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According to Woodward and Bernstein, Kissinger's monitoring of telephone calls was not confined to Nixon. Beginning in 1970, a Dictabelt machine began automatically taping nearly all his calls. Even some of his personal chats with his present wife, Nancy Maginnes, were monitored by secretaries, who would remind him of any social engagement he might have made.
Kissinger, the book goes on, kept pressuring Nixon to make him Secretary of State for both substantial and petty reasons. He feared that Nixon, in his deteriorating condition, might do something rash in foreign affairs; as Secretary, Kissinger would be in a better position to block it. He also was contemptuous of William Rogers, who then held the job. He considered Rogers weak and inept and actually went out of his way to humiliate the Secretary. Kissinger finally threatened to quit if he could not have Rogers' post; Nixon yielded. But when Nixon sent Haig to tell Rogers he must step down, the deeply hurt Secretary replied: "Tell the President to f___ himself." He later cooled off and dutifully resigned.
With Kissinger running foreign relations, it was Haig who tried to hold domestic policies together whenever proposals requiring decisions came up from the various departments. By then Nixon was totally preoccupied with Watergate. Haig is portrayed as performing heroically, maintaining brutal hours and an outward front of confidence about Nixon's surviving in office. Privately, he startled one White House aide by confiding: "He's as guilty as hell." Haig's personal opinion of Nixon was that he was "an inherently weak man who lacked guts." But to Haig, the good of the nation required that no one on the staff undercut the President so long as he insisted on fighting it out.
He kept insisting, right to the end. At one point, at the request of the special prosecutor, Federal Judge John J. Sirica had ordered the White House to produce a Dictabelt that Nixon claimed to have made to summarize a meeting with his estranged counsel, John Dean, on April 15, 1973. Nixon, who apparently had never made the recording, asked one of his lawyers: "Why can't we make a new Dictabelt?" The lawyer was understandably appalled that Nixon, himself an attorney, would consider concocting evidence for the court.
After the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Nixon must turn over the tapes of 64 conversations to Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski, the President telephoned Watergate Lawyer J. Fred Buzhardt. "There might be a problem with the June 23 tape, Fred," Nixon said. He was referring to the tape of a conversation he had had with his principal aide, Haldeman. When Buzhardt heard the tape, he knew immediately that Nixon was finished. It showed indisputably that Nixon had lied in claiming he had national security in mind when he asked top CIA officials to urge FBI Director L. Patrick Gray to hold up an investigation of Watergate burglary funds that had been channeled into Mexico. The tape made it obvious that both Nixon and Haldeman feared the money would be traced back to the President's re-election committee. The motive was purely political and self-protective—despite Nixon's repeated claims to the contrary.