(7 of 24)
I do not think anything was lost by the incident. In some circumstances, it is wrong to turn the other cheek. I was determined not to be Richard Nixon's judge. I had not been a witness to his misdeeds, only to their consequences and to his suffering.
The night of Aug. 8, 1974, when Richard Nixon announced his resignation as President and his long ordeal was over, I did not want to leave him alone. All Presidents must be aware of history because they are the limbs on its body. No President was more keenly aware of it than Nixon; better than anyone else, he knew what had happened to him and how this event was likely to be viewed. We went together to the Lincoln Sitting Room, his favorite place. The only light came from a log fire on the hearth.
He began to talk. He spoke about his predecessors and the times of doubt and anguish through which nearly all of them had passed. Not a single word did he speak about his own tragedy. He uttered no recriminations. He had lost the thing he wanted all his life, but he seemed to be at peace. I left him there, sitting alone in the dark. When I returned, shortly after dawn, Nixon was still in the same chair. He had a way of sitting on the small of his back, and that was how he was sitting now. The gray light of morning filled the room. There was the smell of a fire that had died. On a table lay a stack of books—the memoirs of Presidents. In each, he had inserted a slip of paper, marking a place where he had found something of interest. That is how Nixon had spent his last night as President. He had been seeking solace from the only men who could truly know what he was feeling—his kinsmen in history. I simply could not render personal judgment on Nixon after seeing what he had gone through.
I am not insensible to the central lesson of Watergate, that a seemingly trivial act can take on such Aeschylean significance as to threaten the balance of the world. But it would be wrong to assign all the blame for that state of affairs to Nixon. There were abuses, and actions that were worse than abuses, on all sides. One need not describe the damage, not the least of which is that the U.S. now has a precedent for the removal of an elected President from office through a process of denunciation rather than due process of law.
It is true that Nixon chose not to avail himself of the impeachment process, but there were reasons for that beyond the shrill quality of public discourse that made a fair trial moot. Not all of those reasons, which included an unselfish belief that the country would be sundered politically, economically and emotionally by a protracted impeachment process, redound to Nixon's discredit.
During my confirmation hearings, when someone advised, "Tell them what they want to hear," I replied, "What is our purpose here? I can't tell them what they want to hear!"
The tragedy I had witnessed, and tried within the limits of legality and honor to help manage, was in the past. It had nothing whatever to do with my qualifications to be Secretary of State. I was willing to answer the questions that would be put to me, but not to gossip about a former President or to be brought so low that I would seek to demonstrate my fitness for my post, or certify my own decency, by joining in the hurling of anathema upon him. There are worse things than not being