambles. Fatigue lines marring his California-Florida tan ("he has aged ten or 15 years," said one dismayed adviser), the President expressed a mixture of gratitude, anger, determination. He praised two of his missing, newly removed aides, White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman and Domestic Affairs Adviser John Ehrlichman, as "dedicated people." Looking at former Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, who also lost his job in the Watergate scandal shuffle, Nixon said, "We are going to miss you." Kleindienst replied, "It has been a privilege to serve with Richard Nixon"—and he left the room to more applause. Then the President's mood darkened and the old Nixon emerged. He assailed the "partisan" attacks from both the press and the Congress. "Their target was not Haldeman or Ehrlichman. I know well who their target is." Though Nixon did not identify himself as the target, everybody in the room fully understood.
He took a vindictive shot at Republican Senator Charles Percy for leading the passage of a Senate resolution urging the appointment of an independent prosecutor to dig into the deepening mess of Watergate. "Percy—his target is running for President," Nixon said. "He will never be as long as I'm around." Dry chuckling rose through the room, and one or two present clapped in approval. More calmly, the President concluded, "We have much to do. We must get on with it."
That meeting showed again the Nixon Administration's great capacity for self-deception, its strange isolation from reality. In the eyes of the country, the White House is a shambles. In a parliamentary democracy, the scandal would have toppled the government. The President's closest advisers were revealed as amoral men who considered themselves above the law in what they conceived to be their service to Richard Nixon. Arrogant for years with the Congress, with the bureaucracy, with the press, they were suddenly toppled from power in a sort of