31 Days Page 2
“Always remember,” he advised, “others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”
Nixon neither confessed to nor apologized for his role in Watergate. But he had disclosed “that amazing, mammoth insight,” as his counsel Leonard Garment put it, that it was his hatred of his enemies at home, not theirs of him, that had finished him. Many were in tears; others reeled with fresh fascination at the strange, complex figure before them, and the shining tableau of the loving family that he had brought to grief—Pat, daughters Julie and Tricia, and sons-in-law David Eisenhower and Ed Cox. Kissinger, a Bavarian-born Jew whose family had fled the Nazis when he was a teenager, believed the tragedy originated in Nixon’s straitened youth, with his pious, distracted mother and hard-bitten, taciturn father. “Can you imagine what this man would have been had somebody loved him?” wondered Kissinger, a former Harvard professor whom Nixon had appointed both national security adviser and secretary of state, making him the world’s most powerful foreign policy adviser and diplomat.
Others could be excused, as they joined the procession out to the South Lawn, where Nixon would depart by presidential helicopter, for worrying less about Nixon and more about themselves. Besides those who held elected office, Nixon was crucial to their hopes and ambitions. Yet in two hours Ford would control the government and the party. What was more, the “presidential timetable,” especially for Republicans, had been upended. Under the constitutional arrangement that enabled Nixon to choose Ford, Ford now would nominate his own vice president. But because Ford had told the Senate during his confirmation hearings that he wouldn’t run for president in 1976, an incumbent vice president would become the heir apparent for the party’s nomination. A lifelong climb to the top politically was a combat version of the children’s game Chutes and Ladders, normally taking decades. The GOP game board suddenly was rife with new battle lines and angles of attack—and accelerating opportunities.
No high-level appointee was more perplexed by the shifting political matrix than party chairman George H. W. Bush. Son of a Wall Street investment banker and former Connecticut senator, Bush, fifty, was a transplanted patrician oilman and former Houston congressman whom Nixon had rescued and elevated to national prominence with high-level assignments after Texas voters twice rejected him for the Senate. Bush had been among Nixon’s staunchest defenders; then, at the last cabinet session, when Ford declared his independence from Nixon, Bush stood up and all but told Nixon he had to leave, for the good of the party.
“There is no way to really describe the emotion of the day,” Bush wrote in his journal. “One couldn’t help look at the family and the whole thing and think of his accomplishments and then think of the shame and wonder what kind of man is this really. No morality—kicking his friends in those tapes—all of them. Gratuitous abuse. Caring for no one and yet doing so much . . .”
Shortly after ten, the Nixons and Fords followed the long scarlet carpet onto the lawn. The women kept their arms around each other’s waists as they walked past the statue-still honor guard. “You’ll see many of these red carpets,” Pat whispered, “and you’ll get so you hate ’em.” Then, in one of the most enduring scenes in American history, Nixon climbed aboard the helicopter, waved good-bye with a broad forced smile and his signature upstretched arms and double-V for victory, and left.
Walking back to the White House, a grim-looking Gerald Ford clasped his wife’s hand. “We can do it,” he said.
* * *
Ford took the oath of office in the East Room at noon, as Nixon hurtled thirty-nine thousand feet over Missouri in Air Force One. Not known for eloquence, he had crafted with his top assistant and speechwriter, the former newsman Robert Hartmann, a memorable twenty-five-hundred-word appeal for national unity in a time of urgency and crisis. The leaders of both parties in Congress sat together on one side of the aisle, the Fords’ four handsome young-adult blond children on the other, and viewers at home couldn’t tell which group looked more proud or pleased, or considered him more their own. Through a decade of Vietnam and two years of Watergate, America had torn itself apart. Yet in twenty-five years in Congress while the Democrats ruled and Ford toiled to reverse the tide, then more recently when relations between the White House and Congress had never been more sulfuric, Ford had won far more friends than enemies. With midterm elections less than three months away, and menaced by an angry snarl of problems—inflation, recession, a world energy crisis, and a quickening threat of war in the Middle East—his first priority was to bring them together.
“This is an hour of history that troubles our minds and hurts our hearts,” Ford said, facing the camera and speaking to the nation. “I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your President by your ballots. So I ask you to confirm me as your President with your prayers . . .”
He continued: “. . . neither have I gained office by any secret promises. I have not campaigned either for the Presidency or the Vice Presidency. I have not subscribed to any partisan platform. I am indebted to no man . . .”
“My fellow Americans,” Ford recited, “our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works. Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here, the people rule . . .”
On the TV set in the living room, Ford looked shaky but characteristically stolid, still trim, his thinning blond hair combed neatly back from a strong, serious brow hooding a troubled albeit level gaze. His voice seemed adenoidal, quivery, pitched too high next to Nixon’s gravelly baritone, but his delivery resonated. Only upon reaching the words the “wounds of Watergate, more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars,” did he choke up.
“I ask again your prayers for Richard Nixon and for his family,” Ford said slowly, red-eyed. “May our former President who brought peace to millions find it for himself . . .” On peace, Ford’s voice cracked.
* * *
A football star in college, Ford hit the White House hallways running. From the East Room he strode to the nearby Red Room to ask the House and Senate leadership how soon he could address a joint session, then sped down one flight to the pressroom, which, as Sally Quinn reported in the Washington Post, “seemed just like a normal day . . . except that it was more crowded and hotter and smellier and dirtier and Walter Cronkite was there.” As poisonous as relations with Capitol Hill had grown under Nixon, the enmity between the White House and the Washington media was far worse, crystallized by open mutual contempt between reporters and Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler, a former ad executive and the youngest presidential spokesman in history, who eighteen months earlier famously told reporters to consider “inoperative” all previous White House statements on Watergate.
“We will have one of yours as my press secretary,” Ford announced, “Jerry terHorst.” Since the news had broken that Nixon would leave, the mood of the triumphal national press corps had plummeted from raucous euphoria to an existential “What now?” Steve Daley, bartender at the Class Reunion, a smoky bar where many reporters had drunk heavily and talked all night until they returned to work, thought they seemed “postcoital.” Ford’s choice of terHorst won immediate favor not only because he was a respected longtime colleague from the Detroit News but because he was soothing, not hostile, and understood their needs. “The transition of Presidents,” Quinn wrote in her Post article, “was far less important in the press room than the transition of press secretaries.”
“We’ll have an open administration,” Ford announced before leaving terHorst, who’d been offered the job less than two days earlier, to handle questions. “I can’t change my nature.”
Ford arrived next at the Oval Office, its desk and shelves and credenzas stripped bare of every book, picture, and memento, where he huddled for a few minutes with his family until Haig, who’d controlled who Nixon saw and when he saw them, interrupted. Determined to maintain that same authority with Ford, Haig had decided the first priority was a meeting with the White House s
taff. No one knew better than Haig that he had been acting president, keeping the White House going, making countless decisions Nixon was either too distracted or too out of sorts to make, and he worried that Ford wasn’t up to the job. “We have to save Ford from his own inexperience,” he told an aide. At the door to the Roosevelt Room, Haig handed Ford a list of talking points for his meeting with the Nixon loyalists. The memo concluded: “DO NOTS—At this time, do not commit yourself to dealing directly with anyone but Al Haig. DO—Ask each staff member to be alert to problems and to make suggestions to Al Haig or to Transition Team members.”
The U.S. Army is a garrison force that trains its officers to seize and hold ground, and Haig, a decorated battalion commander in Vietnam, was determined not to yield his government’s headquarters without a fight, especially against an unorganized and untested unit like Ford’s transition group. Normally such teams prepare for months for an orderly takeover, but Ford’s people had barely been recruited, much less trained, and that included Ford himself. While Ford hedged on some of the talking points, he told Nixon’s people that Haig had “unselfishly agreed to stay on,” leaving the impression that Haig would remain as chief of staff, and apparently reversing the decision he had made just hours earlier in the limousine with Byrnes and Buchen.
Watching, Bob Hartmann worried that Ford had been usurped by his palace guard. A gruff former reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Hartmann was Ford’s closest political adviser and a much-needed alter ego for a politician whose career was fueled by trust and likability—dark where Ford was sunny, suspicious where he was naive, surly and combative where he was friendly and conciliatory. “You don’t suspect ill motives of anyone until you’re kicked in the balls three times,” Hartmann told him. “In a human being, that’s a virtue. But as a President, it’s a weakness.” Hartmann recognized in Haig both a Prussian sensibility and ferocious will to win, plus unswerving loyalty to Nixon. As soon as he could get Ford alone, he added: “I think your old friends ought to have some official status around here if we’re going to be of any help to you . . . We aren’t the President’s staff—they are.”
Ford’s idea of an “open” presidency was diametrically at odds with the secretive, sphincterish Nixon staff model, in which the president consulted with a core group of minions before issuing “action memos”—edicts passed down through a single all-powerful chief who alone interpreted the president’s real intentions and degree of will and who controlled all access to him. That system, Ford thought, made the president vulnerable. And indeed, Nixon’s essential defense throughout Watergate was that he had been a victim of the “Berlin Wall” constructed around him by his first chief of staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, and his powerful domestic policy adviser, John Ehrlichman; his “Germans,” both now scheduled to go on trial in September on charges of conspiracy and obstruction of justice. Ford worried as well that during the transition “we’d end up with two ‘White House staffs, two administrations,’ ” and that “chaos could ensue” as Nixon’s opponents saw a chance to appeal to Ford through his new entourage, which had no official status.
Ford was torn. He believed Haig and his staff had performed heroically and deserved better than to be fired. Those who served Nixon most loyally in his first term were either in jail, facing charges, or at the very least tarnished by their service, and Ford didn’t have the heart to put the rest out on the street. On the other hand, he knew he needed his own people in positions of authority or he couldn’t govern. He immediately designated two counselors with cabinet rank: Hartmann and a former Democratic congressman from Virginia, Jack Marsh, one of Ford’s most trusted aides. As vice president, Ford had chosen the forty-eight-year-old Marsh, a courtly, salt-and-pepper-haired defense hawk and then assistant secretary of defense, as his national security adviser. Marsh also was a small-town lawyer from a border state, skilled at reconciling foes. Smooth where Hartmann was rough, subtle where he was blunt, he more than anyone else would attempt to bridge the Nixon and Ford staffs.
Ford charged into the Cabinet Room to issue marching orders to the White House economists, telling them that the worst inflation in America’s peacetime history was “public enemy number one” and that he would veto any spending bill that increased the federal deficit. Joining the group was a Wall Street consultant named Alan Greenspan, whom Nixon recently had appointed to chair his Council of Economic Advisors. Like other top-level appointments, Greenspan’s confirmation was stalled by Watergate—twenty-four hours earlier Senate Democrats had been grilling him about his wealthy corporate connections and opposition to consumer protection laws—and he was fast growing disenchanted with the idea of government service, telling friends he was thinking about withdrawing his name.
Ford left for a whirl of ambassadorial calls arranged and directed by Kissinger and his staff. The message he and Kissinger agreed must be conveyed to other nations during the days ahead was that Watergate was a domestic political matter that had no bearing whatever on foreign affairs, and that while there had been a change at the top, all else was the same. In much of the world, Nixon was and would remain widely admired as the architect of a new and promising international order that, whatever its domestic controversies, was cause for hope and optimism. And Kissinger’s diplomatic breakthroughs, “shuttle diplomacy,” and aura of superstardom were celebrated by the global media; enthralled national leaders clamored for him to visit, to personally resolve stubborn issues in their regions. As one Ford aide observed, Kissinger was America’s foreign policy.
Ford saw dangers in keeping Kissinger, especially from the political right, which viewed him as having exploited Nixon’s vanity and incapacity to serve his own agenda—namely, European-style “realism” resulting in a sellout of American values and interests. But he saw far greater opportunities. Nixon and Kissinger had relaxed tensions with the Soviets at the height of the Cold War, negotiated the first nuclear arms reductions, opened relations with China, and ended the United States’ longest, costliest, and most controversial foreign war in Southeast Asia. Ford hoped for further cooperation with the Soviets, especially in diffusing the flashpoint of the Middle East, and Kissinger, he wrote, was a “total pragmatist who thought in terms of power and national interest instead of ideology”—in Ford’s view, a plus. Similarly, Kissinger regarded Ford’s willingness to reach across ideological boundaries as a major asset in a world leader, a fund to draw upon. “Ford,” he wrote, “was immune to the modern politician’s chameleon-like search for ever new identities and the emotional roller coaster this search exacts.”
Kissinger’s deputy Brent Scowcroft, a pensive, soft-spoken air force lieutenant general with a Ph.D. in history from Columbia, ushered Ford through the diplomatic rounds—three regional groups consisting of ambassadors from fifty-five countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America, and individual sessions with the representatives of the Soviet Union, Japan, Communist China, Israel, and Vietnam. Scowcroft explained that the Soviets tended to see Watergate as a domestic reaction to the thaw in the Cold War—détente—which made them uneasy about its effect on future relations, and that Communist leader Leonid Brezhnev had “acquired considerable stake” in his relationship with Nixon, with whom two months earlier he’d traded state gifts of a Cadillac for a Russian-built hovercraft. Brezhnev was bound to be in a sensitive position when many in Moscow saw his relationship with the Americans imperiled. At the same time, Kissinger and Scowcroft feared that Russian forces would see the United States in disarray and decide, in Kissinger’s term, “to take a run at us”—force a crisis where the United States couldn’t react. That concern had far from abated and would only intensify should Ford appear weak or uncertain.
“It was a very complicated period,” Scowcroft recalls, “very complicated—because there were a number of trends that were changing. Vietnam was one of closing down an unfortunate chapter. Détente was moving in the wrong direction. Our China relations were positive. In the Middle East, we were on a rising tide—we’
d produced these disengagements and stabilized the region. But it was a fast-moving train.” Unlike Haig, Scowcroft, who had briefed Ford weekly on national security when he was vice president, had confidence in the new commander in chief.
* * *
While Ford reassured foreign emissaries that he would hew to Nixon’s legacy, terHorst took questions at his first press briefing indicating that Ford would be held equally to account for Nixon’s record at home. Washington was in a fever of tips, leaks, confabulations, and rumors: that Nixon had pardoned himself and all his aides before leaving; that he had spirited away the rest of the White House tapes with him to San Clemente; that Defense Secretary James Schlesinger had informed commanders not to take direct orders from the West Wing in case Nixon, said to be drinking and in a suicidal state of despair, refused to leave or ordered a nuclear strike. After twenty minutes, terHorst told the press he’d just been advised that Nixon hadn’t issued any pardons, to himself or anyone else. A reporter followed up by asking if Ford would consider issuing a pardon himself.
Ford had been asked the same question ten months earlier at his vice presidential confirmation hearing in the Senate, answering, “I don’t think the American people would stand for it.” Without checking, terHorst said Ford still opposed granting Nixon immunity from prosecution.
“He is not in favor of immunity?” the reporter asked again.
“I can assure you of that,” terHorst repeated.
* * *
At 5:40 Ford strode into the Cabinet Room to talk for twenty minutes with an ad hoc group of advisers “about being President of the United States,” as journalist Richard Reeves wrote. Beyond filling—and healing—the breach left by Nixon, Ford’s mid- and long-range goals were miasmic. Having stayed out of Washington as much as possible as vice president, promoting Nixon’s innocence while keeping a safe distance, his grip on how the White House operated and was organized was uncertain. Hartmann observed that everyone but Ford seemed drained and exhausted; Haig, bearing the heaviest strains, looked the worst, tension creasing his pallid face as he chain-smoked Marlboro Lights. After thanking everyone and inviting Buchen to lay out the initial moves he had approved earlier, Ford announced that Marsh would be his counselor for national security—apparently forgetting that Kissinger already held that job. Marsh blanched. Responding to several more items on the transition team’s checklist, Ford turned to Haig and said, “Al, what do you think of that?” “If you think it best, Mr. President,” the general replied.