THE PARDON

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000402830009-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 22
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 7, 2012
• Sequence Number: 9
• Publication Date: August 1, 1983
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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%UGUST1983 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
Nixon, Ford, Haig,
and the transfer of power
THE PARDON
AT ELEVEN O'CLOCK ON SUNDAY MORNING, SEP-
tember 8, 1974, one month after taking office,
President Gerald R. Ford announced that he had
granted Richard M. Nixon a full pardon for any offenses
against the United States he might have committed while
serving as the thirty-seventh President. With that act,
Ford made a political blunder that would haunt his presi-
dency and submerge his campaign two years later. The
pardon immediately raised speculation that he and Nixon,
working through Alexander M. Haig, Jr., the Army gener-
al who served as chief of staff to both, had struck a deal for
the presidency.
Many of the aides who worked closely with Haig and
Ford still assume that there was a deal of some kind.
Whether there was may never be known, because the men
involved have yet to give a full account. But defining the
actual terms of the deal, if there was one, is no more im-
portant to an understanding of the pardon than knowing
why Nixon made Ford Vice President and why he thought
that he could rely on Ford to pardon him. Nixon and Haig
thought of Ford as a proven commodity-a man who placed
loyalty to Nixon and the Republican presidency above his
personal ambitions and his political well-being. They as-
sumed, according to the aides, that Ford would take care of
his former boss as soon as he became President. That he
waited so long to act was a disturbing surprise to Nixon.
Gerald Ford was a familiar, if not widely known, fixture
in high-level Republican politics in October of 1973, when
he was nominated to replace the disgraced Spiro T. Agnew
as Richard Nixon's Vice President. He had served in Con-
gress since 1948, representing a heavily Republican dis-
trict in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His conservatism on for-
eign-policy issues and his hard-line stance against
communism won him an appointment in 1956 to the House
Appropriations subcommittee that controlled CIA funding
and monitored, to a limited degree, CIA activities abroad.
In 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson named Ford as one
of two members of the House to serve on the Warren Com-
mission, which investigated the assassination of John F.
Kennedy. Ford was elected minority leader of the House
Seymour M. Hersh's The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon
White House was published in June by Summit Books.
the next year. During these years, Ford acquired a reputa-
tion as an amiable politician who followed his party's dog-
ma with enthusiasm but with no malice; Democrats per-
ceived him as a nice guy.
Ford's voting record, as of his 1973 confirmation hear-
ings as Vice President, provided little basis for bipartisan
endorsement. He had been a consistent supporter of aid to
Vietnam since the 1950s. He repeatedly expressed con-
cern, as did many other Republicans, about Soviet inroads
in the United States: he had praised his fellow congress-
man Richard Nixon as early as August of 1950 for his fight
against the "insidious Communist forces that would de-
stroy our nation." Ford's record on domestic issues was
similarly conventional. He voted against many of the im-
portant housing and community-development proposals
before Congress and to reduce proposed increases in mini-
mum-wage laws. He did, however, favor increased govern-
ment authority to aid the police in the struggle against
crime, including wiretapping and preventive detention.
Ford was known inside the Justice Department as a loyal
supporter of the FBI and its director, J. Edgar Hoover.
According to documents obtained under the Freedom of
Information Act, he served in late 1963 as an informant for
the Bureau on the inner workings of the Warren Commis-
sion. In one internal FBI report, Ford was quoted by
Cartha D. DeLoach, a senior aide to Hoover, as being "dis-
turbed about the manner in which Chief Justice Earl War-
ren was carrying on his Chairmanship." DeLoach wrote,
"Ford indicated he would keep me thoroughly advised as to
the activities of the Commission. He stated this would
have to be done on a confidential basis."
Ford's record on civil rights was, at best, indifferent; he
remained mute during the great struggles of the late 1950s
and early 1960s, and, after becoming minority leader, in-
variably sought to weaken civil-rights legislation during
floor debate-before, in most cases, voting for the bills.
Nonetheless, alongside Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford
looked very good late in 1973, even to some liberal Demo-
crats. Nixon, desperately involved in his fight against the
Watergate Special Prosecution Force and the federal court
subpoenas for his White House tape recordings, was cer-
tain to face impeachment hearings in the House Judiciary
Committee: there was a need for someone as Vice Presi-
dent who was well liked and widely considered to be ac-
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ceptable, such as Ford. The attitude of many Democrats
and Republicans was summed up by David Broder, the
Washington Post's political columnist, in November of
1973, just after Ford's testimony before the House and
Senate confirmation committees: "Whatever his short-
comings in intellect, oratory, or wit, Jerry Ford is one of
the most decent human beings in Washington. He is not a
hater, nor is he under a constant compulsion to prove his
own worth by dominating and downgrading others....
What Ford would bring to ... government is the simplic-
ity and honesty and openness and benignity that have been
missing so long from the White House."
Richard Nixon and his men had evidence that there was
another side to Ford. "In my opinion, he was a tough guy
who knew how to play the game," Charles W. Colson, one
of Nixon's closest advisers on political matters, recalled in
a recent interview. "Nixon knew that Ford was a team
player and understood how to work with a wink and a
nod." Ford had led a much-criticized attempt in 1970 to
impeach Justice William 0. Douglas of the Supreme Court.
It was not a coincidence that Ford's campaign against
Douglas began in the weeks following the Senate's rejec-
tion of Nixon's second nominee for the Supreme Court.
Nixon's choices, Clement F. Haynsworth and G. Harrold
Carswell, were the first presidential nominees to be reject-
ed by the Senate since 1959. In the aftermath of the June
17, 1972, Watergate break-in, and before the November
presidential elections, Ford was instrumental-at the urg-
ing of the White House-in disrupting an inquiry by the
House Banking and Currency Committee, whose iconoclas-
tic chairman, Wright Patman, a Democrat from Texas, was
outspoken in his insistence that the financing of the break-
in had its origins at the top of the Nixon Administration.
At that early stage in the Watergate cover-up, the
White House understood that Wright Patman posed more
of a threat than The Washington Post and other news me-
dia. Patman's thesis was simple: an investigation into the
source of the brand-new hundred-dollar bills found on the
team of men arrested inside the Watergate office complex,
where they were re-installing a wiretap on the telephones
in the Democratic National Committee headquarters,
would lead directly to Nixon's re-election committee. This
illicit financing (it had been arranged by Maurice Stans,
finance director of the re-election campaign, and G. Gordon
Liddy, a campaign counsel) eventually did lead to the un-
raveling of Watergate. Nixon's concern about the link be-
tween the Watergate break-in and the money was so great
that one week after the Watergate burglary, he ordered
the CIA to stop the FBI's investigation into the source of
the money; his order, recorded in a June 23, 1972, tape that
the Supreme Court forced him to release in early August
of 1974, was the famed "smoking gun" disclosure that ef-
fectively ended his presidency. As of the fall of 1972, it was
clear that Nixon had no intention of allowing Patman to
subpoena witnesses, such as Stans, and perhaps learn the
truth. Gerald Ford's role in stopping Patman was pivotal.
That Ford would cooperate was assumed, in the view of
the men close to Nixon. Alexander P. Butterfield, the for-
mer Air Force colonel who, as a personal aide to Nixon,
spent hundreds of hours in the Oval Office, said in a recent
interview, "Nixon had Ford totally under his thumb. He
was the tool of the Nixon Administration-like a puppy
dog. They used him when they had to-wind him up and
he'd go `Arf, Arf.'" Butterfield was fired by Ford in 1975 as
administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, a
move that he believes was punishment for his revelation of
the existence of the White House tape recordings to the
Senate Watergate Committee in July of 1973.
"Ford was the consummate politician," says Colson, and
was aware that the White House was always willing to
repay its loyal helpers. Ford once approached Colson on
behalf of Paul Hall, the president of the Seafarers Interna-
tional Union, who was indicted in 1970 with seven other
senior union officials-none of whom was ever prosecut-
ed-for making more than $750,000 in illegal campaign
contributions between 1964 and 1968. The indictment
charged that extortion was committed in raising the mon-
ey from union members. Hall was a contributor to Ford's
campaign; more important, he had arranged for others to
contribute, according to a Ford associate. He was, as Ford
wrote in his 1979 memoir, A Time 7b Heal, a longtime per-
sonal friend. (There is no evidence that Hall, who died
in 1980, asked Ford to approach the White House.) "The
Justice Department is screwing Paul Hall," Colson recalls
Ford complaining. "You've got to take care of it." Such re-
quests were considered all in a day's work in the Nixon
White House, as the Watergate investigation later re-
vealed. (Hall and the others pleaded innocent in Septem-
ber of 1970, and the case was dismissed in May of 1972 by a
federal judge in New York City for lack of prosecution.)
Ford gave loyalty in return by remaining fervent in his
public defense of Richard Nixon's innocence until a few
days before Nixon's resignation. "Nixon would talk with
him like one of the boys," Colson says-although he adds
that he does not believe that in late 1972, when Ford suc-
cessfully intervened to stop the Patman Committee, Ford
was told the full scope of Watergate.
Watergate was the predominant issue for the staff mem-
bers of the House Judiciary Committee in the fall of 1973,
as they prepared for their exhaustive hearings on Ford's
vice presidential nomination. The committee's focus, inevi-
tably, was not on Ford's past record but on the impeach-
ment proceedings against Nixon-which, many in Con-
gress believed, would get under way once Ford was con-
firmed and sworn into office. "All of the Democrats under-
stood what we were doing," William P. Dixon, one of the
senior Democratic committee investigators, said in a re-
cent interview. "We needed to put him in so we could re-
move Nixon. We couldn't get Nixon out until we got Ford
in. We weren't just making Ford President-we were sav-
ing the presidency."' There were few illusions among the
investigators about Ford, whose main asset was that he
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AUGUST1983 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PAGE 57
was not Richard Nixon. The staff's inquiry into Ford, Dix-
on says, produced evidence of unexplained cash transac-
tions involving the Ford family's personal finances, some
instances of double billing of airline flights, and what were
considered to be technical violations of federal campaign-
finance laws. Far more troubling to many committee in-
vestigators was a closely guarded Internal Revenue Ser-
vice audit of Ford's finances for 1972, which showed that he
and his wife, Betty, managed to live on between $5 and $13
per week in pocket money. "Ford couldn't buy his tobacco
on $5 a week," one committee investigator says. "That was
just total bull, as anyone who read the report knew." The
investigator says that he and others shared many reserva-
tions about Ford, but viewed them as insignificant com-
pared with the problems at hand. "We were saving the
country. For God's sake, the other man was a lunatic. We
had a thorough investigation of the guy and we didn't find
any dead women or live boys. He was a known quantity:
k-n-o-w-n; and let's get on with it."
FORD WAS MOST VULNERABLE, SOME MEMBERS OF
the House Judiciary Committee believed, for his in-
terference with the Patman inquiry. He was
quizzed only cursorily about it during his confirmation tes-
timony before the Senate Rules Committee and the House
Judiciary Committee, but admitted without hesitation that
he had worked diligently to upset the Patman investiga-
tion. It was, he claimed, a natural function of his responsi-
bilities as House Republican leader, and not the result of
any White House pressure. Ford was known to have re-
peatedly lobbied Republican members of the Patman Com-
mittee in the fall of 1972, and was instrumental in coordi-
nating votes against Patman, whose request for subpoena
power was defeated by a vote of 20 to 15 on October 3-
effectively aborting the investigation. Ford arranged for
two meetings with Republican members of the Patman
Committee before the October vote, and circulated a criti-
cal letter to them. Patman, after the defeat, issued a pro-
phetic statement: "I predict that the facts will come out,
and when they do I am convinced they will reveal why the
White House was so anxious to kill the committee's inves-
tigation. The public will fully understand why this pres-
sure was mounted."
Ford specifically denied in his Senate testimony, on Octo-
ber 5, 1973, ever discussing the Patman investigation with
Nixon or any of his key aides who helped with the Water-
gate cover-up-John D. Ehrlichman, his White House do-
mestic adviser; H. R. Haldeman, his chief of staff; and
John W. Dean III, a White House counsel. He further de-
nied that his activities against Patman were motivated by
any factor other than politics as usual. He had urged the
Republican members of the committee to deny Patman the
authority to issue subpoenas on the merits of the case,
Ford said, and not out of fear that the investigation could
jeopardize Nixon's re-election. Testifying in the House
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PAGE 58 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY AUGUST1983
three weeks later, Ford also denied discussing the blocking
of the Patman inquiry with William Timmons, the senior
White House lobbyist, and said that he had no recollection
of any such discussions with others in the White House.
One Democratic lawyer then on the House Judiciary
Committee staff recalls the widespread belief that Ford
had been less than candid in his confirmation hearings
about White House involvement in his lobbying against
Patman, but argues that there were clear reasons for not
dwelling on the issue: "Agnew's left and Ford is coming in.
What good is it to the country to go after him and find little
nits? This was the first time the Twenty-fifth Amendment
[which outlines procedures for the replacement of a dead
or incapacitated President or Vice President] was being
utilized. Let's not get bogged down in minutiae."
Such minutiae are essential, however, to an understand-
ing of Ford's loyalty to Nixon, and the extent to which he
was beholden to Nixon; he had chosen to provide mislead-
ing testimony in his confirmation hearings rather than em-
barrass or endanger the White House.
The loyalty went two ways. On April 30, 1974, the
White House released hundreds of pages of transcripts as
part of the President's frantic effort to forestall the im-
peachment process. Included were transcripts of a Sep-
tember 15, 1972, meeting between Nixon, Haldeman, and
Dean, in which methods of putting pressure on the Patman
Committee were discussed at length. Ford's name was re-
peatedly mentioned by the President and his aides. A
clearer indication that Ford, contrary to his assertions, had
discussed the Patman investigation with the White House
did not appear until late June of 1974, when the House
Judiciary Committee released its version of the same tape
recording, in which many of the phrases and sentences
previously marked "unintelligible" were restored. The
committee's transcripts revealed that Ford was being
called upon to play an active role in undermining Patman,
and they provided dramatic evidence, not noted at the
time, of how Nixon and the men around him consistently
altered the dialogue to protect Ford. (The press focused its
attention in June on those previously deleted portions of
the transcripts that dealt with a series of presidential
threats directed at The Washington Post, Edward Bennett
Williams, the Post's prominent attorney, and the newspa-
per's television station, which was licensed by the federal
government.)
The White House distortion of its transcripts was con-
sidered potentially a criminal matter by the Watergate
Special Prosecution Force, which pursued the issue for at
least a year after Nixon's resignation without recommend-
ing any indictments. Some of the most severe distortions
occurred in discussions about Ford.
Nixon's suggestion that Ford had "to lead on this [action
against Patman]" was deleted from the White House's ver-
sion of the transcript, and a strong comment about the
necessity of Ford's involvement was placed in the mouth of
John Dean. Also deleted was Nixon's rhetorical question:
"[Can Ford] do anything with Patman?" Missing, too, was
Nixon's statement that "the game has to be played aw-
fully rough ... you'll follow through with ... who-Tim-
mons, or with Ford, or-How's it going to operate?" It
was tentatively agreed that Haldeman would discuss the
Patman issue with Timmons and that Ehrlichman would
perhaps talk to Ford. Ford should be told, Nixon said in a
comment that was deleted, that "I'm getting into this
thing."
" John Dean, in his second memoir, Lost Honor, published
in 1982, printed extensive excerpts from White House
memoranda indicating that he was in repeated contact
with Timmons and other White House congressional lob-
byists on the Patman issue between September 15 and Oc-
tober 3, when Patman was denied the subpoenas. Dean
wrote that he was being assured of repeated contact by the
Nixon aides with Ford. Charles Colson similarly recalls
discussing the President's desire to stop the Patman inves-
tigation with Ford and enlisting his aid. "I talked to Ford
directly," Colson says. "It was pure politics. We-the
White House-wanted to stop the Democrats from having
congressional hearings that would be politically embar-
rassing." Colson recalls attending meetings in the White
House with Timmons and others, as did John Dean, at
which specific conversations that had taken place with
Ford were discussed in the context of killing the Patman
inquiry. "There was no question in my mind that this was a
routine political operation," he says.
Ford's direct involvement in blocking the Patman inqui-
ry was not surprising; as a loyal Republican Party leader
with close ties to the White House, he could hardly have
been expected not to do his best to turn the vote against
Patman and prevent him from gaining subpoena power.
Yet he went far beyond political routine in his confirmation
hearings, testifying that he had neither been in direct con-
tact with the White House nor received direct pressure
from the President's men on the issue. Ford chose to mis-
lead the committees to preserve his standing with the Re-
publican Party and the White House. He understood that
personal and political loyalty would get him further in
Washington than complete testimony. Ford's actions in
blocking Wright Patman were far from remarkable, but
the risk he took in his testimony-at a time of continued
White House leaks-in denying the high-level pressures
was an extraordinary one. Any hint in the press of Ford's
obedience to Nixon's men would have evoked Watergate
and jeopardized his confirmation.
THE NIXON WHITE HOUSE WAS RIFE WITH INTRIGUE
and distrust on December 6, 1973, when Ford, after
his overwhelming confirmation by the House and
Senate, was sworn in as Vice President. Ford's ability to
step into the power vacuum and exert influence was limit-
ed by his awareness that he had not been Nixon's first
choice as Vice President. Nixon had insisted initially that
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John Connally, the former secretary of the treasury, who
was himself under investigation for alleged bribery, be
nominated as Vice President. Connally's self-confidence
and his success as an attorney in private practice were
powerful attractions for Nixon. Charles Colson says that
Nixon, in their private talks in the Oval Office, would liter-
ally "design" the sort of law practices he thought Colson
and Connally should have after they retired from public
life. (After Colson left the White House staff, in early
1973, Nixon urged him to bring his potential law clients to
the Oval Office, so that they would be impressed by Col-
son's close relationship with the President. Colson says
that in one chat, Nixon complained about his years as Vice
President under Dwight D. Eisenhower. "After eight
years, Chuck, I left the White House with $38,000 in my
savings account and a four-year-old Oldsmobile. Don't you
make that mistake.") Nixon had reluctantly accepted Ford
as an alternative to Connally only after extensive pleading
from J. Fred Buzhardt, a White House attorney, and Mel-
vin A. Laird, Nixon's former secretary of defense. Nixon
had reservations about Ford's abilities, Colson says; after
Ford's confirmation, the President once described him to
Colson as his "insurance policy" against impeachment.
Haig shared Nixon's ambivalence toward Ford, accord-
ing to his aides, but he apparently found it easy to sup-
press his feelings. He understood that Ford had an excel-
lent chance of becoming President: he must have known,
as Buzhardt, with whom he spoke often, knew, that Nixon
was guilty of most of what his enemies were claiming he
had done. Such knowledge was a closely guarded secret in
the White House. One of Haig's first moves after being
named chief of staff was to recruit Buzhardt to serve as
Nixon's primary Watergate attorney. Buzhardt was Haig's
closest confidant in the White House, but his loyalties
were complex. He served the President well-at one
point, he himself was under investigation by the Water-
gate Special Prosecution Force-but he also had allegiance
to Melvin Laird, for whom he had worked in the Pentagon
as general counsel. Laird had resigned as Nixon's secre-
tary of defense late in 1972, but was induced to join the
White House staff after the April 30, 1973, resignations of
Haldeman and Ehrlichman by a promise of full control of
social, welfare, and education programs. Another factor in
his return to the Administration was solemn assurance
from Buzhardt and Haig that Richard Nixon was not
guilty. "After I'd been back about three or four weeks,"
Laird recalled recently, "Fred came to see me. He told me
he had misled me. `I was wrong,' he said. `The President
did have knowledge, and I've just got to level with you.' I.
was shook up."
If Haig and Buzhardt understood that Nixon was guilty,
they also understood that the burden was on the Water-
gate Special Prosecutor and the legal system to prove it.
Haig was careful to protect himself: he began, almost im-
mediately, to curry favor with Gerald Ford.
Ford had turned to an old friend, Benton L. Becker, a
Washington attorney, for help during his vice presidential
confirmation hearings. Becker was a former Justice De-
partment prosecutor who, after leaving the government,
had worked at Ford's direction on the private impeachment
investigation of Justice Douglas in 1970. Becker learned
immediately, as he recalled in a recent series of interviews,
that Ford was responding to the wishes of Nixon's men in
his condemnation of Douglas. John N. Mitchell, the attor-
ney general, who was among Nixon's most trusted advi-
sers, "pumped up" Ford during that inquiry, Becker says.
When Ford summoned him again during the confirmation
hearings, Becker had his first contact with Alexander
Haig. Ford had been approached early in the confirmation
process by Peter W. Rodino, Jr., the New Jersey Demo-
crat who was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
Rodino offered access to the reports of the FBI investiga-
tion of Ford's background, according to Becker. It was
clear that none of the Democratic leaders in the House
wanted anything to stand in the way of Ford's confirma-
tion. They knew, as did Ford, Becker says, that Nixon
would be forced to leave and that Ford "was going to be
President." Becker rejected Rodino's offer, to protect
Ford, and was thus all the more surprised one afternoon,
while he and Ford were conferring on income-tax matters,
to hear Ford, who had taken a telephone call from Haig,
suddenly begin discussing FBI information. "I heard Ford
saying, `One hundred and thirty FBI agents investigating
me?'" After a moment's pause, Ford said, "They found
him?"-referring to a minor colleague of years past. There
was more talk, about a trip Ford took to China in 1972. At
that point, Becker says, "I walked around Ford and
grabbed the telephone out of his hand. `General Haig, my
name is Benton Becker, and I'm Gerald Ford's personal
attorney.'
"'I know who you are,' Haig says.
"I explain-and I'm angry-that Ford is going to be
asked at some point during the confirmation hearings
whether or not the White House provided him with any
information from the FBI background investigation. And I
want Ford to be able to say no. `Therefore, you and no one
else in the White House are to have any contact with Ford
during confirmation. Is that understood?' "
Haig, also angry, answered, "Yes." Ford was grateful for
his intervention, Becker says, but seemed not to under-
stand that Haig was doing more than relaying information
from the FBI: "He was also trying to ingratiate himself
with Ford." Haig's instincts in doing so were normal for a
good bureaucrat, but his method was questionable: John
Dean's efforts to provide background FBI information to
the White House had already emerged as a focal point for
Watergate scandal.
Haig's courting of Gerald Ford intensified with ' the
Watergate crisis. By July 30, 1974, Richard Nixon's posi-
tion was desperate. The House Judiciary Committee had
voted three articles of impeachment in the preceding few
days, with debate scheduled to begin in the full House on
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PAGE 60 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY AUGUST 19$3
August 19. The loss of his Supreme Court case on July 24
forced Nixon to turn over the June 23, 1972, tape, which
he knew would make a vote for impeachment certain. His
last chance was in the Senate, where he would be tried,
but if he lost his case there he would lose his pension and
other benefits due an ex-President. A resignation, as Nix-
on noted in RN, his 1978 memoir, would lead to "an on-
slaught of lawsuits that would cost millions of dollars and
take years to fight in the courts." Another issue, surely-
not noted in the memoirs-was the possibility of going to
prison. Nixon wrote that on July 31, he was told by Haig
and Ronald Ziegler, his press secretary, that they found
the June 23 tape recording to be devastating. "I just don't
see how we can survive this one," Nixon quoted Haig as
saying. "I told Haig that I had decided to resign," Nixon
wrote. "If the June 23 tape was not explainable, I could not
very well expect the staff to try to explain it and defend
it." He instructed Haig to meet with Ford and tell him that
he was thinking of resigning, without indicating when. "I
said Haig should ask him to be prepared to take over some-
time within the next few days."
FROM MID-JULY ON, FORD HAD BEEN CONSTANTLY
urged by his close aides and friends, including Rob-
ert T. Hartmann, a former Washington bureau
chief of the Los Angeles Times, who was his chief of staff,
to avoid discussing Nixon's future with Al Haig. The advis-
ers believed that Nixon was seeking a commitment for a
pardon from Ford. Laird recalls telephoning Philip W. Bu-
chen, who later became presidential counselor to Ford, and
telling Buchen "to keep those guys [Nixon's men] away
from him." Hartmann wrote in his memoirs of receiving an
early-evening telephone call from Haig on July 31, re-
questing a private appointment with Ford the next morn-
ing. Haig would come to Ford's office. Before the meeting,
Hartmann wrote, he urged Ford to permit him to sit in: "I
just think you might want to have a witness to who said
what ... I don't know what's on Haig's mind." There was
little love lost between Hartmann and Haig; the two be-
came bitter rivals after Nixon's resignation. Haig, furious
over what he viewed as Hartmann's sniping to the press
behind his back, once grabbed a Hartmann aide by the la-
pels, according to that aide, and declared, "If you have any
influence over that fat Kraut, you tell him to knock it off or
he's going to be the first stretcher case coming out of the
West Wing."
Haig was unhappy on the morning of August 1 to find
Hartmann at Ford's office, and after it became clear that
Hartmann would not leave, he chose not to relay Nixon's
message. Nixon's "mood was constantly changing," Hart-
mann wrote that Haig told them. "One minute he was all
for fighting it out .... Then he would appear strangely
indifferent. . . ." There was no talk of imminent resigna-
tion. A few moments after the meeting, Haig placed an-
other call to Ford, who had left the White House with
Hartmann to drive to the Vice President's office in the
Senate. The conversation was one-sided: Hartmann lis-
tened as Ford uttered a series of uh-huhs. Ford told him
that he had agreed to meet Haig privately at 3:30 that
afternoon.
The only detailed version of what took place in the after-
noon meeting, which lasted fifty minutes, is Gerald Ford's,
as provided to a House Judiciary subcommittee during his
testimony on October 17, 1974-more than one month
after his pardon of Nixon. He was only the second Presi-
dent to make such an appearance. Haig has never been
questioned under oath on his role in the pardon, although
he did say in a prepared statement on January 9, 1981, as
he was beginning Senate Foreign Relations Committee
hearings on his nomination to be secretary of state in the
Reagan Administration: "At no time did I ever suggest in
any way an agreement or `deal' that Mr. Nixon would re-
sign in exchange for a pardon from Mr. Ford. When I met
alone with Vice President Ford on August 1, 1974, I went
to that meeting to tell him of President Nixon's inclination
to resign, and to emphasize to him that he had to be pre-
pared to assume the presidency within a very short time
... perhaps within a day." Haig's statement buttressed
that of President Ford before the Judiciary subcommittee.
Ford testified that he first learned of the damaging June 23
tape recording during the afternoon meeting with Haig,
who asked whether he was prepared to assume the presi-
dency in a short time. Haig discussed six possible options,
Ford testified, including the option of Nixon pardoning
himself before resigning; the option of first pardoning all of
the Watergate defendants, then himself, and then resign-
ing; and, finally, the option of an eventual pardon of Nixon,
if he should resign, by the new President. "General Haig
wanted my views on the various courses of action," Ford
testified, "as well as my attitude on the options of resigna-
tion. However, he indicated he was not advocating any of
the options." Haig also informed him, Ford said in response
to a question, that "it was his understanding from a White
House lawyer that a President did have the authority to
grant a pardon even before any criminal action had been
taken against an individual.... " Ford said he requested
time "to think": "As I saw it, at this point, the question
clearly before me was, under the circumstances, what
course of action should I recommend that would be in the
best interest of the country?"
Ford, in an April interview for this article at his offices
near Palm Springs, California, emphatically denied, as he
had in his public statements and testimony over the past
nine years, that he and Alexander Haig made a deal for the
presidency on the afternoon of August 1.
Nonetheless, Ford's and Haig's accounts of their encoun-
ter, as provided to Congress, were far from complete.
Ford's August 1 schedule called for him to drive with his
wife to the Admiral's House, atop Observatory Hill, on
Massachusetts Avenue in Washington. The Victorian
building, which once served as quarters for the chief of
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AUGUST.1983 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PAGE 61
naval operations, had been authorized by Congress to
serve as the official home of the Vice President; Ford and
his wife were meeting with a team of interior decorators
and civil engineers. In a recent interview, one of Ford's
aides recalled the sequence of events that afternoon:
"Ford was running late, as usual, and Mrs. Ford called
me and asked whether he was going to make it. I went up
to see what was the problem, and the receptionist was
there. She said, `Don't ask me and don't ask any questions.'
I said, `Let me see the appointment book.' She did, and
there was the name Rogers Morton [Nixon's secretary of
the interior]. I said, `What's he doing here? It wasn't
scheduled.' `It's not Rogers Morton,' she said. `It's General
Haig, and he made me write Morton in the appointment
book.' "
The aide went into Ford's outer room to wait. Thirty or
so minutes later, Haig burst out. "What are you doing
here?" he demanded. He said little else, but the aide knew
that Haig was alarmed to find him there. "The real mes-
sage was in his eyes." The aide went into the Vice Presi-
dent's office and found Ford "sitting in his chair, turned
completely around and looking out the window directly at
the West Wing of the White House." It took a few prod-
dings before Ford responded to his hello, the aide recalls.
"It was clear to me that whatever had transpired between
him and Haig was of considerable moment. He was lost in
his thoughts."
Ford's receptionist, Kathy E. McCarthy, kept careful
records, and so the Haig appointment on August 1 remains
on the official vice presidential log, made available for this
article by the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, as be-
ing with Rogers Morton. Ford, in the interview, noted that
his office had made public the August 1 meeting, and that
he had discussed it in congressional testimony. He dis-
missed as "irrelevant" Haig's attempt to hide it. "What
transpired in an outer office with a secretary," he said, "is
not substantive."
The men who investigated Richard Nixon and prosecut-
ed his aides present a very different analysis. In their Wa-
tergate experiences, they can cite no instances in which
presidential or vice presidential logs were deliberately
made inaccurate. Haig's actions on the afternoon of August
1, the lawyers agree, could not be considered routine or
unimportant. It would be reasonable to infer, the lawyers
say, that whatever was to take place in the meeting with
Ford-in Haig's mind, at least-would not stand up to
public scrutiny.
Haig was frequently able to meet off the record with oth-
ers in the White House; on August 7, for example, he
spent one hour with Vice President Ford in Ford's office
with no record of the visit on Ford's official logs. Keeping
incomplete logs and slipping in visitors for private meet-
ings is an accepted way of life at the top of government,
and is often essential to the conduct of foreign affairs. De-
liberately ordering the falsification of records is another
matter, however, and raises a basic question about Haig's
intent on the afternoon of August 1: what guarantees were
being made to Nixon in return for his immediate resigna-
tion-an abdication that would spare the nation, and the
Republican Party, the prospect of a lengthy impeachment
trial in the U. S. Senate? Nixon's main bargaining power at
this point was a threat not to resign, with its dire implica-
tions for Republican re-election chances-that is to say,
Gerald Ford's election chances-in 1976. Haig, asked re-
cently to explain why he ordered the logs falsified, failed to
respond.
Buzhardt discussed the meeting only once, in an inter-
view published February 1, 1976, in The Washington Post.
Asked about Ford's 1974 account of the August 1 meeting,
in which Haig listed the various "options," including a par-
don, Buzhardt told Walter Pincus, the reporter, "I don't
know if Al was rattling off every idea; every possibility. I
would assume that he would have discussed with Presi-
dent Nixon this matter before going to the Vice President,
because it was my observation that he just didn't make
decisions on his own without taking them up with the
President, at this time or any other time." Buzhardt also
said that he and others on the White House staff had initi-
ated discussions with Nixon of a presidential pardon well
before the July 24 Supreme Court decision that led to the
disclosure of the smoking-gun tape. The decision prompted
more discussion. On July 24, Buzhardt said, he proposed to
Nixon, with Haig and James St. Clair, Nixon's Watergate
attorney, listening on the telephone, that the entire Water-
gate issue could be "mooted" if Nixon pardoned all of the
Watergate defendants and then himself. Buzhardt told
Pincus that on the afternoon of August 1, moments before
Haig's second visit with Ford, he and Haig once again dis-
cussed Buzhardt's opinion that a President could be par-
doned for crimes not yet the subject of criminal indict-
ment. (The story, which raised prima facie questions about
whom Haig was representing at the August 1 meeting, at-
tracted little interest, even from the editors of the Post,
who decided not to publish it on the front page. "We were
deep into a period of `Let's forget it-Ford's a nice guy,' "
Pincus says.)
In his memoirs, Robert Hartmann described his anxiety
as he waited in his nearby office for Ford to finish his meet-
ing with Haig. "Haig stayed for what seemed like an eter-
nity," Hartmann wrote. After Hartmann was finally called
in, Ford announced, "What I am going to tell you must not
go any farther than this room." He explained quickly that
Haig had discussed the seriousness of the June 23
transcript and the limited number of options available to
Nixon. Ford said that "Haig had talked about the possi-
bility of Nixon pardoning himself before resigning, which
the lawyers thought he had the power to do, or of
resigning and then being pardoned." Hartmann's account
continued:
"Jesus!" I said aloud. To myself: So that's the pitch
Haig wouldn't make with me present. Aloud again:
"What did you tell him?"
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PAGE 62 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY AUGUST 198
"I didn't tell him anything. 1 told him I needed time to
think about it."
"You what?" I fairly shouted.
It was almost the worst answer Haig could have taken
back to the White House. Far from telling nothing, Ford
had told Haig that he was at least willing to entertain the
idea-probably all that Haig and Nixon wanted to know
Hartmann quoted himself as telling Ford, "I think you
should have taken Haig by the scruff of the neck and the
seat of his pants and thrown him the hell out of your office
... And then you should have called an immediate press
conference and told the world why."
Hartmann was still troubled at the close of the conversa-
tion: "It was as if he hadn't heard a word of my outburst. I
could see that he had not yet grasped the monstrous im-
propriety of Haig's even mentioning the word `pardon' in
his presence."
The aide who saw Haig leave Ford's office then accompa-
nied Ford to Observatory Hill, where the Vice President
managed to sit calmly through a series of briefings from
the engineers and decorators. At one point, the aide over-
heard Ford quietly tell his wife, "Betty, we are never going
to live in this house."
The next morning, Ford told the House Judiciary sub-
committee, he met with James St. Clair to consider Nix-
on's chances of being impeached, in view of the June 23
tape. "When I pointed out to him the various options men-
tioned to me by General Haig," Ford testified, "he told me
he had not been the source of any opinion about presiden-
tial pardon power."
"After thought on the matter," Ford added, "I was deter-
mined not to make any recommendations to the President
on his resignation.... For that reason ... I decided I
should call General Haig the afternoon of August 2. I did
make the call late that afternoon, and told him I wanted
him to understand that I had no intention of recommend-
ing what the President should do about resigning or not
resigning, and that nothing we had talked about the pre-
vious afternoon should be given any consideration in what-
ever decision the President might make. General Haig told
me he was in full agreement with this position."
St. Clair, in an interview last March, was unable to con-
firm Ford's version of their meeting. "I have no recollection
of talking about the new [June 23] tape with Ford, and I
don't remember discussing a presidential pardon," he said.
What he did recall was Ford's strange query as to whether
there was any evidence indicating that the Nixon White
House had been involved in the May, 1972, shooting of Ala-
bama Governor George Wallace during the presidential
primary campaign. " `Is there anything to it? Is there a
problem? Was the White House behind the Wallace shoot-
ing.' I said no." (A year after the shooting, The Washington
Post reported that Nixon had been worried at the time
that the attempt on Wallace's life was linked to members of
his re-election campaign. Nixon was said to have ex-
pressed the fear that if such a tie existed, "it could cost him
the election.") St. Clair also recalled a brief conversation
about the likelihood of an economic recession.
Nothing in the meeting changed his basic view of Ford,
St. Clair added. "What I saw of him confirmed everything
I'd ever heard about the [vice presidency]. It'd be very
hard to justify the office. I felt he had been completely
bypassed. I couldn't figure out what he was doing."
Ford did not describe, in his House testimony, a conver-
sation with Hartmann that took place immediately after
St. Clair's visit on the morning of August 2. In his mem-
oirs, Hartmann wrote that he asked John 0. Marsh, Jr., a
former Republican congressman from Virginia, who was a
senior aide to the Vice President, to come to Ford's office
to listen to Ford's recapitulation of his meeting with Haig.
It was then that Ford told of yet another contact ,vii,h
Haig. " `Betty and I talked it over last night,' he began,
wrote Hartmann. " `We felt we were ready. This just nas to
stop; it's tearing the country to pieces. I decided to go
ahead and get it over with, so I called Al Haig and told him
they should do whatever they decided to do; it was all right
with me.' "
"I couldn't believe my ears," Hartmann wrote. It was
only after much argument from Hartmann and Marsh-
and from Bryce Harlow, the former Nixon aide they called
in to support them-that Ford made the telephone call
to Haig in which he sought to disavow what had taken
place the afternoon and night before. After that call, Hart-
mann wrote, he had a drink with Harlow and Marsh to
toast "a good day's work." "We thought that was the end
of it."
Ford, in his memoirs, wrote that it was Haig who initiat-
ed the telephone call the night before, which came shortly
before 1:30 in the morning. "Nothing has changed," Ford
quoted Haig as explaining. "The situation is as fluid as
ever." He told Haig, Ford wrote, that he and his wife had
decided that "we can't get involved in the White House
decision-making process." Robert Hartmann recollects the
conversation differently: "I know w hat most upset me was
the fact that Ford had called Haig," he wrote. "Why would
Haig telephone the Vice President at 1:30 A. M. to say noth-
ing had changed? And why, if Ford informed Haig that
night that `we can't get involved,' did he have to go
through it all over again the next day for Harlow, Marsh
and me?" In the interview for this article, Ford acknowl-
edged Hartmann's differing recollection, but insisted,
"Haig called me."
The aide who monitored Haig's telephones and handled
many of his sensitive papers says that Nixon left the White
House convinced that he had been promised a pardon by
Ford--and more: the President felt assured that he would
be permitted to take all of his papers and tapes with him.
Others in the White House were also sure that an under
standing had been reached - -one that helped Nixon over-
ride the heated objections of his wife, Patricia, and his
daughters, Julie and Tricia, and give up the presidency.
Patricia Nixon fought his decision to the end. One aide re-
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PAGF.G4 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY AUGUST1983
calls sitting outside the President's office in the last days
and overhearing Mrs. Nixon complain to her husband,
"You've ruined my life." Another White House insider, a
witness to many conversations in the offices of Henry A.
Kissinger, the national security adviser, heard Haig tell
Kissinger, with whom he consulted almost daily on Water-
gate matters, that, in the witness's words, "the President
couldn't go when he was going to face a jail sentence-and
so a deal would have to be struck." Haig and Kissinger
were "laughing as they talked," the witness recalls. "They
laughed a lot about very serious things." Kissinger, con-
cerned about foreign affairs, was anxious that Nixon be
forced out as soon as possible, the aide to Haig says: "I
remember Henry telling Haig that it was time to `bring
down the curtain on this charade.' "
H RIG'S GOAL OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS WAS COM-
plex: to end the "charade," and to do so in a way
that protected not only Richard Nixon but his own
standing with Gerald Ford. A new urgency was added ear-
ly in August: scare talk about the need to bring out the
Army's 82nd Airborne Division to protect the White
House. There is evidence that Haig was behind much of
this talk, which worked its way quickly to the Pentagon
and-more important-to the Special Prosecutor's office.
In his memoirs, Nixon wrote of the crowds that had
gathered in early August outside the White House gates
on Pennsylvania Avenue. He was briefly exposed to their
view on August 7, when crossing the private street be-
tween the White House and his hideaway office in the Ex-
ecutive Office Building. "The crowds waiting outside ...
surged forward when I came into view," Nixon wrote. "I
could sense the tension of the Secret Service agents, and I
moved as quickly as possible up the broad stone stairs and
into the office."
In the second volume of his memoirs, Years of Upheaval,
Henry Kissinger wrote of a meeting with Haig on August
2: "He told me that Nixon was digging in his heels [in
terms of immediate resignation]; it might be necessary to
put the 82nd Airborne Division around the White House to
protect the President. This I said was nonsense; a Presi-
dency could not be conducted from a White House ringed
with bayonets. Haig said he agreed completely; as a mili-
tary man it made him heartsick to think of the Army in
that role; he simply wanted me to have a feel for the kinds
of ideas being canvassed."
One of Haig's close aides describes the atmosphere:
"There was a vehemence against us. We had people cir-
cling the White House. Only Abe Lincoln had faced such
ugliness, such absolute vehemence, while in the presiden-
cy. The White House is not a fort. It's a tough place to get
into, but not a tough place to take [by force]." There was
real "concern" on the part of Nixon and Haig about the
crowds outside the White House. "Haig was saying, `Hey,
maybe we need the 82nd Airborne.' " The aide insists that
neither Nixon nor Haig was entertaining any thought of
what he called "extra-legal stuff." Not everyone at the top
of the government was so sure.
On December 22, 1973, a few weeks after Gerald Ford's
swearing-in as Vice President, Richard Nixon held his an-
nual ceremonial meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. One
member of the Joint Chiefs, a four-star officer, recalled in a
recent interview that the President's performance was bi-
zarre and alarming. "He kept on referring to the fact that
he may be the last hope, the eastern elite was out to get
him. He kept saying, `This is our last and best hope. The
last chance to resist the fascists [of the left].' His words
brought me straight up out of my chair. I felt the Presi-
dent, without the words having been said, was trying to
sound us out to see if we would support him in some extra-
constitutional action. He was trying to find out whether in
a crunch there was support to keep him in power...." The
senior officer decided after the meeting, he recalled, that
the other members of the Joint Chiefs did not seem to
share his fears. He made it a point to discuss the meeting
with James Schlesinger, the Rand Corporation economist
and defense analyst, who had been named secretary of de-
fense by Nixon in May of 1973, in the first Watergate-in-
spired Cabinet shake-up. Schlesinger had also been upset
by Nixon's language, but he was noncommittal.
In April of 1974, Joseph Laitin, a public-affairs official
who had served in the Johnson White House, telephoned
Schlesinger. Although Laitin was a liberal Democrat, the
two had become friends early in the Nixon Administration,
after Laitin was reassigned as a press officer in the Bureau
of the Budget, where Schlesinger was in charge of analyz-
ing defense and intelligence programs. They had remained
close as Schlesinger moved up in the government-to
chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1971, direc-
tor of the Central Intelligence Agency in February of 1973,
and to the Pentagon in May. Laitin broached some of his
fears: Was it possible for the President of the United
States to authorize the use of nuclear weapons without his
secretary of defense knowing it? What if Nixon, ordered
by the Supreme Court to leave office, refused to leave and
called for the military to surround the Washington area?
Who was in charge then? Whose orders would be obeyed in
a crisis? "If I were in your job," Laitin recalls telling Schle-
singer, "I would want to know the location of the combat
troops nearest to downtown Washington and the chain of
command." Schlesinger said only, "Nice talking to you,"
and hung up.
Schlesinger did not need Laitin to provoke his suspicions
of the President and the men immediately around him. He
had watched, while serving in the Bureau of the Budget,
as Nixon and Kissinger, invariably using Haig as their ex-
ecutive agent, repeatedly bypassed Melvin Laird, then
secretary of defense. Laird would simply be eliminated
from the chain of command, as combat orders for the war
in Vietnam would go directly from the White House to the
Joint Chiefs of Staff. At one point early in the Administra-
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Canada, Davis Cup Tennis.
Australian Rules Football,
--,M,,World Cup Skiing,
and much, much more.
But we do more than
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Horse Racing
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special events
like the NFL Dra nd the
Baseball Hall of Fame
induction ceremonies.
The excitement and ,,,A
involvement of sports
has no boundaries. And
neither ?does ESPN. Where
the cheering never
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"? ESPN bring
you all the excite
color
of sports. /And
goes anywhere in
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tion, Schlesinger had expressed his concern about such
practices to Haig, who shrugged it off. Schlesinger's
doubts about the White House's integrity deepened soon
after he was named to replace Richard Helms as CIA di-
rector. Within weeks, the Agency was embroiled in Water-
gate, as it became known that the White House, working
in 1971 through General Robert D. Cushman, Jr., deputy
CIA director, had authorized Agency support for a series
of illegal escapades involving E. Howard Hunt, Jr., and G.
Gordon Liddy, members of the White House "Plumbers"
team. Cushman, who had grown close to Nixon while serv-
ing as his military aide during the Eisenhower years, had
been promoted by Nixon to commandant of the Marine
Corps after leaving the CIA-he was thus one of the five
members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the one feared by
Schlesinger in 1974.
Since moving to the Pentagon, Schlesinger had had occa-
sion to learn firsthand of the desperation in the White
House, he told an acquaintance recently. Late in 1973, a
few weeks after the White House had been criticized for
what seemed to be an eighteen-and-a-half minute erasure
in a crucial tape recording, Haig had telephoned Schlesing-
er with a disturbing order. Acting on behalf of the Presi-
dent, he told Schlesinger to arrange for the National Secu-
rity Agency, the nation's communications intelligence
agency, which is under Pentagon control, to produce a du-
plicate set of White House recordings. Schlesinger worried
that any attempt by Nixon and Haig to involve the nation's
most sensitive intelligence service in Watergate could only
hurt national security. The NSA, of all agencies, had to be
above suspicion. After consulting his closest associates in
the Pentagon, among them Martin R. Hoffman, the secre-
tary of the Army, Schlesinger telephoned Haig with a
counter-offer: it was, of course, perfectly proper for the
NSA to duplicate tapes at Nixon's request, he said; but the
Defense Department felt that it would have to inform the
Watergate Special Prosecution Force of the request and
allow it, if it so chose, to have a representative witness the
procedure. Haig was, as Schlesinger anticipated, enraged
at the suggestion, and became only more so when Schles-
inger persisted by telling him that if the White House's
purpose was solely to reproduce the recordings so that
more persons could listen to them, there could be no objec-
tions to permitting the Special Prosecutor's office to par-
ticipate. Haig abruptly hung up; there would be no more
Watergate-related calls to Schlesinger from Haig's office.
Laitin's warning, Schlesinger's experiences in the Bu-
reau of the Budget, the dispute with Haig, and Schlesing-
er's suspicion of General Cushman were the driving forces
behind Schlesinger's next move. As he told the acquaint-
ance, "I had seen enough so that I was not going to run
risks with the future of the United States. There are a lot
of parliamentary governments that have been overthrown
with much less at stake." Sometime in late July of 1974,
Schlesinger called in Air Force General George S. Brown,
the newly appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Brown was known as an officer who was far more comfort-
able behind the stick of an airplane than in an office; he
never seemed to master high-level politics, with its subtle
language and indirection. Bearing that in mind, and aware
that Brown had taken an oath of office that made him re-
sponsible to Nixon as Commander-in-Chief, Schlesinger
trod delicately during their talk. His goal was to express
his concerns about the White House and somehow to get
Brown to reach the same conclusion that he himself had
already reached. In essence, Schlesinger asked Brown for
a commitment that neither he nor any of the other chiefs
would respond to an order from the White House calling
for the use of military force without immediately informing
Schlesinger. Brown dutifully relayed Schlesinger's mes-
sage to the other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at a
meeting a few hours later. He began the session, one of the
joint chiefs recalls, by announcing, "I've just had the stran-
gest conversation with the Secretary of Defense." Schle-
singer had urged him not to "do anything to disturb the
equilibrium of the Republic, and to make sure we're in ac-
cord." He had said, "Don't take any emergency-type action
without consulting me." Brown was troubled by Schlesing-
er's remarks, and so was everyone else at the meeting.
"We were confused, and George had to be confused," the
chief says. "We sat around looking at our fingernails; we
didn't want to look at each other. It was a complete shock
to us. I don't think any of us ever considered taking any
action. We didn't know whether to be affronted or flattered
at the thought." The chief recalls that one of his colleagues
commented that Schlesinger must have been "thinking of
something out of Seven Days in May." If there was any
consensus, the chief says, it was that "Schlesinger was
coming unglued."
Schlesinger was clear, however, about his concerns. He
continued to believe that Cushman, with his personal loy-
alty to Nixon, was a weak link in the new chain of com-
mand. Hecarried his own deliberations further and quietly
investigated just which forces would be available to Nixon.
He found out how quickly the 82nd Airborne Division
could be brought to Washington from its home base at Fort
Bragg, North Carolina. The Marines, he learned-Cush-
man's troops-were by far the strongest presence in the
Washington area, with an honor-guard barracks in south-
east Washington and a large officer-training facility at
Quantico, Virginia, some thirty miles to the south. Schle-
singer began to investigate what forces could be assem-
bled at his order as a counterweight to the Marines, if Nix-
on-in a crisis-chose to subvert the Constitution.
Schlesinger's overriding concern, in case a crisis did arise,
was the possibility that the armed forces would follow
their inherent loyalty to the Commander-in-Chief. One
comfort was his firm belief, based on what he had seen in
the previous five and a half years, that any such order, if
given, would come not directly from Nixon but from Haig.
The Joint Chiefs would respond to an order from the secre-
tary of defense, Schlesinger believed, before they would
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respond to one from Haig. As he explained to the acquaint-
ance, "If an order came from below the Commander-in-
Chief level, I could handle it."
Schlesinger knew that many might view his precaution-
ary steps as the actions of an alarmist, but years later he
remained proud of his decision: "First protect the country
and then the Department of Defense."
The notion that Nixon could at any time resort to ex-
traordinary steps to preserve his presidency was far more
widespread in the government than the public perceived in
the early days of Watergate or perceives today. One of the
original Watergate prosecutors recalled in a recent inter-
view the immediate fear, once the full implication of John
Dean's allegations in the spring of 1973 became known,
that "the government could topple." When the case against
Richard Nixon was initially outlined that April to Henry
E. Petersen, head of the Justice Department's Criminal
Division, the prosecutor says, Petersen responded by ex-
claiming, "The government's going to fall. And then what's
going to happen?" The concern was that Nixon would not
comply with the judicial process: instead of accepting sub-
poenas for his internal records, he would defy the courts
and any contempt summons. "Who ever heard of a Presi-
dent subjecting himself to a court?" the prosecutor recalls
asking himself. "What if Nixon goes on TV-and openly
defies the court? Who is the public going to support? Thou-
sands of telegrams come in his support, and Nixon calls in
the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Then what is Congress going to
do?"
"I'll tell you what," the prosecutor says. "They'll run for
cover. One third of the country still supports him, and
we're on the verge of civil insurrection. If he told the Joint
Chiefs, `I want the troops out and I want to dissolve Con-
gress,' they would have done it."
It was to Nixon's credit, the prosecutor insists, that Nix-
on chose to accept service of a judicial subpoena and not to
jail the marshal delivering it. "You've got to say this for
him-he had respect for the government, because
he stepped out. If he were a Hitler or a Stalin, he'd have
gone all the way, brought the house down. And that's
what Jaworski was afraid of and that's what we were
afraid of."
H AIG HAS BEEN DESCRIBED REPEATEDLY IN THE
Watergate literature as the architect of Nixon's
resignation, as the man who helped maneuver the
President out of office. Haig did play that role, but his es-
sential loyalty to Nixon remained constant throughout the
difficult last days, and his mission in easing out Nixon was
to strike the best deal possible for him. His greatest suc-
cesses in the summer of 1974 were with Gerald Ford and
with Leon Jaworski, who arrived in November of 1973 as
Watergate Prosecutor with the firm belief that there was
no constitutional basis for indicting a sitting President.
Haig had initially offered the job to Jaworski, on Nixon's
behalf, in late October of 1973, two weeks after Nixon
fired Archibald Cox, the original Special Prosecutor-an
act that triggered the resignations and protests that be-
came known as the Saturday Night Massacre. The high
price to the nation of Cox's dismissal was a bargain to the
men in the White House: one aide recalls Haig's descrip-
tion of Cox, a Harvard law professor, as "a silver bullet
that missed."
Jaworski, sixty-eight, a past president of the American
Bar Association, was known as a conservative Democrat
with strong ties to Lyndon Johnson and as a man with a
strong ego. He was a firm believer in national security and
the sanctity of the presidency. In their first meeting,
Jaworski later wrote in his memoirs, Haig praised his
qualifications and added, "You're highly regarded and it's
no secret that you're high on the list for an appointment to
the Supreme Court." Jaworski described the remark as
perhaps "part flattery" and perhaps "part fact." Their rela-
tionship flourished over the next few months; he and Haig
would often talk by telephone and confer in the White
House Map Room. The Prosecution Force attorneys were
increasingly troubled by Jaworski's willingness to meet
privately with Haig, particularly since the attorneys all
understood-as did Jaworski-that they had accumulated
extensive evidence by the end of 1973 showing that Nixon
was guilty of participation in the Watergate cover-up. The
Prosecution Force attorneys did not question Jaworski's
basic integrity, for he clearly was a man of principle; it was
his sophistication that was at issue. One senior Watergate
prosecutor recalls that he and his colleagues would discuss
Jaworski's belief that "he was a better poker player" than
Haig. "Leon thought he had become a good friend of Haig
and could trust him," the prosecutor says, "and that Haig
had the country's needs at heart." The prosecutors feared
that Jaworski was relaying inside information to Haig.
They speculated that Jaworski, perhaps because of his ser-
vice as a colonel in World War II and later as an Army
prosecutor at Nuremberg, and because of his inherent re-
spect for the uniform, had convinced himself that Haig was
a career professional and not a politician.
An aide close to Haig characterizes Haig's selection of
Jaworski as one of his shrewdest moves. "Jaworski was
thoughtful and patriotic, but he didn't know all of the many
parts," the aide, who was the notetaker at some of their
meetings, says. Jaworski viewed Haig as a peer, equally
thoughtful and patriotic.
"Haig was the opposing general," the aide says. "It was
Rommel versus Montgomery in the North African desert.
They were the heads of armies, and it wasn't personal be-
tween them. Underneath them were all the emotions and
the tumult, and both men knew that the guys below would
sell them out." Jaworski had consistent conflicts with the
younger members of the Watergate Prosecution Force,
and Haig, the aide says, was distressed by what he viewed
as disloyalty among the junior White House aides to the
President-and ultimately to himself.
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"So they would meet in the Map Room, and Haig would
move close to Leon, stare at him intensely with his blue
eyes, and warn Leon about the dangers to the nation that
Watergate posed." The aide says, with obvious admira-
tion, "Haig understood the play."
The Watergate Prosecution Force had drawn up a 128-
page "Prosecution Report" by early February of 1974, out-
lining what it described as conclusive evidence of Nixon's
involvement in criminal activity. There was no need in
that office for a "smoking gun." During the next months,
Jaworski was in a constant struggle with the Watergate
grand jury, composed of twenty-three Washington resi-
dents, over the question of indicting Nixon. Jaworski, not
content merely to discourage the grand jurors from indict-
ing the President, warned them that as long as Nixon was
in office he, as Special Prosecutor, would not sign an indict-
ment. His was the ultimate authority, because no indict-
ments could be issued without his personal approval.
Jaworski held back none of his fears in his attempts to
maintain control over the grand jurors. In a June, 1982,
segment of the ABC television show 20/20, Harold Evans,
deputy foreman of the grand jury, described some of
Jaworski's arguments against indictment: "He gave us
some very strange arguments.... He gave us the trauma
of the country, and he's the Commander-in-Chief of the
armed forces, and what happens if he surrounded the
White House with his armed forces? Would the courts be
able to act?" Did Alexander Haig, who is known to have
spread similar concerns inside the White House, discuss
this possible use of force with Jaworski?
In retrospect, Jaworski seems almost to have been a
confidant of Haig in the last days. Internal Watergate
Prosecution Force records, made available under the Free-
dom of Information Act, show that Haig matter-of-factly
told Jaworski at a private lunch on August 8 that Nixon
had finally decided to resign, effective at noon the next
day, and would announce that decision in a televised ad-
dress to the nation that evening. Haig said that Nixon
would be taking all of his documents to California with
him, and that-according to a Prosecution Force memo-
randum summarizing a report Jaworski gave his three top
aides that afternoon-"there will be no hanky-panky."
Haig also told Jaworski that there was "no question" that
someone in the White House had tampered with the presi-
dential tapes, but added that he had no further knowledge.
The records show that Haig told Jaworski that Nixon "will
not be doing anything for defendants-there will be no
pardons." Haig further assured Jaworski that he, acting
for Nixon, was not asking for anything in relaying all of
this information; Nixon's resignation was not part of any
understanding or bargaining, "tacitly or otherwise." On
August 9, Jaworski met with about a dozen members of
the senior prosecution staff and, according to notes of that
meeting, once again relayed Haig's report that Nixon was
taking "some things" with him. Jaworski added that Haig
had assured him that "there will be lawyers at San Cle-
mente who will know about these things" (the status of
pending Prosecution Force requests for White House
documents).
That Jaworski would take Haig's assurance at face val-
ue, after more than a year of repeated White House lies,
deletions, and erasures in a broad array of subpoenaed
documents, says much about his relief at not having to face
the indictment and trial of Nixon. From the day of Nixon's
resignation, Jaworski became, in effect, one of the White
House's strongest allies in the struggle to avoid an immedi-
ate indictment. Jaworski saw Nixon's resignation as
enough punishment, as did Haig. Jaworski argued as early
as August 9, according to the Prosecution Force memoran-
da, that Nixon would never be able to receive a fair trial in
the United States, because of the heavy pre-trial publicity,
and that his indictment would delay the impending trial of
the other Watergate defendants. "There are conflicting
factors for us that [the] general public does not have to
grapple with," Jaworski told his staff. He was alone in that
view among all of the attorneys at work in the Prosecution
Force, but he prevailed.
One senior Prosecution Force attorney recalls a conver-
sation in which Jaworski disclosed that he had a compelling
financial reason to end his involvement in Watergate by
November 5, 1974, when he would have been away from
his law practice one full year. If he were gone for a longer
period, Jaworski said, he would be required to receive a
cash payout, on which there would be hundreds of thou-
sands of dollars due in taxes. The Watergate attorney re-
calls his understanding at the time that Jaworski was re-
ferring to an arrangement he had made with his firm,
Fulbright & Jaworski, one of the largest in Houston, with
which Jaworski had been associated since 1931. "It was a
legitimate tax-planning concern," the attorney says.
Jaworski's deputy, Henry S. Ruth, Jr., recalls a similar
conversation with Jaworski over an "equity problem" in
connection with his law firm. However, Gibson Gayle,
chairman of the executive committee at Fulbright &
Jaworski, insisted in an interview last May that Jaworski
had severed all financial links to the firm upon becoming
Special Prosecutor in 1973 and that, to Gayle's knowledge,
there were no assets remaining that could have posed a tax
problem.
Jaworski died in 1982, and the exact nature of his tax
liability may never be known, but it is a fact that his senior
associates in the Prosecution Force remain convinced that
he was worrying excessively about his financial status at a
time when the most critical decision of Watergate was yet
to be made. It was their understanding that Jaworski
stood to lose a great deal of money by staying too long in
Washington, and it was obvious that if he indicted Richard
Nixon, he would have to stay on as Watergate Prosecutor
for as long as it took to try the case. His subsequent resig-
nation as Watergate Prosecutor took effect October 25, six
weeks after the pardon; he served slightly more than fifty
weeks on the job.
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H AIG, IN TELLING JAWORSKI ON AUGUST 8 THAT
there would be no pardons for the other Watergate
defendants, was leaving out an important part of
the story. It began in early August with Nixon's determi-
nation to pardon his former aides, and was played out
largely on the telephone. Haldeman and Ehrlichman were
scheduled to go on trial September 9, 1974, for their role in
the Watergate cover-up. Their efforts to receive presiden-
tial pardons were reported in the press at the time, and
Nixon was said in one account to have "deeply resented the
tone and character of the pleas by his two former depu-
ties." Haig, too, was reported to have been angry.
Charles Colson, then serving a federal prison term for
his activities against Daniel Ellsberg, recalls being tele-
phoned in jail by his attorney the night before Nixon's res-
ignation and told "to pack my bags." Colson was told, he
says, that "Haig was seeing the Vice President and getting
pardons for everyone." Haig did, in fact, meet with Ford in
his offices early in the morning of August 7-a meeting, as
noted earlier, that was not recorded in the vice presidential
logs. Colson was not surprised by the news of such intense
activity, he says: "It was not in the President's personal
self-interest to walk out of the White House with his own
pardon buttoned up but not that of his aides. It wasn't just
because the boss wouldn't want to leave the wounded on
the battlefield, but also because he was worried about be-
ing torn up. They'd walk all over him."
John Ehrlichman, in an interview last March, agreed to
discuss a series of telephone calls he had received from
Haldeman on August 7. He had been out of touch with
Haldeman for many months, and he took careful notes.
"Things are moving fast," Haldeman said at 11 A.M. Nixon
had decided to resign, after a week of indecision prompted
largely by pressure from his family. Haldeman told Ehr-
lichman, according to the notes, that Nixon had resolved
the issue of his personal papers and was contemplating a
"blanket pardon" of all those caught up in Watergate. Nix-
on had discussed with Haldeman his belief that the aides
had acted not for personal gain but "for the President."
Now they were facing prison terms, stiff fines, and person-
al and family abuse-"and for what?" Nixon had asked.
"Serving the President not wisely but well." Therefore,
Nixon had said, he was going to "put the Special Prosecu-
tor out of business by leaving nothing unpardoned." Six
hours later, Haldeman telephoned again, in distress. He
had talked to Haig, and things had fallen apart: Haig an-
nounced that his request for a pardon had been "extensive-
ly considered and rejected as impossible." Nixon was no
longer taking his calls, Haldeman told Ehrlichman. Could
he try? Ehrlichman, whose loyalty to Nixon was suspect
by mid-1974, did manage to reach Nixon's daughter Julie,
but the moment clearly had passed.
In fact, according to an aide of Haig's, Nixon had made a
flat commitment to Haldeman for a pardon. The aide
eavesdropped on an August 7 telephone call between Hal-
deman and Nixon, he says, as Nixon tried to "crap out" on
the agreement. Nixon couldn't face telling Haldeman that
no pardon would be forthcoming, the aide says, and turned
the call over to Haig. "Nixon and Ford had the same deal
that Haldeman thought he had with Nixon," the aide sur-
mises. "Ford delivered; Nixon didn't."
Haig's role throughout this sequence of events is difficult
to fathom. Was he in favor of blanket pardons at one point,
as Colson was led to believe? Or was he, as was widely
reported at the time, and as he said to Jaworski during
their lunch the next day, firmly opposed to them? Or did he
simply change his mind when others in the White House-
among them Leonard Garment, a White House counsel to
Nixon, who had not been tainted by Watergate-raised an
immediate objection to blanket pardons? One firsthand
source describes Garment's role on August 7 as crucial:
"He stopped Nixon from pardoning Colson, Haldeman, and
Ehrlichman by telling him [through Haig] that if he did
he'd go to the slammer, for sure." The source, an attorney
who was involved in the pardon process, says that Gar-
ment's protest "turned Haig around-there's no question
that Garment killed it." Garment refused recently to dis-
cuss his dealings with Haig, but he did acknowledge that
he favored a pardon for Nixon "on principle," and thought
that pardoning the others would have been a "bizarre and
unacceptable act."
With all of the frantic telephoning that day, Ehrlichman
did learn new information. Haldeman told him during their
morning conversation, "I'm calling to tell you something
specific and I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to or not."
Ehrlichman's notes to himself continue, "The specific thing
has to do with the rest of the tapes ... while some are
embarrassing to Nixon, they create no major problems.
Except in one conversation, the President tells Haldeman
that there is a big fund of cash held by Bebe and Abplan-
alp"-Charles G. (Bebe) Rebozo and Robert H. Abplan-
alp, Nixon's closest friends, who were under investigation,
along with Haig, for their role in the handling of a $100,000
presidential campaign contribution. Investigators for the
Senate Watergate Committee suspected that the contribu-
tion, which they believed came from Howard Hughes, was
part of a larger fund and was put to Nixon's personal use.
Haldeman told Ehrlichman that the President had said,
"That's Higby's $400,000." Lawrence M. Higby was Halde-
man's closest aide and considered by many on the White
House staff to be his alter ego.
Higby testified about the cash fund before the Water-
gate Committee, but its existence has never been con-
firmed. Haig's aides were convinced, as of the fall of 1974,
after Nixon's resignation, that the cash was still inside the
White House. "I knew the money was floating around,"
one aide recalls. He and others believed that the money
was stashed in what was considered to be a secret safe in
Haig's office (the same office that had been occupied by
Haldeman). The aide says that the existence of the safe in
the office was known only to a few, and even fewer knew
its location. Haig refused to touch the safe, the aide says.
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Nobody wanted to know what was in it. When Donald
Rumsfeld returned from serving as ambassador to NATO
and became Ford's chief of staff, in late 1974, he ordered
the safe drilled open by the Secret Service, a procedure
that drew a small group of fascinated members of the
White House staff. "It was empty," the aide recalls. "Some-
one, somehow, snapped up the cash."
Ford, in his memoirs, wrote nothing of the pardon issue
or of any talk of money during the last hours of the Nixon
presidency. He described his meeting with Haig on the
morning of August 7 in a few sentences: "Haig was there
shortly before eight o'clock. The two of us sat on the dav-
enport, looking at each other. `Mr. Vice President,' he said,
`I think it's time for you to prepare to assume the office of
President.' "
TO THE AMERICAN PUBLIC AND THE WORLD, THE
change of power on August 9 was an emotional mo-
ment, as an outgoing, defeated President bade fare-
well in a televised speech delivered to his staff. Nixon had
expressed regret in his resignation speech, but refused to
acknowledge that he had done more than merely make
mistakes: "I would say only that if some of my judgments
were wrong-and some were wrong-they were made in
what I believed at the time to be in the best interests of
the nation." One closely involved aide recalls that Nixon
had initially sought in his formal letter of resignation,
which, under the Constitution, was to be handed to the
secretary of state, to make a vigorous defense of his ac-
tions, but was persuaded not to during last-minute rewrit-
ing. His first draft, the aide says, defiantly laid the blame
for Watergate on others. "But it finally came down to, `I
resign.'"
There was a last, bizarre interlude on the eve of his de-
parture from Washington, when Haig ordered the Secret
Service to keep all of the White House staff in their offices
while the President took a farewell stroll through the
buildings and grounds.
Inside the White House, the bunker mentality continued
after Nixon was gone. Nixon's staff had been burning pa-
pers until the last minute. Robert Hartmann recalls that
the offices adjacent to the President's were "heavy with
the acrid smell of paper recently burned in the fireplace."
A few hours after taking possession of the Oval Office,
Ford called in Benton Becker. Becker, who had taken leave
from his law firm at Ford's request (he is now the senior
trial attorney in the Dade County, Florida, State Attor-
ney's Office), recently recalled the meeting, which was his
first visit to the presidential office. Ford asked him about
the disposition of Nixon's papers. "What are Nixon's
rights?" Ford wanted to know.
The Secret Service had reported that tons of papers
were piled up on the fourth and fifth floors of the Execu-
tive Office Building; there was concern, Becker had been
told, "that the floors would cave in." In the first few days
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in the White House, Becker says, "The Nixon people were
burning crap like crazy." Dozens of bags of documents
were piled outside the basement burn room, awaiting in-
cineration. Becker learned from a White House aide that
the chemical paper shredder, known as a machination ma-
chine, had been operating at five times its normal capacity
for weeks. There was constant pressure on Ford's men to
stand aside, Becker says, and to permit the continued de-
struction of White House documents and the shipment of
Nixon's papers to California. Becker, in these first days,
seized authority as Ford's representative. He ordered the
burn room to cease operations, except for the destruction
of highly classified materials, and cut staff access to the
chemical shredder.
On Saturday, August 10, the day after Nixon left,
Becker was at work late at night in his office when he was
told that three Air Force trucks were outside the White
House, loading Nixon's file cabinets and other personal
goods. Becker recalls walking outside to the parking lot,
where an Air Force colonel was directing the loading oper-
ation. "This truck does not move," Becker said. The colo-
nel did not back off an inch: "I take my instruction from
General Haig," he said.
"I said," Becker recalls, "`Let's go right now'-and we
went into Al's office." Haig professed ignorance, telling
Becker, "I wasn't aware of it," and ordered the colonel to
unload the trucks, which were to deliver their cargo to a
waiting transport plane at Andrews Air Force Base, in
suburban Maryland. "I had no illusions about Haig,"
Becker says, "and so I went outside and watched that son
of a bitch unload."
Becker's assumption of authority did not prevent Jerry
F. terHorst, Ford's press secretary, from announcing to the
press on August 14 that Richard Nixon's attorneys and of-
ficials of the Special Prosecution Force had agreed that the
White House tape recordings and presidential files, still in
protective custody of the Secret Service, were Nixon's
personal property. The statement was big news; newspa-
pers suggested that the Ford Administration was, as Rob-
ert Hartmann noted in his memoirs, "trying to pull a fast
one." Jerry terHorst recanted the next day, and it was an-
nounced that Fred Buzhardt, whose office had supplied
terHorst with the information, had resigned as a White
House counsel. Haig's role in all of this is not known, but
he had discussed the matter with Leon Jaworski on Au-
gust 8, as the Prosecution Force memorandum shows, and
Jaworski had done nothing to discourage Haig from believ-
ing that an understanding had been reached on the papers.
But Jaworski had left Washington for a brief vacation im-
mediately after Nixon's resignation, and James Voren-
berg, the Harvard law professor who was Acting Water-
gate Prosecutor, had called the Ford White House that
weekend, after hearing from a reporter that the Nixon
papers were being prepared for shipment, to demand
that they not be removed. Vorenberg recalls being re-
assured by Philip Buchen, Ford's official White House
counsel, that nothing would happen. "I threatened to take
every legal step I could take," he says. "They were very
taken aback."
The aide to Haig who monitored his telephone calls re-
calls that Haig was under intense pressure from Nixon
after the failure of the Saturday-night shipment. There
were repeated calls, and they were abusive: Nixon was
convinced that Ford was doublecrossing him, reneging on a
commitment to ship him his papers. "Nixon was obsessed
by those boxes [his files]," the aide says, "and he was furi-
ous at Haig. He was screaming bloody murder." Becker
recalls attending a meeting with Ford and Haig and listen-
ing to Haig argue once again that Nixon be given his
papers. Ford explained to him, Becker says, that the pres-
sure was originating with Nixon and coming through Haig.
Becker recalls insisting to Ford at one point, in front of
Haig, that if he permitted the papers and tape recordings
to be shipped, "history will record this as the final act of
cover-up-there will be one hell of a bonfire in San Cle-
mente." Haig said little, Becker says: "He was still reluc-
tant to argue with me in front of Ford."
Haig must have understood that Ford, even if he had
made a prior commitment, would be in dire political jeop-
ardy if he permitted Nixon's papers to be returned to
him-especially since there had been heated opposition
from the Prosecution Force and his own staff. And yet
Haig did battle for his former boss. In the first months of
the Ford presidency, he continued to operate as chief of
staff, spending, according to Robert Hartmann, as much as
three hours a day alone with Ford. Hartmann and other
longtime members of Ford's staff, such as Philip Buchen
and John Marsh, were initially forced to schedule their
meetings with Ford through Haig's office.
In the interview last April, Ford insisted that he did not
discuss a pardon for Nixon with Haig or with anyone else
between his swearing-in and August 28, the day of his first
presidential news conference. He went further, and insist-
ed that the "matter" of a pardon for Nixon "never entered
my mind" in this period. He was preoccupied, he said, with
the arguments over the handling of Nixon's papers and
tape recordings. Asked whether Haig advised him on that
issue, Ford answered, "I don't recall."
Haig's goal in those first weeks, along with establishing
control of Ford's staff, was to provide for his own future.
Within a few weeks of Nixon's resignation, Ford informed
James Schlesinger, at the Pentagon, of his wish to nomi-
nate Haig as Army chief of staff, the highest post in the
Army. Schlesinger was offended. For one thing, General
Creighton W. Abrams, a much-decorated combat officer,
who had the job, was hospitalized at Walter Reed Army
Hospital in the final throes of a long battle against cancer.
It was unseemly to appoint a successor before his death.
Another factor was the outcry Haig's appointment was
sure to create inside the Army, where, as Schlesinger
quickly learned, Haig was viewed with disdain by his
peers. The Army senior officer corps was strongly in oppo-
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sition-an opposition that somehow never reached the
press.
Schlesinger finally decided to go out of channels. He de-
fied the wishes of his Commander-in-Chief, by lobbying
quietly against Haig's nomination with two key members
of the Senate, John C. Stennis, chairman of the Armed
Services Committee, and Henry M. Jackson, of Washing-
ton, the ranking Democrat who was most influential on
military issues. Both men acknowledged that Haig's nomi-
nation would pose great difficulty, and not only because of
the protests from the Army; there was the possibility that
Haig would be unable to stand up to thorough questioning
on Watergate during confirmation hearings. Schlesinger's
lobbying killed the nomination. Ford was unhappy and
Haig was furious. Schlesinger got the silent treatment
from the President for ten days, but he had no regrets.
"The Army could not abide Haig," he explained recently. "I
didn't want Haig to screw up the Army, which had its own
problems in the post-Vietnam period. His appointment
would have thrown the service into another internecine
struggle."
One of Haig's aides in the White House recalls making a
series of inquiries on Capitol Hill, just as James Schlesing-
er was doing in the Pentagon, and telling Haig what he had
learned: "You can't get confirmed to anything." The ad-
verse readings from Congress wiped out the jobs on Haig's
list, and, the aide says, "He fell back to NATO." Haig was
appointed NATO commander in Brussels, the most senior
American military post that did not require confirmation.
He did not leave the Ford White House until the issue of
Nixon's files was resolved.
THERE WERE OMINOUS SIGNS FROM JAWORSKI THAT
he was losing control of his Watergate Prosecution
Force and the grand jury. At the beginning of Au-
gust, Jaworski requested members of his staff to forward
their recommendations on Nixon. The advice showered in,
and it was unanimous: Jaworski no longer had the right to
stand in the way of the grand jury. Even James F. Neal,
the Prosecution Force lawyer who was closest to Jaworski
in age and outlook, broke ranks. Neal, who was scheduled
to try the Watergate cover-up case in September, had
agreed with Jaworski that a sitting President could not be
indicted. It was one of many areas of agreement between
them. The two men, both conservative Democrats from
the South, had spent dozens of hours in the past year in
conversation about Watergate, but Jaworski suddenly cut
off those talks. Neal, his feelings hurt, never did learn
why Jaworski chose to operate in secret in August and
September. In an August 27 memorandum on Nixon, made
available under the Freedom of Information Act, Neal
urged Jaworski to "advise the grand jury that you will
abide by its decision and that you will assist in prep-
aration of a report in lieu of an indictment, if the de-
cision is not to prosecute, or will aid in preparation
of an indictment if the grand jury decides on prosecu-
tion.... In any event, the issue is so close, history,
in my opinion, will not argue with the decision if the
manner in which it was made reflects fairness and ma-
turity of judgment."
In mid-August, Jaworski was in touch with Philip Bu-
chen; the two men were staying in the same downtown
Washington hotel, and often met privately. There was also
Jaworski's continuing relationship with Haig. It seems
probable, based on the constant meetings between
Jaworski and members of the White House staff, that
Jaworski warned Haig that Richard Nixon was facing im-
minent indictment.
This possibility must have triggered alarm in San Cle-
mente, with Nixon's feeling that Ford had doublecrossed
him on the shipping of his papers suddenly becoming the
fear that Ford would allow him to be indicted. The public
and the press had responded to Ford's presidency in its
first few weeks with overwhelming support-perhaps
far more than anyone had anticipated. Such growing
popularity was a liability to Nixon, for with each passing
day Ford stood to lose more politically by pardoning
Nixon.
The pressure on Ford began to mount. A steady stream
of reports to Ford, many coming through Haig's office, de-
scribed Nixon's rapidly deteriorating condition. His health
was said to be alarming; there were stories in the White
House that he was acutely depressed and morbid.
In his 1976 memoirs, The Right and the Power, Leon
Jaworski wrote of a visit late in August with Senate Judi-
ciary Chairman James Eastland, of Mississippi, a Demo-
cratic supporter of Nixon's. "He said he had just talked
with Nixon, that Nixon had called from San Clemente. `He
was crying,' Eastland said. `He said, "Jim, don't let
Jaworski put me in that trial with Haldeman and Ehrlich-
man. I can't take any more."' Eastland shook his head.
`He's in bad shape, Leon.' There was a touch of the pity he
felt for Nixon in his voice, but not the slightest intimation
that he was trying to twist my arm." Similar calls and re-
ports from congressmen were being directed to the White
House, in what seemed to be a carefully devised campaign.
Even the Nixon daughters and their husbands were telling
friends and reporters of the poor shape of the ex-
President.
On August 28, Leonard Garment made an impassioned
plea for an immediate pardon from Ford in a memorandum
to Haig and Buchen, made available for this article. Gar-
ment cited Nixon's mental and physical condition and hint-
ed that Nixon's life could be at stake. He wrote:
A Special Prosecutor must prosecute; and Jaworski's
staff [and] the media ... will not let him forget that. My
belief is that unless the President himself takes action by
announcing a pardon today, he will very likely lose control
of the situation.... The country is struggling to get on
its feet. Public feeling toward Richard Nixon is extremely
confused. There is a drift toward prosecution stimulated
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by a variety of sources, but it has not yet crystallized. At
this point most of the country does not want Richard Nix-
on hounded, perhaps literally, to death. Once the institu-
tional machinery starts rolling, however, and the press
fastens on Nixon as a criminal defendant, Presidential ac-
tion will be immensely more difficult to justify and there-
fore, perhaps, impossible to take.
The country trusts President Ford and will follow him
on this matter at this time.
Garment's memorandum was accompanied by a draft
presidential statement announcing a pardon, written by
Raymond K. Price, Jr., one of Nixon's former speech-
writers, who was still at the White House, which raised
the pre-trial publicity issue, as Jaworski had done in his
staff meeting in early August. "Because he [Nixon] has
paid this high penalty," Price wrote, "and because, realisti-
cally speaking, there is no way that he could be given a fair
trial by an unbiased jury... I believe his case can be sepa-
rated from those of the other Watergate defendants." The
issue of Nixon's future was "more than strictly legal," the
statement said. "It turns on considerations that are essen-
tially political ... considerations of the broader public in-
terest, not merely of the mechanical application of laws
written for other purposes and other circumstances." Ford
was being told that Nixon was above the law.
Haig had nothing to do with his memorandum, Garment
insists. He says it was inspired by the fact that Ford was
scheduled to hold his first press conference, and the issue
of pardoning Nixon would obviously arise. "I didn't need
anybody to tell me that," Garment says. "The thought on
my part was that I had some credibility with the new
bunch, and that this was the time to clear it up." He stayed
up much of the night before, he says, writing eight or nine
drafts of his memorandum. If Haig or anyone else had
wanted to use the memorandum "to push and press" Ford
to pardon Nixon, Garment says, "that would have made
sense."
There were doubts among some of Ford's senior staff
members, however, about the speed with which it circulat-
ed. "The Garment memo landed on my desk on the morn-
ing of the press conference," Philip Buchen says. "It was
well done. I remember telling the President that I had the
memo and that it was premature." Buchen says that by the
time of their conversation, Haig may have already given
the Garment memorandum to Ford. "For all I know, Ford
saw the memo. Haig was in cahoots with Garment." A few
hours after its submission, Haig told Garment that a par-
don was "all set-he's going to do it this afternoon."
Ford's insistence in the April interview that the "mat-
ter" of a pardon for Nixon did not enter his mind from the
time he became President until August 28 is challenged by
his response to the first question at his press conference.
Nelson A. Rockefeller, the governor of New York, who
was Ford's nominee for Vice President, had told a televi-
sion interviewer on August 25 that he believed Nixon had
been punished enough by being forced to leave the White
House. The first question at the news conference referred
to Rockefeller's comment, as the White House staff had
anticipated, and asked Ford whether he would use "his
pardon authority, if necessary." Ford declared that Rocke-
feller's statement "coincides with the general view and the
point of view of the American people. I subscribe to that
point of view, but let me add ... in the last ten days or two
weeks I have asked for prayers and guidance on this very
important point."
Ford told the reporters at his press conference that he
would not make a final decision on the Nixon question until
it reached his office. His point, repeated throughout,
seemed clear to most of the journalists: he would not inter-
vene with the functions of the Watergate Special Prosecu-
tion Force. Most newspapers interpreted Ford's comments
as indicating that he would permit Jaworski to proceed
with an indictment of Nixon.
Benton Becker knew better. In late August, he was
asked by Ford to research Ford's constitutional authority
to pardon. "Was it absolute? Could he pardon before indict-
ment?" After a few days of work in Washington law librar-
ies, Becker concluded that Ford's power was absolute and
was not subject to review; nor could he be impeached for
his use or misuse of the pardon power. At this point,
Becker became a supporter of the pardon, a position that
matched Ford's; he was convinced that their conversations
on the matter were a first for Ford. It was with some shock
that he later learned that Ford had talked over presidential
authority to pardon with Haig on August 1. Throughout
this period of intense discussion about the Nixon docu-
ments, Haig was a constant participant in Oval Office
meetings, Becker recalls.
Some members of the Special Prosecution Force, who
shared the overwhelming staff sentiment in favor of an im-
mediate indictment of the President, also were not fooled.
On the day after Ford's news conference, Philip A. Laco-
vara, chief counsel to Jaworski, shrewdly summarized the
situation in a memorandum to Jaworski, made public un-
der the Freedom of Information Act:
In his news conference yesterday President Ford clearly
suggested that he did not believe that former President
Nixon should be prosecuted. Although it is difficult to dis-
cern whether he was intending to "signal" you at all and
whether such a "signal" was designed to discourage you
from putting him in the position of having to pardon Mr.
Nixon or to encourage you to let the law take its course
while allowing him to exercise Presidential clemency, one
thing is clear: President Ford seems inclined to exercise
his pardon power on behalf of the former President.
Lacovara went on to urge Jaworski to defer a decision
on the President's future. "I believe President Ford has
placed you in an intolerable position by making his public
announcement," Lacovara wrote. "I see no reason why the
matter should not be put squarely to him now whether he
wishes to have a criminal prosecution of the former Presi-
dent instituted or not."
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MJGUST19S3 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PAGE 75
The vast majority of attorneys in the Prosecution Force
office disagreed with Lacovara's advice. They believed
that Jaworski was obligated to make his own decisions. In
a series of memoranda submitted to Jaworski in late Au-
gust and early September, the Prosecution Force attor-
neys were adamant that Nixon not be judged by a separate
standard. "Richard Nixon should be treated no differently
than anyone else," Nick Akerman wrote on August 29.
"All criminal allegations involving Mr. Nixon should be ful-
ly investigated and, if the evidence points to criminal con-
duct, he should be indicted." Richard Weinberg advised
Jaworski on September 4: "I ... believe that Richard Nix-
on should be treated like any other citizen this office has
investigated.... the country would accept a decision by
the lawful processes of law, the grand jury, and the Special
Prosecutor, to indict Richard Nixon." Jaworski was re-
peatedly urged to base his decision solely on legal grounds.
On September 3, Phil Bakes wrote: "Your decision, what-
ever it may be, should be made with a clear view of your
role. You are a prosecutor-not a pollster, a congressman
or President. Accordingly, your decision should be made on
prosecutorial criteria alone.... Your function is to inves-
tigate and, if the evidence warrants, prosecute. Your role
is not to discern public opinion and public mood and base
your prosecutorial decisions on your view of the public
mood." The Prosecution Force memoranda, obtained un-
der the Freedom of Information Act, strongly suggest that
the junior attorneys in the Prosecution Force understood
as of early September what the press and the public did
not: that there were strong political forces urging a par-
don-and that Leon Jaworski would go along with them.
Jaworski was looking for a way out. He needed a justifi-
cation for not indicting Nixon. The issue he used was his
oft-stated belief that Richard Nixon could not get a fair
trial in the United States. In late August, he shared his
doubts with Philip Buchen as well as with Herbert J. Mil-
ler, Jr., a former senior Justice Department official, who
had been retained on August 27 by Nixon as his criminal
attorney. After a series of meetings between Miller and
Jaworski, Miller, at Jaworski's request, provided the Spe-
cial Prosecution Force with a memorandum on September
4 in which he argued that the impeachment proceedings of
the House Judiciary Committee and the intense media con-
cern with Watergate had made it "inconceivable that the
government could produce a jury free from actual bias."
Jaworski reproduced the Miller analysis at length in his
memoirs, and added that if he had been asked by a court
whether Nixon could get a fair trial, "I would have to an-
swer, as an officer of the court, in the negative."
Jaworski may have been sincere in his belief, but he was
not necessarily right. His legal staff, on which he had re-
lied over the past year on so many issues, had been waging
a battle with him over the question. In a memorandum
dated September 5, Lacovara concluded that "it is my best
professional judgment that a decision not to prosecute
Richard Nixon because of the occurrence of ... publicity
about his criminal complicity cannot be justified on ground
of constitutional law. There may be other factors justifying
non-prosecution but `pre-trial publicity' is not one of
them." Another point repeatedly cited by the attorneys
dealt with procedure: regardless of Jaworski's views on a
fair trial, they argued, a decision on that issue was not his
to make as a prosecutor. It was a judicial determination.
Jaworski had turned Miller's memorandum into his own,
informing the White House in a letter on September 4-in
response to a request from Buchen-that a trial of Richard
Nixon, in the event of his indictment, would have to be
delayed at least nine months to one year before an unbi-
ased jury could be selected. In other words, he was telling
Gerald Ford that he could expect to begin the 1976 cam-
paign with Richard Nixon on the docket somewhere in the
United States. Jaworski's goal was obvious: to shift the
burden of responsibility from his office to the White
House. His letter gave the Ford Administration the evi-
dence of objectivity it would need to help cope with the
inevitable protests over the pardoning of Nixon.
FORD WAS NOW WILLING TO RUN THE RISK OF
granting a pardon before indictment, but in return
he would need some concessions from Nixon on the
relocation of his papers and tape recordings. Benton
Becker had been struggling with that issue, on and off,
since Nixon's resignation. Becker's immediate problem, he
recalls, was historical precedent: Presidents had always
been able to remove their personal files. He realized that
Ford's instinct was to get the papers out of the White
House and out of his Administration. Becker's initial goal,
nonetheless, was somehow to find a legal basis for main-
taining possession of the documents, which included 950
reels of tape and 46 million pieces of paper. "Plan One was
a subpoena," he says, "but there were no subpoenas out-
standing at the time. I wanted a goddamn subpoena, and I
passed the word through Buchen to Jaworski. We were in
the middle of August and I'm begging for a subpoena and
none is issued. All Jaworski had to do was give me a sub-
poena." None came; there was "no probable cause,"
according to Jaworski. Days went by, Becker says, and
still no subpoena. "I ask Ford for permission to have a pri-
vate meeting with Sirica." Federal Judge John J. Sirica
had handled the original Watergate cases. "He says no."
Becker's second plan was to establish a trust, with Sirica
placed in control of the papers while the various claimants,
including Nixon and the Prosecution Force, litigated. Ford
initially liked that approach, Becker says, but quickly
cooled to it-after consulting other parties, he thinks.
On September 5, at the suggestion of Herbert Miller,
Ford authorized Becker to fly to San Clemente to negotiate
on his behalf an agreement on the pardon and the papers.
Haig was present when Ford made the decision, Becker
says, at a meeting of senior White House aides, but quick-
ly excused himself, seemingly in an effort to have it appear
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that he was not involved in such negotiations. "It struck
me as opportunistic," Becker says, since Haig had been
kept advised "of everything" by Buchen and presumably
by Ford. A few hours later, in fact, Becker says, Haig
sat in on the meeting at which Becker received his last-
minute instructions from Ford before taking off for Califor-
nia. One requirement was a clear statement of contrition
from Nixon. Becker recalls Haig predicting, "You'll never
get it."
Eight hours later, Becker arrived at the Nixon com-
pound in San Clemente, accompanied by Miller. "At the
very first meeting with Ron Zeigler," Becker says, "he be-
gan by saying, `Mr. Becker, let me tell you this right now,
President Nixon is not issuing any statement whatsoever
regarding Watergate, whether Jerry Ford pardons him or
not.' How did Ziegler know what I wanted? It's always
been my suspicion that Haig telephoned him."
Becker negotiated, during the next two days, primarily
with Ziegler. There was one brief meeting, on September
6, with Nixon, who seemed unwilling or unable to discuss
any specific aspect of the papers agreement. Becker had
evolved a third plan, which called for a deed of trust, with
Nixon as the grantor, the government as the receiver, and
the General Services Administration as the trustee. Under
the agreement, third parties such as journalists and schol-
ars would be able to subpoena the administrator of the
GSA, representing the government, and the GSA would
have the right to object to the subpoena on various grounds,
such as national security. Becker's proposed deed of trust
would reserve to Nixon, as the owner of the documents
and tapes, the further right to object. Thus, those seeking
access to Nixon's papers would have to overcome two legal
barriers-the GSA and Nixon. Becker's proposal, howev-
er, did deny Nixon the right to object to a subpoena on the
grounds of executive privilege; he was left instead with ob-
jections based primarily on privacy. As it was conceived,
Nixon could order the destruction of any records or tape
recordings after ten years, but that period was reduced to
five years during the negotiations at San Clemente. It was
the only significant concession. Becker remains proud of
one aspect of the agreement, which specifically barred
Nixon and his attorneys from obtaining access to any origi-
nal documents or tape recordings; they would be able to
receive only copies, made by the GSA. Nixon finally
agreed to this plan, but it was eventually thrown out by a
federal court, which ordered the documents and tapes
placed under control of the National Archives.
Becker also won very little on the statement of contri-
tion. Ziegler's first draft of Nixon's statement, according
to Becker, said only, "In accordance with the law, I accept
this pardon." In his final statement, Nixon still refused to
admit guilt, saying: "One thing I can see clearly now is that
I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forth-
rightly in dealing with Watergate.... No words can de-
scribe the depths of my regret and pain at the anguish my
mistakes over Watergate have caused the nation."
Becker returned to Washington early on September 7,
and learned that Ford was prepared to make the pardon
public immediately. There was a hitch: some White House
aides continued to insist that Nixon, in accepting the par-
don, be compelled to demonstrate some sense of contrition
or of wrongdoing. Nixon refused. He would not give his
enemies the satisfaction they wanted.
It was this issue, apparently, that prompted the former
President angrily to telephone his successor sometime in
the early evening of September 7, twenty-nine days after
he had resigned the presidency. Nixon's message was
blunt, according to those few White House aides who knew
of the private call: if Ford did not grant him a full pardon,
he, Nixon, was going to go public and claim that Ford had
promised the pardon in exchange for the presidency, be-
cause Ford was so eager to get it. Ford was enraged by the
call. "He'd made his decision already," one aide with first-
hand knowledge recalls, "and here comes the guy stirring
it up. He was very, very irritated; he really repented it."
Another aide, who also worked in a sensitive position in
the White House, says it was immediately clear that Nixon
had no "leverage" on Ford; "going public wouldn't have
done him [Nixon] any good."
Ford's decision to announce the pardon the next day, on
Sunday morning, September 8, distressed many of his as-
sociates and aides, among them Melvin Laird. Laird recalls
telling the President that his rush to pardon Nixon was a
disastrous political mistake. If he had been given advance
notice, Laird told Ford, he could have lobbied for biparti-
san support in the Congress: "I would have had them beg-
ging him to do it." All Ford could say, Laird says, was "Mel,
I had to get it out of the way. I had to get it out of the way."
THE PARDON WAS A POLITICAL NIGHTMARE FOR THE
new President. His press secretary, Jerry terHorst,
resigned in embarrassment and anger. So did Philip
Lacovara, in a letter to Leon Jaworski made public at the
time. Seventeen thousand telegrams were sent to the
White House within two days, running at "about six to
one," by a White House spokesman's count, against the
pardon. The Senate passed a resolution, by a vote of 55 to
24, expressing its "disapproval" of any further Watergate
pardons "until the judiciary process has run its full
course." There were no fewer than nineteen bills and reso-
lutions introduced in the House requiring further inquiry,
with sixty-three members, Democrats and Republicans,
signed on as co-sponsors. Three liberal Democratic mem-
bers of the House-John Conyers, of Michigan, and Bella
Abzug and Elizabeth Holtzman, of New York-filed sepa-
rate resolutions of inquiry posing questions to the Presi-
dent. Under House rules, the resolutions had to be consid-
ered by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Criminal
Justice, chaired by Representative William L. Hungate,
within seven legislative days of their filing. Ford sought to
brush off the resolutions, writing Hungate on September
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MIJOU9T41983
25 that he was "satisfied" that the pardon was "the right
course.... I hope the Subcommittee will agree that we
should now all try, without undue recrimination about the
past, to heal the wounds that divided America." Enclosed
were copies of the transcripts of Ford's most recent news
conference and transcripts of two press briefings on the
pardon by Buchen.
Hungate, prodded by, among others, Holtzman, who
had been one of Ford's most persistent critics during his
vice presidential confirmation hearings, rejected Ford's ini-
tial approach and urged him to send his counsel, Philip Bu-
chen, to testify. Ford astonished Hungate on September 30
by agreeing to appear in person.
He did so only after a bitter fight among his staff. In a
report of events prepared on October 7 for a senior govern-
ment official outside the White House, and made available
for this article, the aide who had seen Haig leave Ford's
office on the afternoon of August 1 gave his view of the
debate:
Haig spent the day in the White House trying to con-
vince the President that he should not go up before the
congressional committee to discuss the pardon. Haig is
concerned that the revelation that he, Haig, offered Mr.
Ford a resignation from Mr. Nixon in exchange for a com-
mitment that Nixon would be pardoned would cause Haig
problems with regard to his return to uniform. Apparent-
ly, there are a number of points in which Haig will not
look very good. Further, the whole problem of how Mr.
Ford himself is willing to come across is a worrisome one
to his staff. Apparently, he will have to report that it was
twenty-four hours after Haig made the offer before he,
Ford, called back to reject the offer and, although every-
one believes that Mr. Ford is truthful, they are concerned
how the picture will look.
When [Ford's staff] tried to answer the written ques-
tions from the Committee, there were so many unan-
swered facts that would lead to additional questions that
the staff and the President decided that the least worst
alternative was for him to volunteer to go up and talk,
which would have the advantage of giving him the oppor-
tunity to come across with the integrity that he has and
also would tend to foreclose the "studied" additional
questions.
Ford had much more going for him than even the aide
who wrote the memorandum realized: the Hungate sub-
committee did not conduct an investigation into the pardon
before Ford's testimony. One senior subcommittee staff
aide recalls: "Once the President indicated his willingness
to come up there, there were some members who felt
honored."
Ford's timing was nothing short of miraculous, the aide
says-the product of some inside information, he thinks.
"I remember trying to figure out who should be contacted
and interviewed," he says, "and we were probably no more
than a day or so from seeking meetings with Haig. Just at
that point the President extended his offer." There was
widespread feeling among the subcommittee members, in-
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AA! GUST 1883
cluding such liberals as Robert W. Kastenmeier, of Wiscon-
sin, and Don Edwards, of California, the aide says, that
"it would be an embarrassment to the President to try to
contact Haig prior to the time Ford came up there."
There was no inclination or intent to "cross-examine" the
President.
The precise ground rules for Ford's appearance were
worked out at a meeting between John Marsh, represent-
ing the President, William Hungate, and Peter Rodino,
who was chairman of the full committee. Marsh, now sec-
retary of the Army, recalls that he and the legislators
agreed that the resolutions of inquiry called for responses
from Ford to specific questions, and nothing more. "The
only thing we said Ford would do was respond to the inqui-
ry resolutions-and not an investigation," Marsh says.
The White House imposed no other guidelines or demands,
he adds.
They weren't needed. One Democratic member recalls
having doubts about the President's testimony during the
hearing but choosing not to express them: "The President
wasn't coming over here to be browbeaten," he explains.
Another liberal Democrat, questioned about the soft treat-
ment given to Ford, defended the subcommittee by saying:
"We had a discussion as to whether we would stand up [rise
when Ford entered], and we decided not to. We were a co-
equal branch of the United States and treated him as a co-
equal."
The only member to speak up at the October 17 hearing
was Elizabeth Holtzman, and she did so to the chagrin of
her colleagues. "I wish to express my dismay," she told the
President, "that the format of this hearing will not be able
to provide to the American public the full truth and all the
facts respecting your issuance of a pardon to Richard Nix-
on. Unfortunately, each member of this committee will
have only five minutes in which to ask questions about this
most serious matter. And unfortunately, despite my urg-
ing, the committee declined ... to prepare fully for your
coming by calling other witnesses, such as Alexander
Haig, Mr. Buchen, Mr. Becker, and failed to insist on full
production of documents by you ... I must confess my
own lack of easiness at participating in a proceeding that
has raised such high expectations and unfortunately will
not be able to respond to them."
Ford was permitted to make an extensive opening state-
ment; each of the nine subcommittee members was al-
lowed only five minutes for questioning. Ford's appearance
lasted less than two hours and won him plaudits for his
willingness to face his questioners in person.
Discussing the hearing recently, Holtzman was still an-
gry. "Once you failed to do the proper groundwork, there
was no way the questioning could effectively be carried
out." She recalls being sharply criticized by many news-
papers for her tart remarks to the President, but says that
upon returning to her home district in Brooklyn, "people
were hugging me on the street."
In late November, after no further staff inquiry, the
Hungate subcommittee voted formally to end its investiga-
tion into the pardon. Only three members, Holtzman, Kas-
tenmeier, and Edwards, voted in favor of further hearings.
Holtzman, now district attorney of Kings County (Brook-
lyn), New York, says, "Ford's never answered the ques-
tions about the pardon to this day."
Ford, asked about the Nixon telephone call in the inter-
view for this article, cited his testimony before the sub-
committee, in which he stated that he had no conversa-
tions with Nixon about the pardon. "That testimony was
made on my recollection right after the pardon," he said.
"It was fresh on my mind." He went on: "Secondly, in order
to find out any additional information, I got my telephone
logs from the Ford library." Those logs showed only one
conversation with Nixon, on August 20, which dealt with
Ford's choice of Nelson Rockefeller as his vice presidential
candidate. "If you go by my memory and if you go by the
White House telephone logs," he said, "the call did not
take place."
Many of Ford's former close aides, including Benton
Becker, say that it was extremely easy for senior White
House officials to receive personal calls on outside lines
that were not monitored by the switchboard and thus
not logged. "I know there are private lines," Becker says.
One of Ford's associates points out that Ford was not
categorical in denying that such a telephone call took
place; he was only stating that he had no recollection of it,
and was convinced that he would have remembered such
an event.
The Hungate subcommittee, by not fully investigating
the pardon, failed to fulfill its constitutional obligations.
Theirs was not the only failure. Leon Jaworski found him-
self unable to meet the immense responsibilities of his po-
sition, and undercut his authority by maintaining close
contact with the closest aide to the man he was investigat-
ing. Those former White House staff aides who know
enough to have serious doubts about the process-doubts
they waited nine years to discuss with an outsider-did
not have the courage at the time to talk, or act. Richard
Nixon, with his continued efforts to influence the White
House through the good offices of Alexander Haig, demon-
strated that his fall from power had taught him little. And
Gerald Ford, by putting self-interest and political loyalty
to a benefactor above his duty, did not give the American
legal system a chance to work. The transfer of power in
August of 1974 was not a triumph for democracy. ^
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000402830009-9