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THE INTERVIEWS

THE INTERVIEWS: DAYS 1–2

March 23, 1977, and March 25, 1977

As N-Day dawned in California, I found myself considering how best to get the ex-president talking. Though the sessions were bound to be edited and aired out of order, I liked the idea of starting the first day with a question that might also head our first program. I also felt it was important for Nixon and the American people to pick up where they had left off three years earlier. As I drank a black coffee, my mind wandered toward Watergate.

I met my team in the hotel lobby at 7:45, and we set out for the one-and-a-half-hour drive to Monarch Bay. As we drove, we debated the merits of various possible openings.

“Why don’t we start with the question everybody talks about?” I asked. “Why didn’t he burn the tapes?”

Bob didn’t like the idea. “It could open up the entire Watergate matter long before we’re ready to delve into it. And if he regards it as a breach of our understanding to discuss Watergate after Easter, it’s more likely to set the sort of negative tone you’re worried about.”

Birt was less apprehensive.

“Apart from Bob’s point about the breach of understanding, I can’t see any real harm in it,” he said. “It’s not likely to take him by surprise. My goodness, if he’s thought of nothing else about Watergate, he’s surely thought of that. Provided we don’t stay too long on the subject, I don’t feel strongly one way or the other.” We made no final decision in the car. I would check with Brennan about the breach-of-understanding issue, then trust my own instincts.

Our 9:35 arrival at the Monarch Bay estate was greeted by a swarm of network and local media. I paused briefly, then hurried inside. Nixon would be arriving at 10:10.

At precisely the appointed moment, Nixon’s white Lincoln Continental pulled up to the curb. What impressed me first about the ex-president that first morning was his apparent robust health. Gone was the tortured mien of the resignation period, the jangle of bones that had offered a hollow victory salute on his departure by helicopter, even the recuperating recluse of our meetings with Swifty Lazar. The Nixon now gliding toward us looked formidable, tough, knowledgeable, well briefed, and confident he would soon be at the top of his game. It was a moment to savor.

We shook hands, then parted for a few moments of final preparation and makeup. Fifteen minutes later, we walked along the passage and through the kitchen into the living room, where the cameras were waiting. Nixon showed no sign of nervousness. His face seemed set, determined; his gaze firm.

The first question could be so important, I thought again. Will the nudge of the unexpected elicit an honest response, crisply delivered, right to the point? Or will he feel betrayed, besieged by those hostile media types, the target of another gunman from the eastern establishment? As we took our seats, I decided to test him. The cameras rolled.

“Mr. President, we are going to be covering a lot of subjects and a great deal of detail over the course of the next six hours, but I must begin completely out of context by asking you one question, more than any other, almost every American and people all over the world want me to ask. They all have their questions, but one of them in every case is: Why didn’t you burn the tapes?”

Nixon didn’t like what he had heard. Intellectually, he was an orderly man who stored his information in modular units and who drew upon them as programmed. This day was supposed to be about other topics, and his interlocutor had started it off with a subject about which he knew everything but had no structured thoughts prepared. Still, Nixon wanted his public back and the seasoned politician knew the hazards of a brash response. The air of feigned diplomacy he now adopted was a hat he would don repeatedly over the next month when confronted by questions or accusations he found distasteful.

“Mr. Frost,” he began now, “as you know, we agreed that we would cover the Watergate aspects of these various programs, the White House years, and the early life as well in our last taping session, but since you have that as a major concern among your listeners and viewers, there is no reason why I at least can’t respond briefly to it now and you can explore it at greater length later if you like.”

I noted the breach of protocol but returned to the question. “But everybody says, Why didn’t you burn the tapes? And in a word, I wondered what your answer was.”

A generation later, journalists, scholars, and others still ponder the question. Dates and events are tossed around like football plays on Super Bowl Sunday. All are premised on Nixon explaining his action as a defense of the presidency from encroachment by Congress and the courts. The earlier Nixon had acted, the less evidence documenting the Watergate crimes would have come to light and the more time his natural political allies would have had to rally to his defense. The optimum moment to move would have been within hours of White House aide Alexander Butterfield’s Ervin Committee testimony disclosing the existence of the taping system. Destruction of the tapes could have been accompanied by a speedy but thorough White House investigation identifying the wrongdoers—nearly all of whom were already known by Mr. Nixon—firing them from whatever positions they held, and issuing pardons to all involved in a “boys will be boys” type adventure that had gotten horrifyingly out of hand.

Back on the set, I hoped silently that Mr. Nixon could be both forthright and concise in his response. It was not to be. Nixon warned that “it takes a little bit more than a word” because “you have to understand why they were put in.” Twenty minutes later we were still understanding a pretty simple narrative. Upon moving into the White House, Nixon had learned that Lyndon Johnson had maintained an elaborate taping system including both phones and offices, apparently his way of building an accurate record of his presidency. He further learned that Kennedy too had maintained a system. “Not as extensive apparently as President Johnson’s, but that there were several hundred tapes of conversations that had occurred while he was president that had been taped and put in his library.” Nixon had the Johnson system dismantled but installed a new one in February 1971 on Johnson’s strong recommendation, “just in places where we conduct official business.” This one would play a fateful role in his presidency.

Mr. Nixon’s account was flavored with wordy descriptions of LBJ’s persuasiveness and a syrupy recollection of a military medal ceremony he was happy to have taped. Nixon vaguely recalled having urged H. R. Haldeman to purge the tapes of all save historic content, but Haldeman recalled having received no such instructions. After Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were sent packing, Nixon, at the suggestion of General Alexander Haig, his new chief of staff, listened for the first time to all of the Watergate tapes involving conversations with John Dean. Keeping those tapes “was probably a good idea because the tapes in many respects contradicted charges that had been made by Mr. Dean…”

Finally he got to Butterfield and the question of destroying the tapes. “I considered it. Ah, but I felt, ah, that first, if I were to destroy them, it would be an indication that I felt there were conversations on there that demonstrated that I was guilty. I thought it would be an admission of guilt to destroy them.”

Nixon related that after Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox had won the right in the Court of Appeals to subpoena nine crucial tapes, he had considered turning them over to Mr. Cox while destroying the rest in order to preserve “the confidentiality of all presidential communications.” But again he claimed to have been influenced by not wishing to look as though he had something to hide. Moreover, “…I must admit in all candor that I didn’t believe that they were going to come out.”

In the end, Nixon cited those four main reasons for not destroying the tapes: he did not wish to act in the manner of a guilty man; he thought that if not exculpatory they would at least impeach the credibility of John Dean, his most dangerous adversary witness; he felt there were other means to protect the presidency against future encroachments by the legislative and judicial branches; and he never quite believed that the courts would compel him to part with the requested material.

His judgment proved faulty with respect to each reason. First, it was the tapes themselves that provided the most compelling evidence of presidential guilt. Second, rather than impeaching Dean—and despite his erroneously transposing a March 21 conversation with the president to March 13, 1973—Dean’s memory proved superb, his note taking fastidious, and his “cancer on the presidency” advice to Nixon—cut it out!—the best the president received during his lengthy ordeal. Instead, Nixon persevered on his own disastrous course. As he spoke, I remembered Nixon’s lame attempt to force Senator John Stennis upon the special prosecutor’s office in order to monitor White House–supplied “summaries” of tapes subpoenaed by the office. The country wound up with the “Saturday Night Massacre,” Mr. Cox’s successor with the tapes, and the president—so worried about appearing as though he had something to hide—with another giant stride down the road to impeachment. That such a lengthy parade of lawyers, special counsel, speechwriters, senior staff assistants, attorneys general, and self-anointed defenders of the presidency were unable to get inside Nixon’s head long enough to fix his course remains perhaps the greatest unsolved mystery of Watergate.

Though Nixon’s wandering tour of White House taping systems was hardly the candid opening gambit I’d been hoping for, I stayed with the subject for one final question: “But looking back on it now, don’t you wish you had destroyed them?”

Even as I asked the question, the entire bonanza of Nixon tapes had been impounded by an act of Congress, triggering a legal battle over controlling access that Nixon would eventually lose. The result would be unprecedented access by students of the presidency and other scholars to the inner workings of the White House, not simply with respect to Watergate and other alleged abuses of power but regarding relations with Vietnam, China, the Soviet Union, and others, and such important domestic issues as family assistance and civil rights. But from the vantage point of San Clemente, still weathering the long winter of his discontent, Nixon already knew the magnitude of his mistake, acknowledging that “if the tapes had been destroyed, I believe that it is likely that I would not have had to go through the agony of resignation…I think it would have been well, looking at it from our standpoint, to destroy them all.”

It had taken a lot to get this small admission. In our bedroom at the far end of the hall, where Zelnick, Reston, Marv Minoff of Paradine, Peter Pagnamenta of the BBC, and David Gideon Thomson of Polygram were watching on a 12-inch monitor, the morning’s elated mood had begun to dissipate. Worries only mounted as Nixon began rambling again. He insisted that he had been judged unfairly because the tapes had been taken “out of context” and that publishing them in a way that showed his “very volatile” private side had undermined the essential dignity of the presidential office. He suggested that perhaps he should have destroyed the tapes, not for personal reasons but because “there’s been a chilling effect, really, on the advice that future presidents are going to get” since the best advice is of a confidential variety.

“Ah,” he said, “I know what cabinet officers and staff members and congressmen and senators and friends usually do when they come to see a president. Many times, of course, they want to be heard. They have some ax to grind, and that’s very proper. Ah, at other times, they want to please the man. But above everything else, they want to be sure if they are heard, and they give advice, ah, and it proves to be wrong, that they don’t take the blame. And that’s why I always assured people…look here, you tell me what you think and I’ll take the blame if it should fail, and I’ll give you the credit and take a little of it myself if it succeeds…”

Clearly Nixon was nowhere near ready to confront the Watergate period with complete candor, but that should have surprised none of us. It was something he needed to build up to, Ken Khachigian had assured Bob Zelnick. “Don’t be surprised if you encounter difficulties until the Watergate taping segment is under way.”

On the set, I was disappointed but not overly distressed. I had gambled that an opening thrust into an area he knew a lot about but had not been a part of our day one agenda might produce a dramatic response. It had not. But little of what he had said would survive the final editing, so all that had really been lost was time. I had to believe he would be more responsive as we began discussing the day’s agreed-upon subject, the last days of his presidency. I asked him when he had decided to resign.

The return to agreed-upon territory produced nothing beneficial with respect to usable material. Nixon produced a rambling, somewhat disjointed account of events that even in their barebones form would be hard to square with what we would come to learn had been going on inside the White House. Nixon said he decided to resign on July 23, 1974, following a telephone conversation with Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, which left him convinced that he would not capture enough support from southern Democrats to defeat an impeachment vote in the House. Weeks earlier he had been assured by his vice president, Gerald Ford, that the votes were there. But then three southern Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee—Walter Flowers of Alabama, Thomas R. Mann of South Carolina, and Ray Thornton of Arkansas—all announced that they would support at least one article of impeachment. And on the twenty-third, Nixon received a call from Joseph Wagoner of Louisiana, the leader of a bloc of about 50 southern Democrats, who told him he could count on no more than 30 of those votes, which would leave Nixon with no more than 190 of the 217 votes needed to block impeachment.

Enter Chief of Staff Al Haig, who told Nixon he had just taken a call from a “Mr. Snyder,” who had identified himself as an adviser to George Wallace. Snyder advised a call to the former segregationist pit bull, saying he could help turn Flowers and perhaps other southern Democrats. In desperation, Nixon called the man who had, along with Hubert Humphrey, been his opponent in the 1968 presidential campaign, only to find Wallace hard of hearing, remote, and unwilling to get involved. “I don’t believe there’s anything I can do to be helpful,” he told Nixon. After a brief exchange of amenities, Nixon said, he hung up and turned to Haig. “I said, ‘Well, Al, there goes the presidency.’”

As we shall see later, this account does not fully comport with what was going on at the time in the White House, where all appeared to be digging in for the climactic final battle. That changed abruptly, not on July 23 but rather on August 1, when presidential counsel J. Fred Buzhardt listened for the first time to the infamous “smoking gun” Nixon-Haldeman tape of June 23, 1973, in which the president ordered Haldeman to speak to the CIA and urge it to request the FBI curtail its investigation into Watergate. As I waded through Nixon’s narrative, all of the fighting statements made between July 23 and August 8 stood fresh in my mind. If it was true that he had made his decision on the twenty-third, what purpose could those statements have served other than to place his desperate allies even further out on a limb?

But my problem at the moment was not authenticating the former president’s account. Rather, it was to get him to respond to questions directly and with some concern for the constraints of time.

“Move in, tear the SOB to pieces,” implored Zelnick in the monitor room.

“Move along. Move along, David,” Birt countered in the production trailer.

I decided to press forward.

A question about his emotional state after he had decided to resign, however, elicited a veritable dissertation on his relations with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, their final get-together when Ike had been on his deathbed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and the tears Nixon had shed a day or so later when he learned that this crucial figure in his life was gone. Interesting stuff, had Nixon been able to describe it all in two minutes rather than ten, but even then not really pertinent to the subject at hand.

Nixon’s final encounter as president with Henry Kissinger, unforgettably described by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in The Final Days, was something else again. Kissinger had denied being the source of the story. Nixon certainly hadn’t been. Yet no one but the two of them had been present. How accurate was the account? Had the two men wept and drunk cognac together from the same Courvoisier bottle they had used to toast China’s invitation to the first summit? (In bringing En-lai’s dispatch to Nixon, Kissinger had grandly announced, “Mr. President, this is the most important message a president has received since World War II.”) Had Kissinger promised to quit if the Ford administration mistreated Nixon? (Kissinger would later tell me that from Nixon’s embellished account of the Kissinger threat, “you would think the purpose of the meeting had been to discuss my resignation rather than his.”) Did they fall to their knees in tearful silent prayer—the Jew who had escaped Nazi Germany with his family and the Quaker veteran of World War II? Yes to all of the above. Most likely Kissinger had designated a senior aide—Lawrence Eagleburger, we were told—to deliver Woodward and Bernstein an accurate account of the session with Nixon. And as Nixon had prepared himself both for our interviews and his memoirs, Diane Sawyer, formerly an aide to Ron Ziegler and soon to be a CBS and ABC news anchor, played a liaison role between the two camps, making sure their recollections of events both great and small were compatible. As Nixon told the story, however, it read like a scene ripped from the pages of a Danielle Steel novel.

“And Henry at that time, and I too,” said Nixon, “became very emotional. He said, ‘Well, Mr. President, I just want you to know,’ he said, ‘It’s, it is a crime that you’re leaving office. It’s a disservice to the peace in the world which you helped to build, and history is going to record that you were a great president.’ I said, ‘Henry, that depends on who writes the history.’…And then he said, ‘I just want you to know that if they harass you after you leave office, I am going to resign, and I’m going to tell the reason why.’ And his voice broke and I said, ‘Henry, you’re not going to resign. Don’t ever talk that way again.’”

Though this initial exchange shed little light, we returned to Nixon’s relationship with Kissinger more than once in later sessions. As Nixon began to relax, his comments on Kissinger grew more colorful. Their relationship, laden with dislike, distrust, disdain, and disgust on the one hand and, on the other, admiration, appreciation, respect, and mutual need, is one of the more remarkable of recent times and one of the most worthy of further scholarly exploration.

In the period that remained, I asked a handful of questions relating to specific moments of Nixon’s final White House days and departure. I recalled his admonition to the White House staff not to hate those who hate you because then “you destroy yourself.” What a lovely moment that would have been for a bit of human introspection, I thought. I had to settle instead for a few homilies, beginning with the respect he felt for his White House barber, the legendary Milton Pitts, and culminating with the advice of his former football coach, Wallace J. “Chief” Newman, to get mad at yourself rather than your opponent when you lose.

He did leave some thoughts to come back to, some at later points in the interviews, others with the perspective of time. His greatest contribution as president, he said, had been achieving an honorable settlement to the war in Vietnam. Second was the opening to China, and third, the achievement of racial integration in the South—an achievement that few at the time would have associated with the architect of the “Southern Strategy” but that rings far truer today with the perspective of time. And while we were on the subject of history, I asked him, “What negative things do you think it will say about the Nixon administration?” He responded, “The primary negative will be that the Nixon administration engaged in political activities which led to the resignation. In other words, the bugging of the Democratic headquarters and so forth.”

The moment of candor proved fleeting as Nixon quickly shifted to a complaint that he was being judged by a “double standard.” After all, shortly after taking over the presidency upon Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death, Harry Truman had pardoned fifteen members of his old Pendergast machine of Kansas City who had been convicted of “stealing votes.” Of course, had Nixon pardoned the Watergate culprits as part of a full accounting process, he would have retired at the conclusion of his second full term.

As the discussion came to a close, my mind ran over the morning’s proceedings. Nixon was indeed well prepared. He was also evasive, long-winded, and, at times, maudlin. Most of the day, I knew, would end up on the cutting room floor. I had a lot to think about in the next two days.

The return ride to Beverly Hills was not altogether without rancor. Still smarting from my having opened with the question on burning the tapes, Zelnick complained that I had yielded control of the conversation right out of the box and had never regained it.

“He had his way far too much,” said Bob. “I know this is not what you were intending today, but you are going to have to challenge him much more.”

“Yes, much more than I thought,” I concurred.

Nixon had talked endlessly, blunting the thrust of any area under discussion, creating a risk that we would run out of time with much ground left uncovered and providing us with nasty editing problems down the road.

“Honestly, David,” chided Bob, “if I hadn’t been selling pencils on the street when you discovered me, I don’t know what I’d do.”

Birt was more sanguine. “Now, we learned some lessons today about how Nixon operates and about the need for David to be more assertive. Obviously Nixon can’t recite War and Peace in response to every question. Now, I’m as concerned as you are about falling behind schedule, but I can promise you that if there are any cuts to be made, it will not be Watergate or other dirty tricks that gets the ax. Now let’s talk about Vietnam.”

Richard Nixon had, without a doubt, the most varied repertoire of parrying devices I had ever encountered. We had given him a soapbox—partly deliberately, partly productively. But he was the one who had built it into a platform. And somehow, we had to be able to prevent him from doing that.

March 25, 1977

Vietnam provided an opportunity for us to prevent Nixon from using the interviews as a one-dimensional podium from which to broadcast his administration’s successes. Objectively, the policy had failed. In the little more than two years since he had brought the prisoners of war home and declared “peace with honor,” the whole of Indochina had fallen to Communist governments. Vietnam had been reunited under Hanoi’s control. Remnants of Washington’s South Vietnamese ally had last been seen clinging to the skids of helicopters lifting off from the roof of its Saigon embassy. Laos, in case anyone noticed, was also Communist. Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge butcher of millions, was in his glory in Cambodia. Before too long, he would be on the lam, tossed out by his Marxist North Vietnamese cousins, who were appalled by his inhumanity. So much for the dominos. Once one departed from Indochina itself, they simply ceased to exist. Thailand remained independent, as did Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Japan remained contentedly under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. Taiwan’s precarious independence had become strikingly less precarious due to the advancement of “normalization” with the People’s Republic of China.

This left us with one big question and several smaller ones. The big question was, given the untenable position Nixon had inherited from two Democratic presidents and the cost in both human and material terms of fighting on, why hadn’t he simply pulled the plug on the venture shortly after taking office? The smaller question involved some of the actions that had been taken—the secret bombing of Cambodia and later the incursion into that country, the Christmas bombing, the puffy rhetoric—all undertaken to support a policy that might be termed “defeat without surrender.” I was comfortable with that and comfortable as well with the underlying moral premise—that it is wrong to continue a fight that is terribly costly to combatants and noncombatants alike when there is no reasonable prospect of achieving success. I must confess that I was particularly anxious to explore Nixon’s actions in Cambodia, where the engagement was not inherited from prior presidents. A fine British journalist named William Shawcross had written extensively about the secret bombing, the incursion, and U.S. political support for a right-wing coup engineered by General Lon Nol, suggesting that the bombing had helped drive the Khmer Rouge deeper into Cambodia, expanding the Khmer Rouge’s territory as well as its recruitment base. Clearly the Nixon administration must accept some responsibility for the resulting human tragedy.

“Mr. President,” I began, “the whole area of foreign policy is such a vast one, but at the moment you took office, America’s involvement in Vietnam was regarded by many as a disaster that was splitting American society at home in a very grievous way for what seemed to many an obscure or even mistaken reason. How did it look to you, though?”

The question did not demand brevity of reply, nor did Nixon provide any. He began with an anecdote that described his opening the president’s bathroom safe the first night he was in the White House and finding only a single item: the briefing report for January 20, 1969. The United States had 538,000 troops in Vietnam then, and 14,000 per month were being drafted. In one of his favorite formulations—which I call “the path not taken”—Nixon said he could have gotten out, blamed his predecessors, and lost the war. But he didn’t for two reasons: “One, because I think John Kennedy was right when, as late as July 1963, he said that if Vietnam were to fall, all of Southeast Asia would fall with it.” Nixon also believed Lyndon Johnson had been right when he warned that “what was involved in Vietnam was not simply freedom for Vietnam, the chance to choose their own form of government, but the security of the United States, the credibility of the United States as a dependable ally, and, as far as our adversaries are concerned, as one that would take positive action to stop aggression.” When he took office, Nixon conceded, he was critical of how the war had been conducted, but “I wasn’t about to go down the easy political path, of bugging out, blaming it on my predecessors. It would have been enormously popular in America.” But it would have been at “an enormous cost, eventually even to America but particularly to the whole free world.”

I felt it important on this second day—particularly on as sensitive a topic as Vietnam—to demonstrate early on that Nixon’s statements would not stand unchallenged. Thus I countered quickly:

FROST: But wasn’t staying there, I mean, that was also at a massive cost, wasn’t it? In billions of dollars; in 138,000 South Vietnamese killed; half a million Cambodians; half a million North Vietnamese; and so on. That cost—it’s a question of weighing one cost against another cost, isn’t it? But you thought the cost was worth paying for what you got?

NIXON: Looking at my term in office, yes. I think considering the kind of peace agreement we finally got in January of 1973, one which provided for a cease-fire, ah, one which provided for, of course, the exchange in return of our POWs. One which also provided for no violations in the future of South Vietnam’s territory by the North Vietnamese, among many other things. I believe that having accomplished that, after those four long, tortuous years, was worthwhile. And that held for over two years. The cost, I agree with you, however, was very great. It was a close call, a very difficult call.

In October 1968, just before the election, Lyndon Johnson suspended the bombing of North Vietnam. In exchange, Hanoi was supposed to stop shelling cities in the South and respect the demilitarized zone, which demarcated the accepted temporary line between the North and the South. During the early months of his presidency, Nixon explored a variety of ways to achieve a breakthrough at the negotiating table. He suggested a mutual withdrawal of U.S. and North Vietnamese forces, then an in-place or “leopard spot” arrangement that would freeze the status quo for the North while still withdrawing U.S. forces. He tried without success to link improved ties with the Soviet Union to Moscow’s help in prodding Hanoi to accept a reasonable compromise; later he would try the same thing with Beijing, also to no avail. “And so we got to the bottom line with them very early,” Nixon recounted. “A line they hung to right until the last, until October the eighth, 1972. Whatever we did, mutual withdrawal, unilateral withdrawal, ah, nothing that we offered would they consider unless we agreed on our part to overthrow the government of South Vietnam and allow them to take over. And that we would not agree to.”

One good reason for Hanoi’s obduracy was the sense that South Vietnam was a ripening fruit that would fall into its lap before too long. The U.S. policy of “Vietnamization,” announced by the president in the spring of 1969, had the first withdrawals of combat forces occurring the following autumn. Nixon purported to condition the withdrawals on the level of military activity, the behavior of North Vietnam, and the progress of South Vietnamese forces being trained by Americans. But in fact they proceeded on an orderly schedule, even through the big cross-border Spring Offensive launched by the North Vietnamese. In our exchange, Nixon defended the policy as part of a larger “four-legged” approach.

FROST: And when linkage wasn’t working in North Vietnam, that was when Vietnamization became, more and more clearly, almost a substitute for linkage, was it?

NIXON: Our policy in Vietnam, as I indicated, was basically a three-legged, or even perhaps, if you call Vietnamization, ah, bring that into it, a four-legged position. Negotiate, military pressure, ah, going—working on their arms suppliers, the Chinese and the Soviet Union and any other countries, even the Romanians, who might have good relations with them, and then, finally, Vietnamization, providing the Vietnamese with the means to help themselves.

To support his policies during volatile political times, Nixon made some questionable judgments. Certainly one was Operation Menu, the secret bombing of a fifteen-mile-wide strip inside Cambodia, which served as a logistical and operational center and was suspected to house the headquarters from which military operations in South Vietnam were being directed. Cambodia’s leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, clearly did not enjoy having his sovereignty disregarded by his powerful neighbor to the north and had privately suggested that the United States might go after some of the infiltrators “in hot pursuit.” And since both the Cambodians and Vietnamese would know they were being bombed, one might have concluded that the bombing was more easily justified than the accompanying secrecy, particularly since it involved the deliberate falsification.

Nixon was unapologetic. “Mr. Frost, it was much better for the young Americans that weren’t killed by the hordes of ammunition, rockets, and the rest, and the number of civilians that weren’t killed. My responsibility was to protect these men.” He argued again that the supplies captured and destroyed had saved American lives. “You know there was no Tet Offensive in 1969,” he jibed.

“Well, there was no third world war either, but that wasn’t necessarily the result of bombing,” I replied.

Nixon did go public on April 30, 1970, with his decision to launch a ground offensive on North Vietnamese forces inside the Parrot’s Beak area of Cambodia, adjacent to South Vietnam. This was the famous “pitiful helpless giant” address whose bloated language sparked weeks of sometimes violent demonstrations and protest marches across the country. As the speech came just ten short days after a far more optimistic presentation, I asked Mr. Nixon to enlighten us as to what had changed. Instead of responding with specifics, he talked in general terms about a buildup of enemy supplies and then uttered some disparaging remarks regarding the quality of my research and promised to provide the kind of intelligence we were seeking. Khachigian would later hand Zelnick some pages from Nixon’s soon-to-be-published memoirs listing a number of unfavorable developments inside Cambodia, including the fall of some provincial capitals, but nothing regarding an enhanced threat to South Vietnam. So much for the promised Nixon “intelligence.”

I asked a long, emotional question about the United States’ violation of Cambodia’s “flawed neutrality,” and how the administration’s air and land incursions had changed the military landscape while its at least grudging support for Lon Nol had changed the political landscape. The ensuing slaughter of millions—did that weigh on Mr. Nixon’s Quaker conscience?

“If I could, if I could accept your assumption, yes,” Mr. Nixon allowed. “But I cannot accept your assumption. Ah, I don’t accept it because I know the facts.” The Cambodians had stayed out of the big war and kept their own civil war pretty much under control during their 1970–1975 period of “flawed neutrality.” It was the North Vietnamese who had intervened and eventually overthrown the government. The Khmer Rouge “couldn’t have lasted a month unless they had received enormous military support from the North Vietnamese.”

After the wave of protests following the incursion into Cambodia, things quieted down. Nixon went to China. U.S. troop withdrawals continued. Draft calls fell. So did U.S. casualties. Congress considered legislation to convert to an all-volunteer service.

In the spring of 1972, Nixon considered how to respond to a massive armored charge by North Vietnamese mainstream units across the DMZ. Should he cancel a pending summit with Moscow, let the Russians cancel, or leave the South Vietnamese to their own devices? Militarily, the big options included bombing Hanoi, mining Haiphong harbor, and giving plenty of air support to South Vietnamese forces. His Treasury secretary, John Connally, offered the advice Nixon recalled for us: “Number one, the president cannot lose his war. Number two, that means he should go forward with this strong action. It should have been done long ago, but now he has got to go forward. Number three, I don’t believe the Soviets will cancel, but in any event, under no circumstances should the president cancel. Put the monkey on their back by blocking the road to peace because of their involvement in Vietnam.”

The summit came off as planned. On October 8, in Paris, the North Vietnamese agreed to the South Vietnamese government of Nguyen Van Thieu remaining in office, pending a more complete settlement. All U.S. forces would be withdrawn. The POWs would come home.

I felt it had been a good day’s work. I had questioned Nixon firmly and responded to his challenges. John Birt pumped my hand in congratulations, and Zelnick seemed—for the first time in days—unashamed of the fact that we were working together.

The Nixon camp was equally enthusiastic. Brennan, Khachigian, and speechwriter Ray Price warmly congratulated Nixon and myself on the dynamics of the day’s debate. Though their reaction caught us by surprise, we soon realized they too had reason to be pleased. Nixon had held his own. He had stated his convictions plainly and had not given way, even under aggressive interrogation. He had not stonewalled or lost his temper, nor did he seem too physically taxed by the day’s energy expenditure. We were back on track.

I should add, however, that perspectives on the issues evolve with time. Shawcross’s theory of how U.S. military action helped bring the Khmer Rouge to power has been questioned by many, including Shawcross himself. More likely it was the inevitable byproduct of the Communist victory in Vietnam, a victory assured when Nixon first announced that the United States would withdraw and then tried to negotiate as though he were dealing from strength. His deal ending the war was where our next session would begin.

THE INTERVIEWS: DAY 3

March 28, 1977

Monday morning got off to a rocky start, when a camera malfunction set us back ten minutes. Nixon unhooked his microphone and excused himself.

“I’ll wait in the room,” he apologized. “You know when you get yourself ready for one of these things, you lose your edge if you let your concentration wander.”

Once we got under way, however, the session proved to be one of our most memorable and significant. The period covered involved the October 8, 1972, negotiating breakthrough with Hanoi, the problem getting South Vietnamese President Thieu to accept the deal, the Christmas bombing, the final deal, and, within two years and three months, the final Hanoi offensive and the collapse of the South Vietnamese army. It was an adversarial session, not in the sense of our Watergate “trial” but because it involved two sharply conflicting theories of the case based upon a carefully constructed and intricate body of facts.

Earlier, Nixon had told us of an informal three-hour session during the June Moscow summit at which Soviet Communist Party boss Leonid Brezhnev, Premier Alexei Kosygin, and President Nikolai Podgorny had taken turns hammering him to accept Hanoi’s terms for ending the war. Nixon insisted he could be flexible, but not to the point of scuttling the Saigon government and forming the sort of coalition government Hanoi sought. Late in the visit Brezhnev called him aside and indicated that Podgorny might soon visit Hanoi to explain Nixon’s determination, “and he also implied that they would try to contribute to a more forthcoming attitude in the talks on the part of the North Vietnamese.” Nixon readily agreed to Brezhnev’s accompanying request that he suspend air strikes in areas Podgorny would visit.

Between the summit and the October 8 “breakthrough” session with Hanoi, Nixon sweetened the deal. He pledged to have all U.S. forces out of Vietnam within sixty days of the release of POWs. Both sides would be entitled to replace assets in the South on a one-for-one basis. The United States, in addition, would pay $3 billion to Hanoi for purposes of reconstruction. On October 8, Hanoi responded by dropping its demand for the removal of the “puppet” Thieu regime, agreeing instead to a formula for internationally supervised elections. The war seemed all but over. “I’ll never forget when Dr. Kissinger got back from Paris after that October eighth meeting,” recalled Nixon. “Kissinger came in late in the day, and he said, ‘Well, the president now has three out of three.’ Because we’d always talked about, we wanted China, we wanted Russia, and we wanted Vietnam.” Saigon had yet to weigh in, but there seemed little doubt of Thieu’s endorsement of the deal that his Paris representative had accepted.

Could Nixon have had the same deal had he been so forthcoming at the outset of his presidency? Could the war have been shortened by three years if he’d made the same generous offer in 1972? “No way,” replied Nixon. “Ah, no way, and I can base that on the secret negotiations and also the public negotiations that we had in Paris and the hard line that the North Vietnamese took throughout that period.”

Going back to Lyndon Johnson, said Nixon, Hanoi had always insisted not only on a U.S. withdrawal “but, as we withdrew, throwing Thieu and his government out of office.” This was true, Nixon said, even when the administration used its “secret channel” in the spring of 1971 to offer a unilateral U.S. withdrawal within nine months—later reduced to six—in exchange for the return of its POWs. North Vietnam balked, insisting on the removal of the Thieu government as part of the deal. Why had Hanoi changed its tune? Nixon offered four reasons: the bombing and mining initiated by the United States in response to Hanoi’s Spring Offensive, the developing U.S. relationships with Moscow and Beijing, the improvement in Saigon’s fighting capability, plus a political factor: “It was clear then that I had an enormous lead in the polls and it was very likely that I would be elected in November. Kissinger played that hard.” Settle now or face a man with no incentive to make concessions after November.

But with the deal seemingly clinched, Kissinger ran into trouble in Saigon. I asked Nixon whether Thieu’s reaction amounted to “a minor eruption or a minor earthquake.”

“Well, I would say that’s typical British understatement when you say a minor eruption,” said Nixon. “It was basically, a major eruption.”

Thieu, as we were later to learn, hated the deal in its entirety, believing that permitting North Vietnamese forces to remain in the South was a time bomb bound to destroy his society. “Un drôle de paix,” as Thieu himself told me later and inscribed for me on a notepad. Nixon could not help out with that kind of big objection. “Some of them we couldn’t possibly get. For example, his insistence that the agreement had to provide that all North Vietnamese forces would withdraw from South Vietnam, because the North Vietnamese wouldn’t even admit they had any forces in the South.”

On smaller matters Nixon tried to help. Thieu wanted an immediate cease-fire supervised by international inspectors to prevent a North Vietnamese land grab in the immediate postagreement period. And he wanted the DMZ to remain the effective border between the two Vietnams. Nixon offered backing on these two items. Plus he offered generous aid to Saigon and one-for-one replacement of needed military equipment. Finally, in a secret letter to President Thieu on November 14, Nixon promised to respond “with swift and severe” retaliatory action to any North Vietnamese violations. “What did you have in mind at that point?” I asked him.

“Well,” said Nixon, “that was simply a letter that had at its purpose giving him the self-confidence he needed to sign the agreement.”

I was somewhat incredulous: “But, you felt that you could get congressional approval for ‘swift and severe retaliatory action’ with full force?”

Nixon: “I—ah…with regard to ‘swift and severe retaliatory action,’ I felt that if the North Vietnamese, which they had so often done in the past, flagrantly and blatantly violated the agreement, that I could go to the country and to the Congress and get the support that was necessary to bring them into line.”

I was skeptical, and it showed. After “peace with honor” and with the POWs safely home, could the president have gotten the go-ahead for new engagements, new deaths, new POWS? Nixon said he could have gone to the country and made his case as he had in the past.

I disagreed: “But the difference…the difficulty for you going on television at that point would have been…all the other times you went on television, although you were announcing military ventures, they were all part of getting out. At that point we would have been out and you have been going on television for support to go, maybe only with airplanes and bombing, but to go back in again. Do you think you could have?”

Yes, said Nixon. “Because the people, having supported the actions we had taken previously to get the peace, I think, would have supported what we had to do to keep the peace…I would have broken the case strongly. It would have been swift, it would have been massive, and it would have been effective.”

“Un-bloody-believable,” said Zelnick in the other room. “I can’t believe that David got him to say that.”

“The rest is a bonus,” Birt whispered to no one in particular from his cramped space in the production trailer.

On set, I kept my eye on the ball and continued to press Nixon. Those were the carrots for Thieu, he explained. There was also a stick: “I indicated to him that if he didn’t go along, we would have great problems in getting continued American support within the…and particularly within the Congress for aid to Vietnam.” When that proved insufficient to bring along the recalcitrant ally, Nixon was forced to send “increasingly tougher and tougher” messages to Saigon.

Hanoi, meanwhile, was troubled by U.S. efforts to amend the still-secret accord. So it published the agreement and urged the United States to sign, triggering Kissinger’s famous “Peace is at hand” declaration, which launched a sense of national euphoria in the United States. Nixon regarded that Kissinger move as a mistake because it put Hanoi, Moscow, and Beijing in the position of knowing the United States would have to deliver what it said was at hand. The statement, Nixon said, “boxed us a bit into a corner…. As far as the American people were concerned, after the election, after that statement was made, after we had reduced the bombing and so forth, ah, they wanted to put the war behind them.”

When Washington refused to back down, the North Vietnamese came up with their own version of bait and switch. According to Nixon, “They began to hint and imply and then insist that the matter of the release of our prisoners of war, military prisoners of war, should be tied to and conditioned on the South Vietnamese government’s release of civilian prisoners held in the South.”

After meetings in November and December, Kissinger informed the president from Paris, “I can’t get an agreement.” He came home on the sixteenth. Two days later Nixon launched his massive “Christmas bombing” campaign against North Vietnam. During our discussion, Nixon objected to the term because the bombing had been suspended for eight hours around Christmas Day. However, on December 27, Nixon launched the heaviest bombing raids of the war. The following day Hanoi informed the United States that it was willing to return to the negotiating table. The more important objective—Thieu’s consent—was also achieved. According to Nixon, “There isn’t any question that it had, I believe, a salutary effect on Thieu, in that it indicated that the United States was going to still take action against the North Vietnamese” if they violated accords and understandings.

According to Nixon, Kissinger—despite contrary notions planted with liberal and media colleagues—supported the bombing. He even urged Nixon to go on television to rally support for it, advice Nixon rejected for fear of locking Hanoi into a rigid position. “Well, frankly, I was surprised and I was shocked, and he knew that,” said Nixon, then typically concocting a rationale for Kissinger’s self-serving behavior. It was all part of Kissinger’s effort to leaven criticism of the administration in this liberal community: “Consequently, he often took a position with them that was basically more reasonable than the position that I appeared to be taking. He did not do it for the purpose of making points for himself, in my view, but because he wanted to keep his leverage with them. He wanted to keep his credibility with them.”

Next to resignation, Nixon said, the December bombing had been his toughest decision as president. Kissinger, he agreed, had picked a bad moment to whisper a dissent he had never expressed in White House deliberations. “In this instance, what concerned me, of course, was that we had very little support even from friends in the press,” said Nixon. He said he had spent a lonely and depressing holiday in Key Biscayne, scorned as a practitioner of “government by tantrum,” in the words of James “Scotty” Reston. Finally, Hanoi came back to the table. “And we didn’t make a big point about the fact that, well…the bombing is what did it, heh, heh…the facts spoke for themselves.”

I noted that had President Thieu accepted the October agreement, Hanoi would have been cooperative and the Christmas bombing would not have been needed. Nixon’s rejoinder: “The new agreement was better than the October accord.” Not his most persuasive moment, as he and Kissinger had been the ones to negotiate the October agreement. As many of those covering the story had suspected at the time, what made Hanoi announce the deal in October and come back to the table in January was the fact that the agreement was merely another step toward its ultimate victory.

I pressed Nixon further. Were the modest improvements to the October accords worth all the aircraft and airmen lost? “I mean, given a choice, wouldn’t you say it would have been better if the October agreement, imperfect as it was, could’ve been signed, if you had your choice? Or was it better to have the Christmas bombing and a slightly different agreement?”

Nixon rambled and stumbled but conceded that even with the “substantial” improvements achieved, “I would say in retrospect, certainly from our standpoint, my personal standpoint…that we would have preferred to have taken the October eighth agreement.” Not all the facts and figures were known at the time, but history has made the bombing look even worse. For one thing, we now know that there were no new North Vietnamese concessions. The deal agreed to in October was the deal signed in January. As one Kissinger aide, John Negroponte, snapped, “We bombed North Vietnam to make them accept our concessions.” The U.S. losses were also severe: twenty-five B-52s and twelve smaller fighters lost, forty-three U.S. dead, forty-four new POWs, all to improve General Thieu’s mood. In the end, Nixon still had to tell him that, unless he signed the accord, he—Nixon—would sign it himself.

Watergate would soon cripple the Nixon presidency, erasing the sense of triumph of January 1973 and the president’s declaration that “peace with honor” had been achieved. Congress was able to pass a bill denying funds for bombing operations anywhere in Southeast Asia as of August 15. And in October, Congress overrode a Nixon veto to pass the War Powers Act, giving the president only sixty days to conduct military operations not approved by the Congress.

When I asked Mr. Nixon whether he could have saved South Vietnam from the North Vietnamese assault of May 1975, he replied in the negative, claiming, “the blame has to be placed where it belongs, in the Congress of the United States.” Not only had they precluded bombing and constricted the president’s power to employ force, they had also denied President Ford’s request for funds to replace the weapons and equipment South Vietnam had lost on the one-for-one basis called for in the now-fractured peace accord. “So—why did this happen? It happened because the Congress refused to grant President Ford’s request to provide the funds for the South Vietnamese to defend themselves. If the South Vietnamese had had the necessary equipment, I believe they could have held on.”

Was Nixon saying “that American assistance, military assistance, would have to be permanent if South Vietnam was to survive?”

Nixon responded, “Well, permanent as long as the Soviet Union was providing permanent assistance to the North, yes.” Even under détente, the United States had the obligation to help its friends help themselves.

Later, Nixon would respond to my question as to whether it was realistic to expect the Congress to appropriate $3 billion to heal Hanoi’s war wounds, with a long soliloquy on the magnanimity of the American people, their generosity after World War II, and the willingness even of returning POWs to lobby for the assistance program. The Nixon peace accord, then, rested on two political assumptions. First, that he could win majority support for an aid program of some $3 billion or more for North Vietnam. And second, that if the admittedly “fragile” agreement broke down, he could convince the Congress and the nation to endorse his military reintervention, at least as regards the use of airpower. Idealist or the ultimate pragmatist, I concluded, it would have been a remarkable experience watching his act had he served his full second term.

“Let’s come back to the domino theory,” I suggested. The intellectual legitimacy for Vietnam rested on the domino theory, articulated by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and embraced by Richard Nixon. I reminded Nixon of the dominos, “the Philippines and Malaysia and Singapore and Indonesia and Japan.” All or most of them were supposed to fall if Indochina fell. “Well, they haven’t fallen, there’s been no discernable effect. Were we therefore pursuing a whole chimera in being in Vietnam at all? Because the domino theory, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—Indochina—fell in April, May in ’75, and there’s been no domino theory.”

Nixon had no easy response. When he had visited the “dominos,” mostly during the mid-1960s, they had been concerned about an American defeat. Maybe improved relations involving the United States, China, and the Soviet Union had taken some of the edge off the danger. Maybe staying as long as we did gave some of the putative dominos time to fortify their own governments. “I am not a domino player,” said Nixon. “But as far as whether the domino theory has validity or not, I think it’s too early to judge.”

I reminded Nixon of an early White House speech in which he declared that failure in Vietnam “would spark violence wherever our commitments helped maintain peace—in the Middle East, as you’ve mentioned, in Berlin, eventually even in the Western Hemisphere. I think that was an overstatement, wasn’t it?”

“We shall see,” said Nixon, weakly suggesting instability in “countries like Argentina and the rest.” There was also the problem of the Caribbean and countries falling under the influence of Castro.

The ultimate question for Nixon involved the human and material balance sheet reflected in his administration. “The cost, we’ve said, was probably, during your administration, 75 billion [dollars], 15,000 American lives, 138,000 South Vietnamese, half a million Cambodian, 590,000 North Vietnamese, and so on. As we look at that cost, and as we take into account the body of opinion that feels that was not so much a peace settlement as a piece of paper, of which, tragically, nothing remains today, do you still feel the cost was worth it?”

“It was worth it in terms of the period in which I had the responsibility,” said Nixon. He again reviewed the Kennedy and Johnson policies and said he had rejected the easy option, “to dump on them.” He continued, “All wars are terrible, but if there was ever one in which a country had motives that were decent, motives that were unselfish, this was that kind of war.”

That the dominos did not fall very quickly, he conceded, “I suppose makes the case as to why we shouldn’t have done it in the first instance. My point is perhaps we will be sitting here maybe two years from now. Who knows? Here or someplace else. Ask the question then. My point is that as far as the United States was concerned, the war in Vietnam was a terribly difficult war…. I hated every minute of it and would have done anything I possibly could to bring it to an end…. But my point is that as far as the war was concerned, at the time that I made the decisions, it was the only, in my view, right decision to be made.”

We touched again on dominos, on good wars and bad wars, and on whether Vietnam, which ended badly, would constrain the United States and energize its foes in the years ahead. For a few years it looked as though it might, as the Soviets and their friends created mischief in places like Angola and Afghanistan. Later, in 1980, the United States elected a president who argued that the United States’ weakness was providing the Russians with a “window of opportunity” that must be shut. A big buildup and some toughness of spirit could still condemn this “Evil Empire” to the “ash heap of history.” Soon the United States tested the waters in Granada and Panama—places influenced more by the Monroe Doctrine than the domino theory. Stunningly, it won a bloodless victory in the Cold War. Sympathizers and critics saw an age of Imperial America in the works, while neoconservatives began plotting the “New American Century.” Later, one U.S.-led coalition kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait while another helped end Serbian domination over the former Yugoslavia’s Muslims and Catholics. Then came 9/11, Iraq, and the war on terrorism, and suddenly people started recalling Vietnam. Everybody’s All-American had suddenly become the Headless Hegemon on the world stage.

Back on the set, we were drawing to a close. I asked Nixon to respond to the theory of someone who had worked closely with him that the thought of losing had been so repellent to Nixon that he could not recognize Vietnam as a losing battle.

Nixon demurred: “I wasn’t concerned about my quitting, I was concerned about America’s quitting. I wasn’t concerned about my credibility or prestige, or what have you, because the presidency is transitory. I certainly was concerned about America’s credibility in the world. And I didn’t want America to be a quitter.” But Nixon’s distaste for disloyalty came out a moment later. “Several members of my staff were bug-outters,” he said. “But I didn’t have them in the foreign policy areas, I had them working on things where they could have those views and not interfere with the conduct of foreign policy, and the very fact that one would make this kind of statement is an indication that I had him in the right position, by not having him in foreign policy.”

I then asked Nixon whether the length of the war, the bitterness and polarization it had engendered, and the abuses of power it had spawned might lead to the conclusion that Nixon himself had been the last casualty of Vietnam. Some interviewees, confronted with a question not specifically expected but fundamental to what had previously been discussed, will reach deep into themselves and deliver a response from the soul. Not so with Nixon, whose guard is never completely down and whose motto might well be: If it’s so goddamn important, it should be in my briefing book. Yet here Nixon’s face became a mask of pain. He paused. He drew a breath. His lips tightened. And then he spoke.

“A case could be made for that, yes,” he began. “Ah, there isn’t any question but that in the conduct of the war, I made, ah, enemies who were, from an ideological standpoint, ah, virtually, ah, well, paranoiac, I guess. Oh, the major newspaper publisher told Henry Kissinger one night, right after the peace settlement, ‘I hate the SOB’s gut.’ And, ah, naturally, ah, coming right after the time that we had been able to have the peace settlement, is an indication of how deep those passions ran. Ah, because that kind of attitude developed over a period of years. I mean, my political career goes be…over many, many years. But, the actions, and many of them I took with great reluctance but recognizing I had to do what was right, the actions that I took in Vietnam: one, to try and win an honorable peace abroad, and two, to keep the peace at home, because keeping the peace at home and keeping support for the war was essential in order to get the enemy to negotiate. And that was, of course, not easy to do in view of the dissent and so forth that we had. And so it could be said that I was, ah, if I, that I was one of the casualties, or maybe the last casualty in Vietnam. If so, I’m glad I’m the last one.”

“Congratulations on a great session,” said Zelnick en route to L.A. “You had complete command of the material. He got away with nothing in an area regarded as his long suit. My God, we fought the war for an extra four years just so Nguyen Van Thieu could rule by himself without a coalition government. Then he nearly wrecks the Paris Agreement that collapses with the first big Hanoi assault. And then to blame it on the Congress. I didn’t think he’d have he balls to do that.”

“Yes, indeed, I agree with all of that,” said Birt. “Now we’ve got to get the story out. I don’t know if it’s Joe Kraft or Clay Felker, but somehow the word’s gotten around Washington and New York that we’re a bunch of softies and that Nixon’s been having his way with us. Let’s take John Stacks [of Time] and show him some of the clips from this morning’s session. And Bob, on your next jog with Hal Bruno [of Newsweek], tell him how tough David was.”

We had already survived one media challenge, the visit of Mike Wallace and his 60 Minutes team. Some had predicted a “David in the lion’s den” hatchet job. But Mike’s producer, Harry Moses, spent enough time with us to conclude that we were in the midst of a serious piece of work. So Mike was the picture of amiability and the interview proved to be quite a bit of fun. One example, Mike asked me what approach I expected Nixon to take:

FROST: I hope the approach he takes will be one of a cascade of candor.

WALLACE: A cascade of candor from Richard Nixon? Is this what you expect?

FROST: No, it was just a phrase which I thought would appeal to you.

We did expect a cascade of candor on China, perhaps Nixon’s greatest legacy, and for that reason adopted a different, distinctly nonadversarial mode.

THE INTERVIEWS: DAY 4

March 30, 1977

Our sessions on relations with China and the Soviet Union were more debriefings than interrogations, and for very good reasons. This was Nixon as he probably envisioned himself, doing big, dramatic things on a world stage for his country and the cause of world peace. And doing them well, perhaps as well as any president in history.

The moment was propitious for an American move. Sino-Soviet relations were bad and getting worse, with Beijing fearful that the Russians sought to dominate all Communist societies and, as a Eurasian power, wanted regional hegemony as well. Normal relations with Washington could be helpful—assuming the Taiwan issue could be finessed—on the theory that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Nixon’s view was the mirror image of Beijing’s.

With respect to the Soviets, there were several reasons to seek improved ties. The first was to get control of the arms race, preserving mutual deterrence against resorting to nuclear weapons, a concept threatened by the development of antiballistic missile systems as well as offensive systems with multiple, independently targeted warheads, each of which, in theory, could destroy ten or more enemy weapons. Second was the lack of communication between the superpowers, which could lead to a terrible misreading of intentions, as happened with near-calamitous consequences during the Cuban missile crisis. Third was the possibility of a regional brawl between great-power clients getting out of control, something that seemed always about to happen in the Middle East.

Nixon had one other item on his mind: finding a graceful exit from Vietnam. He was prepared to make major concessions, including a unilateral withdrawal while the North Vietnamese kept their forces in place. Hanoi was also insisting on removal of the Thieu government in Saigon. But it was dependent on China and, even more so, Moscow for its weapons and was thus far from immune to pressure from its big friends. That pressure was slow to come, the Russians promising late in the day to intervene.

Nixon’s account of the secret steps leading to his historic visit to Beijing recalls no significant missteps. At various points, French President Charles de Gaulle, Pakistan’s Yahya Khan, and Romania’s Nicolae Ceauşescu served as intermediaries between Washington and Beijing. Walter Stoessel, the U.S. ambassador to Poland, fired up his old contacts with his Chinese counterpart. The latter brought a positive response from Beijing. Soon Henry Kissinger was secretly on his way to work with Chinese officials to set an agenda and draft a final communiqué. At first the Chinese insisted that the sole purpose of any visit would be to discuss Taiwan, but they would settle for an agreement to disagree written into the final communiqué, together with a U.S. restatement that it regarded Taiwan as part of China.

Nixon prepared for his trip by consulting with others who had met Mao Zedong and his foreign minister, Chou En-lai. The French writer and intellectual André Malraux warned that Mao would ask, “Would the world’s most prosperous nation provide economic assistance to the world’s most populous nation?” That never happened. Malraux also said, “When you see Mao, the thing that is going to impress him most about you is…your youth.”

Once face-to-face, Mao did not ask for aid. Instead, Nixon felt Mao was trying to take his measure, while leaving most of the substantive issues to En-lai. “As far as Taiwan is concerned,” recalled Nixon, “the only reference was with their incomparable humor. He said, ‘I see where your friend Chiang Kai-shek, ah, called me a bandit.’ And after the translation I said, ‘What does the chairman call Chiang Kai-shek?’ Ah, and he said, ‘Well, ah, I call him a bandit too.’ And then Chou En-lai interspersed a comment…ah, he says, ‘We just abuse each other.’ Then they both threw back their heads and laughed.”

Nixon’s affection for the Chinese was both immediate and permanent. He admired their sophistication and subtlety as diplomats, their sense of justice, and their respect for struggle. The sentiment was mutual. At one point, Nixon recalled, En-lai spoke “very glowingly not of what I had done as president, or as vice president for that matter, but of the comeback…Mao also mentioned that…he’d read Six Crises and paid it a rather nice compliment, saying, ‘You know, it wasn’t a bad book.’ And that from Mao is high praise. But in any event, what interested him most about it was not the achievements, not the crises, but the comeback, the comeback.” Nixon had always viewed himself as the underdog. He was gratified to receive not only recognition but appreciation from the Chinese leadership.

The Chinese took the extraordinary step of inviting Nixon back in 1976, two years after his resignation in disgrace. By then En-lai was dead and Mao’s days were severely numbered. Nixon said, however, that he was still “in charge of himself and he was still in charge in China.” He also spent time with the new chairman, Hua Kuo-feng. To Kuo-feng, the Soviet hegemony issue was still critical. He told Nixon about a 1965 meeting between Mao and Soviet Premier Kosygin. “Our differences are going to continue for ten thousand years,” said Mao to his host. Kosygin replied, “Well, Mr. Chairman, after these long discussions we’ve had and the reassurances we have given you, don’t you think you could reduce that somewhat?” To which Mao responded, “Well, in view of the very persuasive arguments that the premier has made, I’ll knock off a thousand years. Our disputes will continue for nine thousand years.”

Despite the goodwill of these early meetings, however, the road to normalization with Beijing was not without its bumps. Nixon’s old China Lobby friends treated the move as an act of betrayal. Conservatives like Ronald Reagan suspected it would undermine the morale of U.S. soldiers risking their lives in Vietnam to stop communism. The U.N. General Assembly promptly took the hint and bounced Taiwan, seating, to Nixon’s fury, the delegation of the PRC. Four former ambassadors to Moscow, led by the respected Charles “Chip” Bohlen, warned the president that by cozying up to the PRC he would be sacrificing the opportunity to improve ties with the Soviet Union. During our discussion, however, Nixon maintained that the two efforts had complemented each other. The Russians “weren’t about to want to have us have a new relationship with the PRC and a cooler relationship with them,” said Nixon. “The Chinese game made the Russian game work, and the Russian game made the Chinese game work.”

But it was the Chinese game that weighed most heavily on Nixon’s mind. Comparing the two, Nixon said, “to have eight hundred million, and eventually a billion people, twenty years from now, with an enormous nuclear clout, and have no communication with them would be a danger to the United States, to all of the friends of the United States and Asia, and to the whole world, that we could not have. That’s why the China initiative on its own was worthwhile. With the Soviet Union, it was more immediate. They were enormously powerful. They were equal to us. It didn’t make any difference whether we were so many…we had too many…more warheads than they had or they had more missiles than we had. We both had enough to destroy each other.”

Nixon spoke disparagingly of past summit meetings with the Russians that had raised the “spirit” of the country only to produce disenchantment when no deals were reached. Ike had had his “Spirit of Camp David” with Nikita Khrushchev and Johnson his “Spirit of Glassboro” with Kosygin. “I wanted a summit in which we knew in advance that there was subjects and substance to be discussed, in which we could make real progress rather than to get together to shake hands, to tip glasses, to sign meaningless communiqués,” said Nixon. Before they met in person, the two leaders made progress on “a step-by-step basis” until “several significant agreements” were reached. This time there was a deal—two major ones, in fact. One limited ABM systems to two sites, not anywhere near enough to prevent the nation struck first from inflicting “unacceptable damage” on the aggressor state. The second accord, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), limited the numbers of land-and submarine-based offensive missile launchers.

When it came to nuclear arms control, Nixon and Kissinger had proven themselves conventional liberal thinkers. While conservatives had already begun to drift toward the sort of defensive system reflected in Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative program, Nixon maintained that defense is nonsense: “If a nation is able to move forward and commit enough resources to the development of a thick nuclear system, ABM system, this would mean that it might gain enough sense of security that it might launch a first strike offensively. And therefore, that would change the balance of power in the world and increase the danger of war. In other words, you would no longer have the balance of terror. So by limiting defensive weapons, this new breakthrough, limiting them and practically eliminating them now, it means that option is not open to the leader of either of the two major powers, or any power for that matter in the world, which becomes a major power in the future. Because if you cannot defend yourself against a counterstrike, you are not going to launch a first strike.”

Opponents of the deal—Senator Henry Jackson of Washington chief among them—complained that the Russian limits on offensive launchers were slightly higher than the United States’, a fact attributable to the higher Soviet production rate. Nixon argued that the numbers meant nothing: “Now, as far as numbers are concerned, there comes a point when they don’t make that much difference. Because unless you can strike…knock out your potential opponent’s ability to have a counterstrike, that gives you unacceptable damage. That, in other words, it kills forty, fifty, sixty, seventy million of your own people. And even were a leader insane, he cannot risk losing up to one hundred million of his own people in a second strike—that’s not an option.”

The agreements became the groundwork for Nixon’s détente. Nixon: “Détente basically, to me, means talking rather than fighting. It means communication. It means agreeing in those areas where your interests are the same, disagreeing in areas where the interests are different, but having an understanding that you’re going to talk about disagreements and you’re not going to fight about them.” Limiting nuclear arms appeared to lie within the framework of shared interests.

But the emerging détente was put to a serious test in October 1973, when Egypt and Syria—both Soviet clients that maintained no diplomatic ties to the United States—launched an attack against Israel designed to, at least, recover land taken by Israel in 1967. Months earlier Brezhnev, visiting San Clemente during Summit II, had spent three hours urging Nixon to persuade Israel to withdraw from the West Bank, the Sinai, and the Golan Heights. Nixon had demurred. He would not “impose a settlement.” Withdrawal must be worked out in negotiations between the parties. Brezhnev was relentless, warning, “Unless the Israelis withdraw, the Egyptians and Syrians are going to attack and they are going to attack soon.” Nixon responded that the United States would stand by its ally.

The attack came on October 6. Both the CIA and Israel’s Mossad failed to predict the attack, adding to Nixon’s long list of grievances with his intelligence agency. (“I wasn’t surprised to see our intelligence drop the ball,” he said. “And I say this with all due deference to some of the good things they’ve done.”) At first Israeli prime minister Golda Meir expressed confidence. Then the battle started going poorly and she phoned the president, asking for tanks, guns, and other supplies. When the Russians began an airlift of their own, her pleas became more desperate. The Pentagon, under Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, dragged its heels for four days. Schlesinger wanted the cargo aircraft disguised as El Al planes to avoid political complications. According to Nixon: “I finally cut through all of the red tape and I said, ‘Look, I mean, it isn’t going to fool anybody.’ I said, ‘Second, what kind of airlift is it going to be?’” Pentagon officials said the plan was to send two or three C-130s. Nixon checked to see how many were available. He asked how many were in stock and was told the number was between eighteen and twenty-five. Nixon’s next order: “I said, I want every C-130 that can fly to go in there. If we’re going to do this, do it big, do it right, and do it quick.”

The Israelis had soon turned the tables. Their conquered territories now out of danger, they sought to methodically destroy the Egyptian Third Army. Cairo, at Moscow’s urging, called on the two superpowers to intervene between the warring armies. In short order, Kissinger received an invitation to meet with Anatoly Dobrynin in Moscow. “Needless to say,” recalled Nixon, “I was anxious to have a cease-fire and I said, ‘Go right ahead.’ But with very firm instructions that we considered that this was a kind of conflict which should not be allowed to escalate; that we both had to restrain our clients; and that, ah, any action on the part of the Russian that, ah, escalated, would bring counteractions on our part.” Kissinger was able to get an agreement for a joint U.N. resolution calling for a cease-fire. Within days, claims were made on both sides that the cease-fire was being breached. The Egyptians asked for a joint American-Soviet force to come in and keep the peace. Washington refused. In a conversation with Kissinger, Nixon recalled saying, “This is sheer madness. It may keep the peace, but it runs into the possibility of a big-power conflict. We can’t do it.”

It was then that Brezhnev sent a note that had, in Nixon’s words, “an ominous sound to it.” Clearly the Russians were talking about a unilateral troop deployment. Nixon responded by warning Brezhnev against unilateral action, placing U.S. forces—including nuclear forces—on heightened alert and persuading the Israelis to halt their offensive, thereby bringing the “Yom Kippur War” to an end. Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, was unhappy with his advisers, his weapons, and the fact that Israel still held his land. Five years later he would switch patrons, recognize Israel, reclaim the Sinai, and entitle Egypt to $2 billion per year in U.S. military assistance. Three years after that, he would be shot. Egypt and Israel would for years maintain a “cold peace.” Today that peace is threatened more by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the region than by issues specific to the Israelis and Egyptians.

Détente enjoyed a short half-life. Soviet and Cuban mischief in Angola got it off to a bad start. Pushed by Reagan during their 1976 battle for the GOP nomination, Gerald Ford dropped the term from his campaign vocabulary. Nixon argued that we were packing more weight on the doctrine than it could carry: “Détente should not be thought of as peace in our time or peace for time to come. Détente is simply a process under which nations with great differences agree, in effect, to discuss the differences rather than to come into constant confrontation with the possibility of a flare-up into war.”

The 1979 Russian invasion of Afghanistan was a second dose of hemlock for the doctrine. Today it is a largely discredited policy associated with perceived U.S. weakness and Soviet belligerence and adventurism. Challenged by Ronald Reagan, the Communist society crumbled from within. Arms control—founded on a regime of sanity as we in the West define it—loses its heart when applied to cultures of death and suicide and weapons of mass destruction that can fit easily into a suitcase.

Even in 1977, however, Nixon had trouble defining any long-term benefits of the approach. I asked, “Do you think there’s anywhere in the world since ’72 and ’73 where the Russians have actually behaved better on an issue because of détente?” The best Nixon could muster was an increase in the number of exit visas Russia granted emigrating Jews. I pressed further:

FROST: Is there anywhere else in the world, though, that you would pick on as where the Soviets have behaved differently because of détente in the last three years?

NIXON: Not that could come to mind, but ah…any questions that you have I’ll be glad to answer on.

FROST: No. I was asking you that. I couldn’t think of one.

NIXON: Well, of course, I was not there, and that…in that period of, ah…after August of 1974 and what happened in other parts of the world, I cannot really judge.

Nixon’s China opening, however, still looks good. It seems more prudent now than ever to be on good terms with the heirs of Mao and En-lai as we move toward the close of the first decade of what may be their century.

THE INTERVIEWS: DAY 5

April 1, 1977

Richard Nixon hated bleeding hearts, particularly when it came to foreign policy. He and Kissinger were both superrealists. They could experience euphoria over a new relationship with Mao and En-lai even while the blood of millions of people savagely cut down during the Cultural Revolution was still fresh. They could pursue strategic arms control with Leonid Brezhnev, a ham-fisted Richard Daley–type ward heeler if ever there were one. There were other aspects to the reality game: “tilting toward the Paks”—Kissinger’s artful formulation—during their near-genocidal thrust against the seceding Bengalis and seeking to organize a coup to remove Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected Marxist president.

“He’ll enjoy this session about as much as an appearance before the Ervin Committee,” Ken Khachigian warned Zelnick as they discussed some of the question areas.

“Give me a break,” Zelnick replied. “You can’t expect all softballs like obstruction of justice and stealing Ellsberg’s psychiatric files.”

For me this was an important session. I had worked hard preparing myself on issues and events that were far more in Nixon’s sphere of familiarity than in mine. Also, I needed to develop material interesting enough to get viewers to tune in to all four of our planned programs.

Allende first ran for the presidency in 1964. In September 1970, he received a 36 percent plurality of the vote. By September 15, CIA Director Richard Helms was in Mr. Nixon’s office receiving instructions to try to prevent the Chilean legislature from confirming Allende as president. When that failed, the United States set about promoting a coup. While U.S. involvement in the 1973 coup that killed Allende has never been proven, it was certainly consistent with all Nixon’s efforts. General Augusto Pinochet brought his iron-fisted authoritarian regime to power, apparently persuading himself that his extended rule was attributable to popular support. In the early 1990s, he restored the popular franchise to his countrymen, who promptly voted him out of power. He faced possible “crimes against humanity” charges in one forum or another until his death.

As Nixon and I spoke, of course, the brutal Pinochet regime was very much in business, squelching democratic institutions as well as people. To Nixon the realist, this was secondary: “In terms of national security, in terms of our own self-interest, the right-wing dictatorship, if it is not exporting its revolution, if it is not interfering with its neighbors, if it is not taking action directed against the United States, is therefore of no security concern to us. It is of human rights concern. A left-wing dictatorship, on the other hand, we find that they do engage in trying to export their subversion to other countries. And that does involve our security interests.”

A valid, traditional argument, I thought, but not in the context of Allende, a left-winger operating within the confines of a democratic political structure. “Can you think of any other example,” I asked Nixon, “where the United States in…recent United States history attempted to interrupt the constitutional process of a democratic government?”

NIXON: Well, it depends on what you mean by recent. Ah, well…you mean the last four or five years? No, I can’t think of any.

FROST: Or even since the war—

NIXON: Since World War II—

FROST: Hm…

NIXON: Ah…well, I would suggest that, ah…in 1946 and ’7 we didn’t attempt to interrupt, ah…but we very, very strongly supported, ah…the [Italian] De Gasperi government…

“In fact,” I declared, “what they have now with Pinochet is a right-wing dictatorship. What they had with Allende was a left-wing or Marxist democracy. It was never a dictatorship.”

NIXON: Let’s understand.

FROST: Was it…was it, though?

NIXON: No, I don’t agree with your assertion whatever. I…oh…I would—

FROST: It was not a dictatorship, was it?

NIXON: It was…you said it was not a dictatorship, and my point is, Allende was very subtle and a very clever man.

I noted for Nixon that shortly before the fatal coup, the CIA had been saying Allende had no plans to abolish democracy and would likely be defeated in the next election. Not for the first time, Nixon unlimbered on the agency that had refused to participate in his cover-up of Watergate: “Based on the CIA’s record of accuracy in their reports, I would take all that with a grain of salt. They didn’t even predict that he was going to win this time. They didn’t predict what was going to happen in Cambodia. They didn’t even predict that there was going to be a Yom Kippur War.”

But for the coup, Mr. Nixon suggested, Cuba and Chile could have become a “red sandwich”—two pieces of sandwich bread putting the squeeze on the rest of South America. I replied that Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, Argentina, and others amounted to a lot of beef for these two tiny pieces of bread to control. Nixon was adamant: “We live in a world where at the present time the greatest threat to free nations is not from Communist nations, potential aggressor nations, marching over borders. It is not from Communist nations with huge nuclear armaments launching a nuclear strike, but the threat to free nations is through Communist nations, potentially, ah, aggressive Communist nations like the Soviet Union, like Cuba, for example, like Chile if Allende had stayed in power, burrowing under a border rather than over a border…”

“But there’s two things there, surely,” I countered. “One is that Cuba, which everybody would say is Communist in the traditional sense of the word, Cuba has been totally unsuccessful in its export of revolution or anything else since 1958, and Allende, ah, just didn’t turn out that way. He turned out to be Marxist. He worked within the system for three years. He never attempted to introduce political repression. That only came later.” My subject would not be persuaded.

Nixon said that for all the allegations, the United States had played no role in the coup that had killed Allende, that internal factors had been decisive: “I would have to say that [John] Foster Dulles was right…that the great failure of communism is that they seem irresistible in their ability to conquer a country either under or over a border, but they are totally inadequate and always fail in winning the support of the people of the countries they take over. Allende lost eventually…Allende was overthrown eventually not because of anything that was done from the outside, but because his system didn’t work in Chile.”

I tried one more time.

FROST: If you had to choose a word to describe the Pinochet regime, ah, what adjective would you use…brutal?

NIXON: Well, when they are brutal, yes. Ah, when they are dictatorial, I would say dictatorial. Ah, I would also have to, on the other side, indicate that they are non-Communists and that they are not enemies of the United States and that they do not threaten any of our neighbors.

If there was one thing I was learning from Richard Nixon, it was how to talk in circles.

The moment had come to discuss the Nixon-Kissinger relationship, my most delicious task of the project. Two more gifted, insightful, jealous, patriotic, secretive, self-promoting, reflective, manipulative, power-grasping public servants had rarely graced the same administration at the same time.

“When you first selected Henry Kissinger for the NSC, did you expect him to become…as much of an international star as he did?” I began.

“No. I didn’t expect it. And I don’t think he expected it either,” said Nixon.

Nixon portrayed Kissinger as an intellectual who cherished his eastern establishment ties and loved hobnobbing with celebrities almost as much as he enjoyed conducting diplomacy. And though he conceded that Kissinger was a genius in his sphere, Nixon was careful to define the scope of their relationship. In recalling Kissinger’s antagonistic relationship with Secretary of State William C. Rogers, Nixon observed, “This was a very painful thing for me because Rogers had been my friend. He was a personal friend. Henry, of course, was not a personal friend. We were, we were associates but not personal friends. Not enemies but not personal friends.”

There was no doubt, however, that the two depended on each other. They adopted a kind of good-cop, bad-cop approach to diplomacy that served them well both at home and abroad.

FROST: It’s a fascinating thing to note who did what and with which and to whom, and there was continually in the press this image of you as the hard guy, the—

NIXON: Or as the British say, the ornery guy—

FROST: The ornery guy, yes…And at the same time Kissinger in his conversations with the press and so on seeming to take a softer line, and was that deliberate?

NIXON: Quite deliberate…. Kissinger was an improvisor, he was one who believed in making startling plays and unexpected plays, and consequently he wanted a great deal of, ah, flexibility…I gave him that flexibility because I knew he would use it responsibly. But always under the proper direction.

Nixon described Kissinger as a man who would sometimes voice anguish, buffeted by second thoughts over decisions already made. For example, the Kent State shootings caused him to doubt the wisdom of the Cambodian incursion and suggest that the operation be called off ahead of schedule. Nixon steeled his colleague’s will: “‘Henry,’ I said, ‘We’ve done it.’ I said, ‘Remember Lot’s wife. Never look back.’” Kissinger’s resolve would crack on many occasions, and each time Nixon would say, “Henry, remember Lot’s wife.” And that would end the conversation.

Kissinger also suffered huge swings of mood. While “cool and cold and controlled” in dealing with foreign leaders, he could go from elation to despair over diplomatic developments. “That doesn’t mean he was emotionally unstable,” Nixon allowed, practically begging one and all to reach the opposite conclusion. Yet he had to stabilize Kissinger’s moods as Kissinger tackled issues such as Vietnam, arms control, and his “shuttle diplomacy” around the Middle East. As Nixon described it: “I tried to restrain elation, because I always know that, as Churchill once said, the brightest moments are those that flash away the fastest. And so that when you’re up today, you may be down tomorrow…. Henry would feel highly elated by a conversation he’d had with Dobrynin, and then we’d have a bad development or a negative development and he would be greatly depressed. And I’d say, ‘Well, Henry, the situation hasn’t changed. We shouldn’t have been as elated as we were yesterday, and we shouldn’t be so discouraged today. Just keep plowing along.’” From time to time, Kissinger would threaten to resign, and Nixon would have to practice tough love—stroking Kissinger’s ego while reminding him to keep his eye on the ball. So effective was Nixon’s presentation that I half expected Henry to come bursting into the room in short pants, suspenders, and long socks, complaining that some big kids from State and the Pentagon had roughed him up and taken his soccer playbook. “Get a new one,” Nixon would probably tell him. “And remember Lot’s wife.”

Kissinger hoarded power. His demand for secrecy meant that Secretary of State William Rogers was rarely current and thus rarely involved in major initiatives. “He wanted to be informed,” said Nixon, “Well, Henry would come to me and say, ‘I will not inform Rogers, because he’ll leak.’ And I’d say, ‘Henry’—I must have told him this a dozen times—‘Henry, the State Department bureaucracy will leak. It always has. It always will.’ I said, ‘But Bill Rogers will never leak.’” Henry never took Nixon’s word, and as a result Rogers was rarely up to speed on Russia, Vietnam, and the Middle East. Nixon had to virtually beg Kissinger to keep Rogers posted on the China opening. “We had an argument about that,” recalled Nixon. An argument Nixon won but that failed to enact any long-term change in Kissinger’s attitude.

As his second term dawned, Nixon wanted to make John Connally his secretary of state. “But in this case, while Henry did not have a veto power—nobody can have a veto power where the president is concerned, any president—but while he didn’t have a veto power, it was indispensable that whoever was secretary of state be able to work with Henry and Henry be able to work with him. In other words, I had gone through the Rogers-Kissinger feud for four years, and I didn’t want to buy another feud with another secretary of state for the rest of the four years.”

So Nixon went looking for someone who was as gifted as Kissinger but who would not threaten “his position of being the president’s major foreign policy adviser.” The science of cloning then unpracticed, the field rapidly narrowed down to one candidate: Henry himself. Nixon, Mr. Tough Guy, had been steamrolled by his own vetoless adviser. In photographs from Kissinger’s swearing-in ceremony, Nixon appears as though he had spent the morning overdosing on castor oil.

Yet for all their personal wrangling, Nixon insisted that he and Kissinger shared a common view of the world and America’s place in it. “As far as disagreements are concerned, I should emphasize, what disagreements we had were always on tactics and never on strategy,” he said. Indeed, Nixon was even charitable regarding the many times Kissinger had been caught saying nasty things about his former patron, particularly a recent incident involving an open mike at an Ottawa banquet: “I can see exactly what happened in Canada. He runs into a lady who has a very low opinion of me and as Henry feels that really he’s defending me and that the best way to defend me is to concede that ‘Well, he’s sort of an odd person, an artificial person’ and so forth…The only problem was that he didn’t think to turn the microphone off. On the other hand, I didn’t turn it off either in the Oval Office on occasions, so I never held him for that.”

Weeks later, just before our foreign policy show was aired, I was speaking on the telephone with Henry Kissinger in Washington.

“I suppose that this week you take off on me,” he said. “I expect that I’m portrayed as a sort of neurotic genius in need of strong leadership.”

“Henry, are you sure you haven’t been bugging the sessions?” I said.

“Oh, no,” said Henry. “I just know my boy.”

From Kissinger, the conversation moved easily to Pakistan and the confrontation with India that had begun with the uprising in East Pakistan, aka Bangladesh. It was Kissinger who had inadvertently disclosed that the president had been on his phone every half hour urging a “tilt toward the Paks.”

Nixon: “Well, I wasn’t calling him on the phone every half hour, but he knew and he totally supported my view here that we had to do something to keep India from gobbling up Pakistan in direct violation of what Mrs. Gandhi’s pledge had been to me when she had been at the White House November the fourth, a month before.”

The air was thick with Washington-Moscow missives.

Nixon: “We ask…tell the Russians how important it is for them to restrain the Indians. They tell us how important it is for the Pakistanis to give up East Pakistan and, ah, there were a number of issues, but in any event, we both got across to each other our points of view, and our point of view was very strongly stated that we thought that if the Russians allowed their client, India, using Soviet arms, to destroy Pakistan, both East and West, that this would imperil our future relationship.”

It was then that from a “totally reliable” source, the United States “learned that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in a meeting of her cabinet had directed that a military force be put in place to attack West Pakistan.” Nixon dispatched a carrier battle group to the Indian Ocean and sent another firm note to Brezhnev. A tepid Russian response was followed by more helpful activity once the carrier battle group was in place. The crisis abated.

I had been to Bangladesh shortly after the war and had seen evidence that the Pakistanis had slaughtered residents in numbers suggesting genocide—one to two million at least had perished—in an effort to crush the revolt. Nixon insisted that the United States could not permit a Soviet client to destroy a state that had been working cooperatively with Washington on several matters, including the China initiative. “But don’t, let’s not leave any impression that the government of the United States, that I personally or Kissinger or Bill Rogers or any of us condoned what the West Pakistani army was doing in Bangladesh. But that is an area with a terribly sad history. It’s like the Mideast…there’s going to be more of it.”

FROST: What I’m saying is, but for the China initiative and those considerations we might have condemned it.

NIXON: We would have condemned it. Well, the point was, as far as that was concerned, who suggests that we approved it?

FROST: Nobody. Nobody…but we never spoke out against it, did we?

NIXON: We…but privately we did…of course…we took…we tried to give our best possible advice to Yahya and so forth…if you condemn the…to condemn it publicly, eh…would have served, in my view, no particular purpose at that point.

THE INTERVIEWS: DAY 6

April 4, 1977

As we walked across the kitchen for the start of our sixth day of discussions, Mr. Nixon turned to me and quite casually asked, “Well, did you do any fornicating this weekend?” For a moment, I could not believe the evidence of my own ears. Richard Nixon didn’t say that, did he? He couldn’t have. I must have heard it wrong. But no. One look at the stunned faces of the people nearest convinced me that I had indeed heard right. Even after thirty years, acquaintances will sometimes ask me whether he really said that and why. The answers are: Yes and I have no idea.

As we prepared to start our sixth day together, I had to smile at the clumsiness of Nixon’s question. He was indeed trying to be one of the boys, and he got the word wrong. After all, lovers call themselves fornicators about as often as freedom fighters call themselves terrorists. And I knew that he did not really want to know the answer. So I said, “No comment. I never discuss my private life,” as if at a mock press conference, and by then we were on the set.

I think Nixon probably did like to fancy himself one of the boys. Even his most loyal friends, however, remember the man as physically clumsy and verbally stiff. “I remember one of his jobs was to decorate soldiers—to pin medals on them,” Brent Scowcroft said in an interview years later. “He was so physically awkward that he couldn’t pin a medal on anyone. The first time he did it, he tore right through the jacket. So I had a clip-on version made. And still he was always fumbling. I was always picking up medals.”

Our subject that morning was domestic policy and politics. We were steeped in the standard wisdom of the period, namely, that programatically, his record was weak and reflected his lack of interest in most domestic issues, while his politics—epitomized by his “Southern Strategy, his anticrime rhetoric, and his Supreme Court appointments”—reflected a pitch for the votes of bigots, racists, and political lowbrows generically described as “the Wallace vote.” As I shall argue in the chapter reassessing Nixon and his presidency, this view inadequately treats Nixon’s outstanding record on racial issues, the validity of street crime and violent political demonstrations as voting issues with the public, and his recognition that the enfranchisement of African Americans in the South would soon produce a true two-party America divided along liberal and conservative lines, with liberal Republicans and conservative southern Democrats finding no room at the inn. The new swing voters were essentially either middle-or working-class city dwellers or suburbanites who were attracted to Democratic social welfare programs but repelled by the Democrats’ soft approach to law and order. In their classic work The Real Majority, Richard M. Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg described this voter as “a 47-year-old housewife from the outskirts of Dayton whose husband is a machinist.” To these two political scientists, this “social issue” could not be ignored. “The law-and-order issue today is essentially a civil libertarian’s issue, and the question that must be asked is: What about the civil liberties of hardworking, crime-scarred Americans, black and white, many of whom happen to be Democrats?”

But in 1977, my team and I had begun to see Nixon’s domestic policy as an outgrowth of his foreign policy decisions. Influenced by the writings of New Yorker editor Jonathan Schell, we wondered if Nixon’s need to rally a domestic constituency behind his Vietnam War policies had led him to promote a hollow domestic agenda that lacked muscle but appealed to targeted voter groups.

“I know it means darting in and out of a great many different subjects,” said Zelnick during our brief lunch break. “But with any luck, Nixon won’t realize quite what we’re getting at.” Indeed, I’m not sure he ever did.

On set, the session got off to a rocky start as Nixon and I battled inconclusively over crime statistics, mainly in the District of Columbia, employing statistics that were inapposite and, in his case, unintentionally erroneous. Nixon became defensive, hostile.

NIXON: I won’t contest your figures, there may have been an increase, but I’m not going to sit here and take the suggestion from you that I deliberately misled the American—

FROST: No.

NIXON:—people with regard to what we were going to do. Because I didn’t.

FROST: No.

NIXON: If you want to make that charge, you go right ahead and do it, but I’ll deny it.

FROST: No. I wasn’t saying that on that particular issue that you did.

NIXON: Why don’t you say what you meant, then?

FROST: Well, let me repeat it. What I said was that “Maybe you raised false expectations, false hopes, that there could be a simple cure for the crime rate.”

NIXON: I didn’t.

He was better at dealing with policy and principle, as when he quoted a 1968 Walter Lippmann essay: “‘The balance in our society has shifted dangerously against the peace forces, against mayors, governors and courts and police,’” quoted Nixon. “And that was true then. It was true in 1968. We tried to right that balance.”

As a candidate, Nixon had been critical of the Supreme Court and pledged to appoint “strict constructionists” to the bench, a philosophy more easily stated than defined. His appointment of the pedestrian Warren Burger as chief justice sailed through. Clement Haynsworth was voted down on spurious ethical grounds, G. Harrold Carswell because he was an intellectual mediocrity. Nixon admitted that Carswell had been a mistake “basically because of his lack of experience…His legal credentials, as I look at them in retrospect, were not equal to those of Burger, of Blackmun, or Rehnquist and Powell.”

At the time, Nixon blamed the Carswell vote on the unwillingness of the Senate to swallow a southerner. That was not true, as the subsequent confirmation of Lewis F. Powell, Jr., a Harvard-educated Virginia patrician, would show. What Nixon didn’t fully comprehend was the dependency on the Warren-era court to correct the social and political inadequacies of the other two branches and the states. The Court, during a span of fifteen years, had become the forum of default for righting the wrongs of race discrimination, archaic political districting, unequal legal treatment of the rich and the poor, excessive police conduct, and thinly veiled assaults on freedom of speech, the press, and religion. Not even Nixon could change that overnight. Of his four confirmed appointments, only William H. Rehnquist, later the chief justice, could qualify as a conservative activist. Harry A. Blackmun was an outright liberal, Powell a reasoned eclectic, and Burger pretty much a practitioner of self-restraint.

“You can’t peg these men,” offered Nixon generously. “And I never asked them to be pegged. Ah, in the case of Powell, in the case of Rehnquist, in the case of Blackmun, in the case of Burger, ah, when I called them in to tell them I was going to name them, I told each one of them, starting with the chief justice, I said, ‘You’ll never hear from me again except when we meet on social occasions, and particularly, you’ll never hear discussed any matter that indirectly or directly involves the Court.’ And that was always my view. I said, ‘You call ’em like you see ’em.’” The justices, apparently, took Nixon’s words to heart.

“When did you think of the Southern Strategy?” I asked Nixon.

“I didn’t think of it,” he replied. “The Southern Strategy basically was a tag that was placed on the administration, on my candidacy, because I happened to win the southern states. I thought of a national strategy.”

He returned to the subject moments later: “I wanted to bring the South back into this Union. Back into this country. That’s why I appointed southerners to the Court and to other positions as well. And that is why when it came to the difficult problem of getting rid of de jure segregation, that instead of making a grandstand play out of it, I did it quietly, with persuasion and with great effect.”

Nixon did in fact achieve an end to nearly all de jure segregation pretty much as he claimed. He began by giving the South a little breathing space by working through the courts rather than issuing federal agency decrees. But once the Supreme Court declared that the time to dismantle dual systems had come, Nixon moved with alacrity, inviting black and white community leaders to Washington, sitting them down with his distinguished labor secretary, George Shultz, and letting them work out the modalities of change. In terms of the number of students south of the Mason-Dixon Line soon attending schools in unitary districts and with a minimum of violence, Nixon’s accomplishment ranks as a minor miracle, or perhaps a major one.

Nixon: “By getting these top leaders in, they did the job, and it was a splendid job. Now, and this is one figure we can’t quarrel with at all: sixty-eight percent. When I came into office…and this is, you have to understand, is fifteen years after Brown v. Board of Education; after eight years of the Kennedy administration; the Johnson administration, who had played so much lip service to civil rights and desegregation and the rest. And yet, when we came into office after all of that rhetoric and all of that lip service, sixty-eight percent of all black children in the South were going to majority black schools. And now it’s eight percent…are in majority black schools. I don’t mean we get all the credit for that. In fact, we get, perhaps, just a modest amount…there’d been too many promises made; too much talk and too little action. And we had action.” Indeed, he did.

Nixon believed in nondiscrimination rather than forced integration through compulsory busing, scatter-site housing, and other artificial means. He and Shultz worked out the so-called Philadelphia Plan, whereby previously all-white construction unions were forced to admit blacks according to their proportionate representation in the available labor force, a “quota system,” arguably justified as a logical remedy for specific acts of past discrimination. Under Nixon, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance (OFCC) “encouraged” firms contracting with the government to establish specific minority hiring “targets” in order to reduce the vast disparities in representation.

The former president seemed particularly proud of the way he had dealt in black businesses to compete for the billions of dollars in federal programs: “We came to office…only eight million dollars a year of those federal contracts were going to black businesses. By 1972, two hundred fifty million dollars a year were going to them.”

Interestingly, as in so many other areas, Nixon argued that his domestic goals were best pursued under the radar and behind closed doors. “It’s easy to demagogue this issue,” said Nixon. “And I’ll be very candid…Republicans have demagogued and Democrats have demagogued it ever since the Civil War…trying to get the black vote.” But tough rhetoric had only inflamed the South, and Nixon felt it was time for a quieter approach. His unwillingness to condemn southern foot-dragging publicly cost him dearly with the press, as well as with the “civil rights leadership.” Nixon: “They were all, ah, generally opposed to what we did. Not to what we did but to what we did not say.” But Nixon maintained that his tactics got the job done. “Going out and, ah…hitting the South basically over the head…would have been counterproductive.”

Thirty years ago, preparing for the interview on domestic issues, a Zelnick memo to me read as follows: “There is little question that Richard Nixon knew less about domestic than foreign policy, that he cared less about it, and that he accomplished strikingly little in the domestic realm during his presidency. Welfare reform, consolidation of the bureaucracy, tax reform, national health insurance, and some form of assistance to the nation’s declining cities remained programs to be written by Jimmy Carter on a slate left virtually clean by Richard Nixon. Energy policy remains unsettled. Nixon left a modest revenue-sharing program and a more conservative Supreme Court, but little else. Even his new economic game plan of August 1971 seems undramatic now, created as it was to combat figures of 5.5 percent unemployment and 4.5 percent inflation which already appeared as almost an economic paradise.”

That assessment may be harsh. Nixon’s policy on race relations was far more nuanced, comprehensive, and intelligent than many realized at the time. His formidable environmental record suffered more from an absence of self-promotion than content, and his insights into what it takes for a Republican to campaign successfully in the ethnic Democratic North helped color the political map for a generation to come, though during his period in office, he seemed unwilling or unable to transfer to his party’s House and Senate candidates the magic he worked for himself. Then, as Watergate grew big, the magic faded.

THE INTERVIEWS: DAY 7

April 6, 1977

John Birt had some necessary business to attend to in London and, upon his return, sat down to view the session he had missed. I told him my sense had been that Nixon had never known what we had been driving at and his answers had at times lacked focus. After viewing the tape, he concurred that Nixon had seemed oblivious to our theme. “The trouble is that I was oblivious to it too, as will be the audience.” John recommended making short shrift of our remaining civil rights discussion and then moving right along. “I suspect that very little of what I’ve seen of Monday afternoon will survive editing.”

I did not fully appreciate it at the time, but as we headed toward the last of our pre-Easter taping sessions and the period of round-the-clock preparations for Watergate, the project was experiencing a decline in momentum, a sinking of morale, and a shaking of self-confidence that forty-eight hours later would envelop us like smog settling into a coastal canyon. Fatigue certainly played a role in this, affecting not only our editorial people but also directors, crews, editors, and administrative assistants. But there was also a far deeper concern among John, Bob, and Jim that most of the accumulated material was falling into one of two categories: not sufficiently interesting to make air or subject dominated by Richard Nixon. Marvin Minoff had a term for the former—“too PBS.” Zelnick would sometimes mutter to himself, “bartender or cabbie,” two career paths he felt confident would remain open to him should our enterprise be judged a failure.

But on Wednesday morning, during the drive to Monarch Bay, such undercurrents were still not readily visible. Our primary subject for the day would be Nixon’s approach to domestic unrest, and both John and Bob had similar points they wished to make. “Nixon knew that by making the decisions he did to continue fighting the war until he could obtain peace on his terms, the trauma in America would continue,” said Zelnick. “Then, later in the October–November period of 1969, he realizes that he can either change his policy and quiet dissent or take the battle to the dissenters by mobilizing the so-called silent majority. The direction he chose was cold and calculated.”

“In effect,” Birt interjected, “he chose a policy of divide and rule, and there was nothing casual or accidental about it. Indeed, it was not even limited to the war issue. You’ve already been exploring its ramifications in areas like crime and civil rights. It was as fundamental a characteristic of Nixon’s leadership style as anything one can mention.”

“But what is the alternative?” I argued. “Surrender to the will of a dedicated minority?”

“In a democracy, that may very well be the alternative,” said Birt. “At its best, democracy is a constantly shifting process of accommodation to majority and minority sentiment. The convictions of a minority may often be permitted to prevail if they are held with greater passion than those of the majority. In a free society, intensity of feeling is often as important as the mere numbers that would be reflected through the taking of a plebiscite.”

“I see your argument,” I said. “But I don’t feel it. I don’t think it’s a strong case or a particularly desirable inevitability.”

“One other thing,” said John. “You spent a lot of time in the United States during the Nixon presidency. If you don’t recognize the picture he draws of the America he saw from the White House, don’t hesitate to tell him so.”

Nixon was prepared for my questions on his mobilizing public sentiment against the war dissenters: some of them were violent. Also, the other side might otherwise conclude that public opinion in the United States had changed and the majority now wanted withdrawal: “In other words, are we going to have a situation where this war would be lost in Washington as the French lost in 1954 in Paris rather than in Dien Bien Phu?” Accordingly, “We had to convince the enemy that this very loud but minority group of dissenters was not all of America.” Thus his “Great Silent Majority” address of November 1969.

Nixon dismissed any suggestion that the speech broke with campaign promises to “bring us together,” speaking quietly and “listening to the voices of the heart and those that were left behind.” Nixon: “I tried to be what I am…and that is, I do the job that has to be done and I do it as fairly as I can and if it requires being firm, I’m firm. Ah…if it requires persuasion, I persuade. If it requires, ah…in some cases the threat of using the law, the…or what I call the stick in the closet, in order to get people to comply, ah, I go that way. That’s the way I am.”

The speech was enormously successful both in terms of the immediate response and its impact on the polls. Gallup reported Nixon’s approval rating as standing at 68 percent. At the same time, Nixon unleashed his own “Nixon”: Vice President Spiro Agnew and his alliterative attacks on “middle-aged malcontents,” the “nattering nabobs of negativism,” and, far more significantly, the eastern establishment media with its anti-Nixon bias. “Was the negativism and all those alliterations, was that your idea?” I asked Nixon. Nixon: “No…. As a matter of fact, what editorial suggestions I made, ah, were frankly trying to make it not so cute.” Not that Nixon was displeased to see the media given a dose of their own medicine. “Whoever is the leader of this country…has to defend himself and defend his policy and to use every resource that he can to get his point across or otherwise these people, who were not elected by anybody and who are paid very well…most of them particularly in television by their superiors…they run the country.”

Though he had long served as the press’s piñata, Nixon wasn’t sure where the animosity came from. His onetime nemesis Dean Acheson had told him what the problem was: “You want the press to love you. And they won’t because you’re not a lovable man.” More seriously, Nixon said, “The reason they were against him [Johnson], most of them, and the reason most of them were against me…was not because we were not lovable, although I don’t think either of us is in the sense that they want. But…because of what we stood for. They were against what we stood for. And, ah…so that’s the way it is.”

Nixon denied that his rhetoric had been particularly harsh. One opponent had compared the United States in Vietnam to Hitler’s extermination of the Jews. Another proclaimed him a “maddened tyrant.” R. Sargent Shriver, George McGovern’s running mate, called him history’s greatest bomber, “even greater than Julius Caesar,” who—Nixon noted—lived a thousand years before gunpowder was invented. He recalled a meeting with George Christian, Johnson’s press secretary. Nixon suggested “that President Johnson is going to be real pleased when he finds out that now they’re calling me the number one bomber. And George Christian said, ‘Oh, don’t be too sure, ’cause you know LBJ, he never likes to be number two.’”

We were going nowhere. Nixon’s answers were expansive, but I couldn’t see much of the material surviving the editing room. It was time to move to more controversial territory. Why had he approved the Huston plan, which included the “black-bag jobs,” or burglaries?

“In the Huston plan it stated very clearly with reference to the entry being proposed, it said very clearly, ‘Use of this technique is clearly illegal, it amounts to burglary,’ um…however, ‘It is also one of the most fruitful tools and it can produce the type of intelligence which cannot be obtained in any other fashion.’ Um…why did you approve a plan that included an element like that…that was clearly illegal?” I asked.

In a rambling, almost incomprehensible response, Nixon talked about the dilemma a president faces in weighing national security concerns over personal liberties. In this instance “black-bag jobs” had been necessary in order to collect information on two violence-prone domestic groups, the Weathermen and the Black Panthers. He acknowledged that neither had received material foreign support but said the number of bombings, bomb threats, assaults on policemen, and airplane hijackings had created a dangerous domestic situation. “Under the circumstances,” he said, “I felt that we had to coordinate these activities and get a more effective program for dealing with first, foreign-directed, ah…espionage, ah…or foreign-supported, ah…subversion. And in addition with domestic groups that used and advocated violence.”

His order approving the plan remained in effect for less than two weeks, until FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover told Attorney General John Mitchell he could not go along. Nixon speculated that Hoover, in his final years, became fixated with his reputation in the broader community. Without the FBI, there was no agency to conduct the program—“the whole house of cards fell”—so Nixon rescinded his order and the Huston plan died.

“And a month later, you know what happened? Well, they blew up, when I say that they…one of these groups blew up a building at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and, ah, a twenty-five-year-old student was killed and two others were injured…and the property damage, of course, was in the millions. If we’d had the plan into effect, maybe he’d be living.”

“In retrospect,” I asked, “wouldn’t it have been better to combat that crime legally, rather than adding another crime to the list?”

On this first specific pass, Nixon dodged the question in not untypical fashion, suggesting that other presidents might also have violated the law, Lincoln by suspending habeas corpus and, later, shooting down antidraft protesters, Roosevelt by the Japanese internment program. “I considered that the president had not only the power but he had the responsibility in this instance to put the safety of citizens, ah…above, ah…the legal technicality that was involved. But on a very limited basis,” said Nixon. All of Nixon’s examples, of course, were inapposite. The suspension of habeas corpus had been a public action reviewable by the courts. The antidraft protesters had been on a murderous rampage. The Japanese action, to the country’s eternal shame, was approved by the U.S. Supreme Court.

FROST: So in a sense what you’re saying is that there are certain situations, and the Huston plan, or that part of it, was one of them, where the president can decide that it’s in the best interest of the nation or something and do something illegal?

NIXON: Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.

FROST: By definition?

NIXON: Exactly, exactly.

A flurry of questions stormed my head. How far would Nixon go? Without betraying any emotion, I pressed my subject further.

“So that the black jobs that were authorized in the Huston plan—if they’d gone ahead—would have been made legal by your action?”

“Well, I think that we would…I think that we’re splitting hairs here.”

Burglaries were illegal, but if a burglary were undertaken because of an expressed policy decided upon by the president for national security reasons or issues of domestic tranquillity, “then that means that what would otherwise be technically illegal does not subject those who engage in such activity to criminal prosecution.” What about murder? What if the president ordered an assassination? “No…absolutely not…” replied Nixon. And a moment later: “the Huston plan, as you know, is very carefully worded in terms of how limited it is to be.”

FROST: But no, all I was saying was, Where do we draw the line? Why shouldn’t the same presidential power apply to somebody who the president feels in the national interest should murder a dissenter? I’m not saying it’s happened. I’m saying what’s the dividing line between the burglar being liable to the criminal prosecution and the murderer?

NIXON: Because as you know from many years of studying and covering the world of politics and political science, ah…there are degrees, ah…there are nuances, ah…ah…which are difficult to explain, but which are there.

Within minutes, Nixon had waded even further into the muddle and was ruminating about how nice it would have been to have assassinated Hitler before he launched his own extermination campaign against European Jewry. But by now I almost didn’t care how far he strayed or how self-serving his arguments became. I believed he had presented us with a stunning picture of his mind-set by advancing the proposition that the president has the inherent power to violate the law and, by so doing, to purge the entire transaction of its unlawful character. I sought to underline the unique circumstances with which we were dealing.

“In fact, is there any single case at all where any former president has personally approved black-bag jobs?” I asked.

“I can’t speak for any of them,” replied Nixon. “None have ever indicated to me that they have.”

In typical Nixon style, he then launched into an utterly irrelevant distraction on covert action targeting foreign embassies.

After a break, I followed up on Birt’s earlier suggestion and asked Nixon which parts of the country he had been referring to when he described part of the country as having been in a “virtual state of revolution.”

“Primarily in the…in the major cities in the eastern part of the country,” said Nixon. “And primarily in those areas against education…near to educational institutions, which might have a more liberal activist element in them.”

“Thinking back to that period, it seems to me that’s a massive exaggeration,” I countered. “I don’t remember that time in America, in the East, there being a virtual state of revolution…revolution implies so much, I thought.”

Nixon didn’t handle the challenge very well, lumping together the excesses of peace demonstrators with a bomb discovered in Detroit, a rise in airplane hijackings—nearly all by foreign nationals—and thousands of assaults against police officers, most by ordinary street criminals. He did much better responding to my suggestion that his war policies were responsible for most of society’s violent divisions, recounting the urban riots that had begun in 1964 and run through 1968, the year of his election. The war had contributed, he acknowledged. But he rejected the notion that he had sought to divide society in order to isolate the war critics.

NIXON: But why did I go to China, then? Why did I go to Russia?

FROST: Well, I think—

NIXON: Why did I take the positions I did with regard to chemical and biological warfare? Why did I take the position for family assistance?

As to taking on the dissenters at home, “I knew that in order to get the enemy to take us seriously abroad, I had to have enough support at home, that they could not feel that they could win in Washington what they could not win on the battlefield. And I had that support.”

Nixon wanted to talk about the press and in particular two of its high-flying representatives, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post. Their best seller The Final Days had presented both Nixon and his wife as heavy drinkers whose marriage had become burdened by unresponsiveness and a long-standing lack of intimacy.

According to Nixon, “The greatest concentration of power in the United States today is not the White House. It isn’t in the Congress and it isn’t in the Supreme Court. It’s in the media. And it’s too much.” He spoke of large newspapers owning large newsmagazines and, of course, the three networks. He called the Supreme Court decision requiring actual malice in cases involving public figures “a license to lie.”

“I don’t want them repressed,” he declared, “but believe me, when they take me on, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, I think the public figure ought to come back and crack ’em right in the puss.”

He saved his Sunday punch for the two Post reporters, but without mentioning their names. It came in response to a question on Mrs. Nixon’s health. She had suffered a stroke several months earlier—purportedly after reading the Woodward/Bernstein book—but had battled back and was now assured of full recovery.

Nixon: “I’ve mentioned the stories that have been written, and some written by some book authors and so forth, which reflected even on her, on occasion, and what her alleged weaknesses were. They haven’t helped, and as far as my attitude toward the press is concerned, I respect some, but for those who write history as fiction on third-hand knowledge, I have nothing but utter contempt. And I will never forgive them. Never.”

We wrapped for the day, but I was intercepted by Jack Brennan before I reached the door. “This is the greatest material yet,” he said, smiling broadly. “If you cut this out of the show, I’ll put out a contract on your head.”

“Jack,” I said sincerely. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

In the light of all that has happened since, it is hard to believe that our discussion of the Huston plan took place thirty years ago or that Mr. Nixon’s approval of it—lasting less than a fortnight—formed the basis of one of the articles of impeachment. From the time when technology first made such tools as eavesdropping and wiretapping available, through the Nixon presidency, presidents have asserted their right to employ such devices in the furtherance of national security. Initially the Supreme Court distinguished, for Fourth Amendment challenges, surveillance techniques that required actual penetration of the premises from those that did not, but technology and sensible jurisprudence eventually erased that distinction. Of course, legal protection has never been extended to noncitizens of the United States whose conversations have been intercepted abroad.

In 1978, just one year after the Nixon interviews were broadcast, Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), requiring the approval of special federal courts in situations where federal authorities sought to monitor phone calls between foreign nationals and U.S. citizens. During the first ten years of life under FISA, not a single monitoring application was rejected by the special court, and today, nineteen years later, fewer than a dozen have. Nonetheless, in December 2005, when The New York Times broke the story of the program’s existence, George W. Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, claimed that the need for speed required circumvention of the courts. In January 2007, Gonzales informed the Congress that approval of the court would be sought in all future cases. No serious impeachment move based upon violation of the 1978 act or the constitutional rights afforded citizens was ever initiated. Nor did other actions such as the indefinite incarceration of terrorist suspects—sometimes without charges lodged against them—the denial of habeas corpus, and the asserted right to treat prisoners more roughly than the Geneva Convention permits give rise to any serious impeachment moves. It would seem that in certain respects, Nixon may well have had to confront a double standard. In his case, however, that standard was the product of self-inflicted wounds, including participation in a criminal cover-up, initiation of the “Saturday Night Massacre,” and the bald assertion of discretionary power: “If the president does it, then it’s not illegal.”

Bewilderingly, despite the day’s successes, the gloomy mood swallowing my staff had not abated. Marv Minoff and Jim Reston had circulated among the production crew at the end of the session and had heard little but praise for the way Nixon had “stuck it to the press.” Zelnick’s mind was more concerned with opportunities he thought had been missed than with openings seized. John was focused more on the disappointments of the morning than the extraordinarily high quotient of riveting material in the afternoon. And after months of round-the-clock work, they were all exhausted.

A rough-cut screening of the Vietnam program later that evening did little to allay the anxieties now eating away at my team. The cut was too long, too jagged, and still “too PBS.” Clay Felker, who had just arrived in town, fell asleep. Though I felt strongly that the Vietnam sequence simply needed another pass, the raw material was all there—my colleagues worried that if we couldn’t hold our own on Vietnam, Nixon would certainly eat us for breakfast on Watergate.

“But we have confronted him where it really matters,” I argued. “Look at Chile. I certainly did not let him carry the day there.”

“Red sandwiches and beef,” said Bob. “I thought for a while that you were in a goddamn delicatessen. Don’t kid yourself. He’s set up perfectly now for kicking your tail from one end of Monarch Bay to the other. The only thing he has to watch out for is overconfidence. And that’s not the position we should be in after more than two weeks on the set.”

“That is not an accurate summary of the situation,” I said, “any more than a goddamn delicatessen is an accurate summary of the Chile confrontation. You’re forgetting the Kissinger material and the Mideast material. And you’re forgetting that when we had to confront him, I did confront him. I confronted him on Chile, on Cambodia, yes on Vietnam, even on those crime statistics in the District of Columbia. Watergate will be like that, only ten times more so.”

“Don’t you know what you’re up against?” said Zelnick. “This man is not only one of America’s cagiest politicians, he’s been a member of the bar for almost forty years. He’s tried cases at trial, presided over committee hearings, argued before the Supreme Court of the United States. You’ve seen how formidable he is on matters he knows something about. Well, let me tell you, by next Wednesday, he will have committed every word on every Watergate tape to memory. He’ll know every statute cold. He’ll have rehearsed his answers. He’ll call you every time you put a comma in the wrong place. He’ll respond to your damaging references with dozens that support his interpretation of the facts. He’ll put everything in a factual context that will take ten minutes to fabricate. You’re in against a master, man, a master. Everything he wanted these interviews to accomplish for him will be on the line beginning next Wednesday. And he’s a fighter.”

“Yes, you can’t back down with Richard Nixon,” said John, echoing the sense of foreboding in Bob’s words, “because he takes it as a sign of weakness. There’s no mercy in the man, not as a warrior and not as an antagonist in this setting. He takes what he gets. You’ve got to stop him on the spot when he misrepresents the record and say, ‘No, Mr. President, I know this better than you do, and I’m not going to let you rewrite the record.’ Just look at this transcript and see how long his responses are. You have to declare your points. You have to stand with them. And you have got to destroy his points. Otherwise we will fail. You will fail.”

“And right now,” said Bob, “that’s where we’re heading.”

Toward failure?

The gloomy attitude had gotten out of hand, and I was not just annoyed, I was angry. What I’d heard was an absurdly lopsided account of the past few days, and indeed of the next few days. It was overkill. And it could be extremely destructive. So I decided to say so.

First, I reiterated the point that I thought should have been obvious without my having to mention it. Yes, I was daunted too. I realized how far we had to go. And time was indeed a commodity in terrifying—and legally limited—short supply. But that was no excuse for this sort of masochistic orgy.

Sure, the Vietnam edit wasn’t working yet—but that was a problem that could and would be solved. If we had made mistakes, we still had the intelligence and the time to correct them. And though I agreed the first hour of domestic policy the day before had been Toilet City, the Huston plan was our “smoking gun.” In the end, however, not only did I not believe their low estimate of our chances, I did not believe that deep down they did either.

“However, if there is anyone who really thinks that we are going to fail, it is better they leave this project now. It would just make the next few days too depressing.” There was silence. The moment, it seemed, had passed. The taboo word had been uttered, faced, and rejected. We got back to work.

We divided the next five days in two: three days for separate effort, then two days for conferring together as needed. Zelnick spent his time working on a short but brutally effective paper, “Likely Nixon Detours,” in which he set forth the possible excursions Nixon might lead us on in an effort to get up off the trail of his own criminal culpability. And he outlined the kinds of responses we would need to abort each such frolic and get us back in hot pursuit of the game.

Meanwhile, I spent my time poring over the White House transcripts, a few odd books, and excerpts of the Watergate trial testimony meticulously compiled by Reston. I was not yet at the point where I felt it necessary to develop a complete theory of the case against Nixon. That could wait until Monday, but I did begin to think in terms of what it was that I could specifically prove against the former president. I made little lists, checked them against the portions of the transcripts I had underlined, added to them, subtracted from them, changed the wording, put them aside, and began compiling new lists from scratch.

I was satisfied that I could prove that Nixon had ordered H. R. Haldeman on June 23, 1972, to order the CIA to request the FBI curtail its probe of the break-in.

I could prove that on January 8, 1973, Nixon had given Charles Colson favorable signals with respect to clemency for E. Howard Hunt.

I could prove that on February 13 and 14, again in discussion with Colson, he had staked his entire second term on the continued silence of the seven convicted defendants. The only problem would be “if one of the seven begins to talk.”

I could prove that on March 13 he had ignored clear statements from John Dean regarding the criminal involvement of current members of his administration, including Gordon Strachan and Jeb Magruder.

I could prove that beginning March 20 he had leaned on Dean to write a phony document absolving White House personnel of culpability in the break-in and cover-up.

I could prove that during the March 21 through 22 marathon Watergate discussions he had been told of blackmail payments in process and later that they had been paid and had—at the very least—done nothing to turn them off.

I could prove that on March 21 he had coached Haldeman on how to commit what any reasonable person would call perjury without getting convicted.

I could prove that after Dean fell out of his good graces, he had turned Watergate matters over to Ehrlichman, who was himself deeply implicated in the cover-up conspiracy.

I could prove that between March 27 and April 14 he had attempted to get Magruder and Mitchell to come forward and take the rap, hoping the investigation would stop with them.

I could prove that through Haldeman and Ehrlichman he had offered suggestions of clemency to Mitchell, Magruder, and Dean in order to coax them into not implicating those even closer to him.

I could prove that he had shamelessly betrayed Henry Petersen’s confidences by relaying his accounts of the investigation to Haldeman and Ehrlichman.

I could prove that between April 14 and 17 he had worked on “lines,” “scenarios,” and “drafts” with his two colleagues in order to explain their involvement in the earlier hush money payments.

I could prove that he had recommended no immunity for those suspected of criminal wrongdoing after Ehrlichman told him on April 17 that such action might be the best way to remove Dean’s incentive to talk.

I could prove that on April 20 he recalled authorizing the blackmail payment to Hunt.

And I could prove that he had repeatedly and egregiously lied to the American people regarding his own state of knowledge at various times and his efforts to unravel the truth within his own White House.

What could I not prove? That list was almost as important as the first, though it was a good deal shorter.

I could not prove that he had had prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in.

I could not establish a motive for the original crime.

I could not establish a motive for his original involvement in the cover-up.

I could not prove that he had been aware of the activities of his private lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach, and Hunt during the summer and fall of 1972.

I could not prove that he had known of the blackmail payments before March 21, 1973.

I could not prove his personal involvement in the erasure of eighteen and a half minutes of his June 20, 1972, Watergate-related conversation with Haldeman.

I could not prove that he had personal knowledge of who had erased the tape, or, indeed, how the erasure had occurred.

I reviewed my list of “could not proves.” With respect to some items the circumstantial evidence was strong. Would, for example, Ehrlichman and Haldeman have dared to enlist the president’s personal attorney for the raising and transmittal of blackmail money without clearing it with Mr. Nixon himself? Would Haldeman have released $350,000 from Nixon’s White House safe without Nixon’s knowledge and consent? The gap in the tape had been created through five to nine manual erasures. Stephen Bull and Rose Mary Woods were the only ones with the possible motive to cause that erasure, except for the president himself. Would either of them have acted alone?

Still, it seemed the better part of wisdom to ignore these episodes or relegate them to a secondary line of questioning. Some would have to be covered just for the record. Others might simply be listed as additional questions concerning Nixon’s conduct throughout the period. But I was convinced that our approach all along was sound: Stay with what we know we can prove. Keep within the essential cover-up period—June 1972 to April 1973.

By the time Monday morning arrived, I felt positively buoyant. I knew the transcripts inside out. I had John’s questions, Zelnick’s, Reston’s, and mine. I had Bob’s latest road maps—intended not as a text but as a guide—embracing as much supporting documentation as feasible for purposes of following up. They were already complemented by my own copious notes, as well as numerous excerpts from the exclusive Reston research material. What I had before me represented a true team effort.

One issue I wanted to work through as a group was what it would take to prove Nixon’s guilt if this were a criminal conspiracy trial.

By Tuesday night, my team seemed to be brimming with confidence. Still, as we returned to our respective hotel rooms, each of us recognized that the fate of the entire project would likely be decided the next day.

It was after 1 A.M. when I responded to a faint knock at my door.

“Sorry to disturb you, David, but John asked me to deliver this to your room,” said Libby, my PA and one of our tireless team. She handed me an envelope, wished me good luck the next day, and left.

Inside the envelope was a handwritten note John had penned on the hotel’s stationery. It was, at one and the same time, the most inspiring and the most constructive letter I can remember receiving. The expressions of confidence in me, coming from a man who could not, indeed would not in principle, exhibit an ounce of false shmaltz to save his life, moved me more than I can say.

And his recital, which followed, of the basic components of our mutually agreed-upon strategy could not have been more economical or to the point:

Today you should review only the evidence that would have been brought up in a court of law: and you should not depart from that evidence…

It is not a conventional interview: you are exchanging interpretations of the known facts; you should talk almost as much as he does…

Most importantly, don’t be tempted to put brief and “pointed” questions that elicit long and vague answers: when he paints a picture that you know to be false, respond by painting, at the same length he does, the alternative picture as you understand it…

Always keep firmly in mind that Watergate is a difficult subject for a mass audience to follow and at each stage consider that it is your responsibility to point out clearly to that audience the implication of any question, fact, event, statement or admission that you consider relevant…

Stay cool and firm, but be polite; only raise your voice if and when you are pushed to…

And finally, keep up the pressure at all times: You will win only if you can, so to speak, sprint the mile.

As he so often did, John had hit the nail on the head. I could not afford to relax at all. At no point tomorrow, even for a moment, were my interests and those of Richard Nixon going to coincide. My aim was to nail the basic truths about Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate cover-up during an all too finite period of time. His aim was to filibuster, perhaps, or rather, to use his own words in our first interview, “to demolish.” In a situation like that, anything I was going to get I was going to have to win.

On the ride to Monarch Bay that morning, I remember John adding something to the effect of “You know something, you have to stay physically in charge as well. There is something that you do sometimes…you did it on Cambodia and, although I wasn’t there at the time, it seemed to me as though you did it with Chile…and you did it with Ian Smith when we were in Rhodesia.”

I spent much of the drive receiving a primer—compliments of Bob Zelnick—on the law of conspiracy. “Now, let’s see if I have this right,” I said. “To be guilty of conspiracy, one must enter a scheme with at least one other person to commit an unlawful act and at least one member of the conspiracy must have performed at least one overt act in its furtherance, such as purchasing a gun with which to hold up a bank the conspirators intend to rob. Intent is an element of the crime, but motive is not. It is not a mitigation of the crime to say you intended to use your ill-gotten gains for benign purposes…or to mislead investigators who might cause you political embarrassment.

“We’ve talked a lot about the conspiracy to obstruct justice. Has anyone here read the actual statute?”

“Just a minute,” said Jim. “I think there’s a copy of it here in the Judiciary Committee volumes.”

He quickly found the place and handed me the book. I began to read aloud: “‘Whoever corruptly endeavors to prevent, obstruct or impede the administration of justice…’ Bob, that sounds pretty wide.”

“I recall John Dean telling the Ervin Committee that the definition of the crime was coextensive with the capacity of man to devise ways to prevent, obstruct, or impede the administration of justice. In a sense, then, it means everything because it means nothing,” Bob said.

“A corrupt endeavor to prevent, obstruct, or impede,” I repeated. “Thank you, Jim. It may come in handy.”

THE INTERVIEWS: DAY 8

April 13, 1977

Now the time had come to discuss Watergate. We arrived early, as I wanted to thank the audio men, technical directors, crews, makeup artists, and all others involved in the production. Their work would soon become the raw material of history. The series, particularly Nixon’s words, voice, facial expression, and body language, would be studied by lawyers, presidential scholars, journalists, and others. We were tackling our most sensitive topic yet, and everyone wanted to know what Nixon would say. For that reason, maintaining security was essential. To date, the crew had been magnificent.

“Gentlemen, you’ve all been superb,” I began. “Every reporter in the country wants to know what the former president has to say about Watergate. I must ask you not to tell them. Don’t even tell your wives or the women you love. In fact, please don’t tell either of them. Thank you.”

Nixon arrived at his customary time, ten after ten. He greeted a cluster of local residents, exuding confidence. Then a car pulled up to the curb and from it stepped Diane Sawyer and Frank Gannon. They had been working on Nixon’s memoirs and had not attended the earlier tapings. As the Nixon camp gathered on the curb, my own team eyed them warily.

“They’re all here,” said Birt.

“Yes,” said Reston. “All the president’s men.”

I have many times tried to recapture my feelings as the count-down and cue came for me to begin. Long ago I settled on “euphoria.” It was almost too much to bear. I started to speak.

“Mr. President, to try and review your account of Watergate in one program is a daunting task. But we’ll press first of all through the sort of factual record and the sequence of events as concisely as we can to begin with. But just one brief preliminary question. Reviewing now your conduct over the whole of the Watergate period, with additional perspective now, three years out of office and so on, do you feel that you ever obstructed justice or were part of a conspiracy to obstruct justice?”

No goal with the first kick. Nixon wanted to go through the record. Then he would explain his motives. “I will give you my evaluation as to whether those actions or anything I said for that matter amounted to what you have called obstruction of justice.”

I had no problem with that and launched an inquiry into events following the June 17, 1972, break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. By the twentieth, Haldeman knew enough to order Gordon Strachan to make sure his White House files were “clean” and Ehrlichman knew enough to order Howard Hunt to leave the country, an order he soon rescinded.

Haldeman met with Nixon on the morning of June 20, a session memorialized by an eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the White House tapes, but also some handwritten Haldeman notes indicating that the president wanted a “PR offensive” and a check of the Executive Office Building (EOB) for Democratic bugs. “Haldeman’s notes are the only recollection I have of what he told me,” said Nixon. It was a statement neither of us believed but that accurately portrayed the sort of narrow defendant posture he would assume for most of the first session. He volunteered to debunk the “outrageous” suggestion that he had been responsible for the gap, another old defendant’s ploy: attack what is not alleged.

I next hit Nixon with questions about the June 20 conversation with Colson that Reston had unearthed, and Nixon never knew we had done so. I recalled for him the talk of “pulling it all together,” of the arrested men being “pretty hard-line guys,” and Nixon’s incautious remark “If we didn’t know better, we would have thought the whole thing was deliberately botched.”

A momentary shadow crossed his face, but Nixon quickly dismissed the new information, then introduced his leitmotif—an argument he would lean on whenever the going got particularly tough. “Let me say as far as what my motive was concerned,” began Nixon. “My motive was in everything I was saying or certainly thinking at the time, ah…ah…was not, ah…to try and cover up a criminal action but…to be sure that as far as any slip-over or should I say, slop-over, I think would be a better word, any slop-over in any way that would, ah…damage innocent people or blow it into political proportions.” The defense played directly into our hands and our understanding of the law. “In other words,” he said, “we were trying to politically contain it.” That had been his motive, he insisted, in what had come to be called the “smoking gun” tape.

“So you invented the CIA thing that day as a cover,” I charged.

Nixon recoiled at the words.

“No. Now let’s use the word cover-up in the sense that it has—should be used. If a cover-up is for the purpose of covering up criminal activities, it is illegal. If, however, a ‘cover-up,’ as you have called it, is for a motive that is not criminal, that is something else again. And my motive was not criminal.” He hadn’t known that Mitchell or anyone else was involved. He had worried instead that the FBI investigation could spring leaks, which would lead to the matter being “blown out of proportion.” What’s more, it would be good if the CIA could help protect Hunt, one of its own.

This was one of the historic Nixon tendencies. When he dissembled, he dissembled in all areas at once, partially and totally. Inconsistencies bothered him not at all. In response to a single question, he had denied the existence of a cover-up, admitted involvement in a cover-up, defined the term in a way no one knowledgeable of the law ever would, denied knowing anyone else was criminally involved, and then conceded his effort to help Hunt, whom he knew to be criminally involved, along with Liddy.

One of Nixon’s more fascinating inconsistencies was his insistence that until he heard the final section of the June 23 tape on August 5 a year later, just days before his resignation, “I thought and often stated, ah…that the purpose of getting the CIA in was primarily or solely for national security reasons being that, the reasons being that the FBI investigation, ah…might, ah…infringe upon investigations or activities of the CIA which they wanted to be kept covert.” Was Nixon really expecting our audience to believe that he had misremembered his own motivations? Indeed he was. According to Nixon, his busy schedule had obscured such recollections.

We tussled over this until he introduced his July 6 meeting with FBI Director-Designate L. Patrick Gray, who warned him “that there are some people around you who are mortally wounding you or would…might mortally wound you because they’re trying to restrict this investigation.” Nixon asked Gray if he had talked to Walters about the matter, and Gray said he had and that Walters was in agreement. At that point, recalled Nixon, “I said, ‘Pat, you go right ahead with your investigation.’ He has so testified. And he did go ahead with the investigation.”

There were two problems with Nixon’s reliance on that instruction to purge himself of conspiracy in the cover-up. First, telling Gray to get the facts, while simultaneously working with his White House subordinates to keep the facts from coming to light, compounded the crime. Second, the conspiracy had already been busy at work at least from June 23.

“Obstruction of justice is obstruction of justice if it’s for a minute or five minutes…much less for the period of June twenty-third to July the fifth.” I said. “It’s obstruction of justice for however long a period, isn’t it? And it’s no defense to say that the plan failed, that the CIA didn’t go along with it.”

These were telling points, and Nixon tried to fend them off by questioning my knowledge of the obstruction of justice statute.

“Now just a moment,” he began. “You’re again making the case, which of course is your responsibility as the attorney for the prosecution. Let me make the case as it should be made—even were I not the one who was involved—for the defense. The case for the defense here is this: You use the term obstruction of justice. You perhaps have not read the statute with regard to respect…ah…ah…obstruction of justice.”

“Well, I have,” I interjected, sorely tempted to tell him that I had inspected it only minutes before coming onto the set. But even my more modest claim knocked him off stride to the point where he had trouble articulating his words.

“Obstructed—well, oh, I’m sorry, of course you probably have read it, but possibly you might have missed it because when I read it, many years ago in, ah…perhaps when I was studying law…if, although the statute didn’t even exist then, because it’s a relatively new statute, as you know.” (At this moment, the laughter in the production trailer could have registered on the Richter scale.)

“Ah, but in any event,” Nixon continued, “when I read it, even in recent time, I was not familiar with all of the implications of it. The statute doesn’t require just an act…. The statute has the specific provision…one must corruptly impede a judicial—”

“Well,” I interrupted, “a corrupt endeavor is enough.”

“Conduct…all right…we’ll…a conduct endeavor…corrupt intent, and that gets to the point of motive. One must have a corrupt motive. Now, I did not have a corrupt motive.”

I also reminded him that the criteria of conspiracy law, passed during his administration, had been fulfilled when he, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman had conspired to obstruct justice. “And,” I continued, “motive can be helpful when intent is not clear. Your intent is absolutely clear. It’s stated again: ‘Stop this investigation here.’ The foreseeable, inevitable consequence, if you’d been successful, would have been that Hunt and Liddy would not have been brought to justice.” Clearly the thrust of my questioning linked Nixon with his closest administration colleagues—Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell, all of whom had been found guilty by the time I interrogated Nixon.

On the subject of hush money, Nixon insisted that, while he had not been informed, “if I had been informed the money was being raised for humanitarian purposes to help these people with their defense, I would certainly have approved it.”

“Right,” I said, “and if you’d been told that they were saying that it was for humanitarian reasons but it was being delivered on the tops of phone booths, with aliases, and at airports and with people with gloves on…would you have believed that it was for humanitarian reasons? That’s not normally the way that lawyers’ fees are delivered, is it?” Nixon conceded that “of course, I would have had a suspicion about it.”

Nixon had insisted that it was not until March 20, 1973, that he learned the money had been used to buy the witnesses’ silence. But I noted earlier conversations in which Ehrlichman had told him the money was needed to keep defendants from going “off the reservation.” And Haldeman had told him it was because the defendants were “gonna blow.” “Yeah,” said Nixon, “well, it has more meaning, but let’s understand what the word ‘blowing’ means too.”

I was incredulous. “But when he said that, you said, ‘Come on, we’ve got to think of a better story than that.’ And you still haven’t.”

Nixon continued to maintain that only on March 21 had he learned most details of the cover-up. So I confronted him with an excerpt from a February 14 conversation with Colson—another Reston tape Nixon did not know we had. “The cover-up is the main ingredient. That’s where we’ve got to cut our losses; my losses are to be cut. The president’s losses got to be cut on the cover-up deal.”

Here Nixon gave one of those awkward waves of his arm that reminded me of no one so much as the late Jack Benny and again suggested he was concerned mainly about the defendants going to the press. He had a tougher time with a statement to Colson in a February 13 conversation, yet another tape he had not known we had: “When I’m speaking about Watergate, though, that’s the whole point of the election. This tremendous investigation rests, unless one of the seven begins to talk. That’s the problem.” Clearly the integrity of Nixon’s second term did rest on assurances by the president and top law enforcement officers that Watergate was being fully and fairly investigated. The mandate Nixon sought and achieved rested on them, the reorganization of government, the pursuit of détente, the new conservatism—it was all there before him, “unless one of the seven begins to talk.” Once again Nixon insisted that his fear was that the men who worked in covert activities would breach security by talking.

We came to the pivotal conversation with Dean of March 21. Not only was it clear that the president wanted hush money paid, but the conversation proved to me beyond a reasonable doubt that it had been Richard Nixon, not Dean, not even Haldeman, who urged that the cover-up continue. Dean had warned the president in the starkest possible terms that Watergate had become a “cancer on the presidency” that, unless cut out, could destroy the presidency. He had warned that several people, including himself, would likely go to jail.

Whatever his underlying motives, however “blind” his past ambition had been, Dean was now providing the president with all he needed to know to make an honest decision about handling the crisis. The army of Nixon defenders who pounced on Dean for his Ervin Committee “treason” could not point to a single change that would have put the president in a position to make a better decision.

It was Nixon who repeatedly underlined the desirability of meeting Hunt’s pressing financial demands, who repeatedly returned to the subject of the money and the need to pay it. And if Nixon could later find, here and there, a saving reference to the difficulty of early clemency, he would find the record barren of any suggestion that he had so much as lifted a finger to bring the course of continuing criminality to a halt.

Once again Nixon began by suggesting it was not Watergate but other matters Hunt had performed for Ehrlichman that concerned him, matters such as the Daniel Ellsberg problem. This hardly amounted to a defense, as the break-in into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist had been no less illegal than Watergate. Other Hunt matters included getting dirt on Ted Kennedy, forging cables to suggest that JFK had approved of the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, and spiriting the ITT lobbyist Dita Beard out of town when she began to cause political embarrassment. But rather than continue playing word games with the former president, I decided to confront him with a list of his own most damning quotes to Dean, something I had been working on over the weekend.

“You could get a million dollars, and you could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten.”

“Your major guy to keep under control is Hunt.”

“Don’t you have to handle Hunt’s financial situation?”

“Let me put it frankly: I wonder if that doesn’t have to be continued?”

“Get the million bucks, it would seem to me that would be worthwhile.”

“Don’t you agree that you’d better get the Hunt thing?”

“That’s worth it, and that’s buying time.”

“We should buy time on that, as I pointed out to John.”

“Hunt has at least got to know this before he’s sentenced.”

“First, you’ve got the Hunt problem. That ought to be handled.”

“The money can be provided. Mitchell could provide the way to deliver it. That could be done. See what I mean?”

“But let’s come back to the money. [“They were off on something else there,” I commented. “Desperate to get away from the money; bored to death with the continual references to the money.”] A million dollars and so forth and so on. Let me say that I think you could get that in cash.”

“That’s why your immediate thing, you’ve got no choice with Hunt but the hundred and twenty or whatever it is.

Right?”

“Would you agree that this is a buy-time thing? You’d better damn well get that done, but fast.”

“Now who’s going to talk to him? Colson?”

“We have no choice.”

I had gathered momentum as I went along. Nixon remained guarded. His countenance was placid through the first several items, then his lips quivered. His eyelids fluttered like the wings of a moth shot through with electric current. His head lurched backward with each new item. He was a man in pain, a man on the ropes, but not yet a man ready to concede defeat.

“Let me stop you right there, right there!” He accused me of reading the quotes “out of context, out of order.” I felt the cumulative impact was worth this bit of poetic license.

Nixon kept insisting that his remark late in the conversation “You never have any choice with Hunt, because it finally comes down to clemency,” reinforced by his statement “You can’t provide clemency,” amounted to a rejection of hush money payments. I wanted to be fair, but I could never make that link. Clemency was a long-term proposition. A better solution would have to be found. The $120,000, though, was a “buy-time thing.” There was nothing mutually exclusive or even mildly inconsistent about ratifying the blackmail payment and declining to go ahead with clemency. An even more damning fact: “Here’s Dean, talking about this hush money for Hunt; talking about blackmail and all of that. I would say that you endorsed or ratified it. But leave that to one side—”

NIXON: I didn’t endorse or ratify it.

FROST: Why didn’t you stop it?

Again the question jolted Nixon. He tried to collect himself. “Because at the point, I had nothing to—no knowledge of the fact that it was going to be paid.”

It was time to wrap our morning session. Birt and Zelnick bolted from the trailer. Zelnick met me at the door of my room.

“David, it was super! First-rate! Sensational!”

We embraced and looked around for John. He was engaged with the Nixon staff outside their monitoring room. Brennan and Khachigian had stopped him as he followed Bob. “What a mistake,” said Brennan. “What a mistake.”

“The president of the United States made himself look like a criminal defendant. With David as prosecutor,” Khachigian agreed.

“We didn’t want him to go that route,” said Brennan.

“But this was one subject that we simply could not discuss with him. It was just too personal,” said Khachigian.

“That’s right,” said Diane Sawyer, joining in the conversation. “He hasn’t written the Watergate part of his book yet. So none of us knew what he was going to say.”

THE INTERVIEWS: DAY 9

April 15, 1977

The fog had lifted. The cloud of gloom was only a memory. It had evaporated once and for all into one and a half hours of brilliant morning sunshine. Marv’s face took on the look of a man ten years younger. Jim, a calm presence even during moments of intense dispute, seemed now like a man who had achieved nirvana, his countenance a portrait of total enlightenment and peace. Bob, who gave ground grudgingly when he thought things were not going well, now with equal passion defied one and all to suggest so much as a single imperfection in the morning’s proceedings. There were instant replays of every pivotal exchange.

But now it was time to look ahead. John had a particular concern. “I don’t know what Nixon will come up with on Friday. Jack and Ken seemed so genuinely disappointed when I talked to them yesterday that I feel sure that they would do everything in their power to reach Mr. Nixon and persuade him to take a different line. I don’t know what it will be, but I think we will have to be ready for it.”

Bob expected no strategic adjustment. “Contrition in any meaningful sense is alien to Nixon’s personality. He is psychologically incapable of it. We are going to face the same stonewall tomorrow we faced on Wednesday.”

At the end of our preparation session, I asked the team, “Assuming what Bob said earlier about the stonewall is right, and taking John’s point, do you think that at the end we ought to invite him expressly to retract the hard-line approach and go the other route? Do you think the occasion calls for it?”

“Absolutely,” said John. “Whether or not you agree with it—and I don’t, by and large—I feel he’s presented a coherent view of himself and his administration except in these abuse areas. But as long as he remains rigid there, the rest of his record will never be taken and debated seriously.”

“Bob,” I said. “You’ve been so adept to anticipating Nixon’s responses all along, how do you think he’ll reply to an emotive challenge like this?”

“His face will contort,” said Bob, “His eyes will glisten. His voice will break. His head will nod gently and sadly. With the weight of history on his every word, he will say…‘Screw you.’”

Nixon arrived on the set seventeen minutes late—his first missed “deadline.”

I told him we would pick up where we had left off the previous day. He was advising Dean and Haldeman that “perjury is a tough rap to prove.” Then his advice became even more specific: “Just be damn sure you say, ‘I don’t remember…I can’t recall.’”

“Is that the sort of conversation that should have been going on in the Oval Office, do you think?”

Instead of bristling at the new allegation, Nixon seemed anxious to respond to this new and serious charge.

“I think that kind of advice is proper advice for one who was at that time…beginning to put myself in the position of an attorney for the defense—something which I wish I hadn’t had the responsibility, felt I had the responsibility to do. But I would like the opportunity when the question arises to tell you why I felt as deeply as I did at that point.”

I turned to the Dean report. In an August 15, 1973, statement, he had explained its origins to the American people as follows: “If anyone at the White House or high up in my campaign had been involved in wrongdoing of any kind, I wanted the White House to take the lead in making that known. On March 21, I instructed Dean to write a complete report of all that he knew on the entire Watergate matter.”

I compared that with the true record. On March 17, the president had asked Dean for a “self-serving goddamned statement” denying the culpability of the principal figures. When Dean had told the president that the original Liddy plan had involved bugging, Nixon had told him to omit that fact from his document. “On March twenty-first,” I told Nixon, “after his revelations to you, you said, ‘Understand, I don’t want to get all that specific.’”

Nixon was still playing defense. He reminded me that Dean had not mentioned Magruder’s admitted involvement in planning the initial Watergate break-in. I reminded Nixon of just how much information had in fact been conveyed by Dean on March 21. The central figures—Magruder, Kalmbach, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, even Dean himself—had all been named and their transgressions listed. “And therefore, when you say, ‘This person isn’t involved and that person isn’t involved,’ you knew they were involved.” Then a stunning breakthrough. Nixon, finally, began to crumble.

Nixon: “I would think you would have found that statement…Let’s get an impression of the whole story. Let the bad come out…there’s plenty of bad. I’m not proud of this period. Ah…I didn’t handle it well. I messed up.”

Here he recalled Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s famous remark “When I make a mistake, it’s a beaut.”

“Well,” he continued, “I must say, mine wasn’t a beaut—it was a disaster. Ah…and I recognize that it was a mistake, I made plenty of them. Ha, but…ah…I also insist that as far as my mistakes were concerned, ah…they were mistakes, frankly, of the head and they weren’t mistakes of the heart. They were not mistakes that had what I call an improper, illegal motive, ah…in terms of obstructing justice. Ah…that’s all I’m trying to say.”

This, I suspect, was the statement Nixon had come prepared to make. A simple declaration that he had made disastrous errors of the mind but not the heart, and that reading the totality of his words in context, one could see that he had been involved in no criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice.

I continued to pepper Nixon with excerpts from conversations with Ehrlichman and Haldeman, firmly establishing the Dean report as an instrumentality of the cover-up, rather than as its exposition. He gave ground foot by foot, yard by yard.

“I still don’t know why you didn’t pick up the phone and tell the cops,” I said. “I still don’t know, when you found about the things that Haldeman and Ehrlichman had done, that there is no evidence anywhere of a rebuke, but only of scenarios and excuses, et cetera. Nowhere do you say, ‘We must get this information direct to whosoever it is—the head of the Justice Department criminal investigation or whatever.’ And nowhere do you say to Haldeman and Ehrlichman, ‘This is disgraceful conduct’—and Haldeman admits a lot of it the next day, so you’re not relying on Dean—‘you’re fired.’”

Nixon’s body seemed to go limp. It was clear he was searching for ways to say new and different things. Up to this point the confrontation had been Nixon versus Frost. Now the former president seemed to be battling within himself. Nixon asked for time to address the question. But then he began wandering from Vietnam to his ambitions for the second term and his lack of knowledge about the law relating to cover-ups.

I was determined now to interrupt, but then I deferred when he again started talking about his special relationship with Haldeman and Ehrlichman.

“But when it came to March twenty-first,” I reminded him, “and the revelation…ah…Haldeman and Ehrlichman soon made it very clear to you that these payments, for instance, were not in fact innocent payments for humanitarian reasons…I mean, Haldeman said the defendants ‘might blow.’ Ehrlichman said they were there to keep him [Hunt] ‘on the reservation.’” I compared instructing Ehrlichman to conduct an independent inquiry with asking Al Capone for an independent investigation of organized crime in Chicago.

Nixon digressed to the Sherman Adams affair, an incident from the Eisenhower administration when Ike had been forced to let go of his chief policy adviser, who had accepted gifts from a businessman named Bernard Goldfine. Ike had designated his vice president—Richard Nixon—to handle the unpleasant chore of notifying Adams. With Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Nixon had no appropriate surrogates. He alone had to tell them they were through.

With Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Nixon also had to balance the value of keeping their good counsel close at hand versus that of purging the administration of those stained by Watergate. Nixon considered pardons for those involved, somehow combining those with assertions of the doctrine of executive privilege.

In the end, Nixon issued no pardons. In my view, he was simply too proud. He wanted to have it both ways, appearing publicly as a law-and-order president, devoted to unraveling the cover-up, yet privately conspiring to make the cover-up work. Nixon’s indecisiveness doubled his problems. Given a choice between one form of damage control and another, the president—on three pivotal occasions—chose both.

Nixon and his two aides repaired to Camp David. Haldeman was the first to learn his fate, telling Nixon, “I disagree with your decision totally; I think you’re going to live to regret it.” Haldeman was bitter, feeling he had done nothing wrong. Nixon took Ehrlichman out to the porch. “I said, ‘You know, John, when I went to bed last night…I hoped, I almost prayed, I wouldn’t wake up this morning.’ Well, it was an emotional moment; I think there were tears in our eyes, both of us.”

Nixon quoted William Gladstone as advising those who wished to be prime minister that the job required one to be “a good butcher.”

“Well, I think the great story, as far as a summary of Watergate is concerned,” Nixon said, “I did some of the big things rather well, I screwed up terribly on what was a little thing and became a big thing. But I will have to admit I was not a good butcher.”

I asked Nixon if it was possible for him to “go a little further.” He had spoken in terms of loyalty to his friends and his perceived need to serve as defense counsel for them, but he had also told the nation that his sole concern during the period March 21 to April 30 was to get the truth out. “But now you’re telling us your innermost feelings at that time, and I’ve indicated some of my doubts, and I’ve got others, about the speed with which the truth came out.”

He was still not ready to go further. I began looking for an excuse to break. In the corner of my eye I thought I saw Jack Brennan holding up a piece of paper saying, “Let us talk.” I told Nixon we needed time to change tapes. I started for our own monitor room, but Brennan was waiting in the hall. His face was flushed. He began to talk in a jumble of words. I heard only isolated phrases. “Critical moment in his life.” “Can’t cross-examine him.” “Know he’ll go further.” “What do you want?”

On the floor lay his piece of paper. It did not say “Let us talk,” it said “Let him talk.” Khachigian came rushing out of Nixon’s room, whispered something to Brennan, and rushed back in. Then Birt arrived from the production trailer.

“What is it you’re trying to say, Jack?”

“David has got to quit playing the prosecutor,” Jack said. “This is an important moment in the president’s life. He’ll go further than mistakes and misjudgments. He wants to make a full accounting. But you’ve got to let him do it in his own way.”

“What do you mean by a full accounting?” asked Birt. “That he was guilty of a crime?”

“I don’t know if he’ll say that.”

“That he committed impeachable offenses?”

“I don’t know if he’ll say that either.”

“Then David’s cross-examination will resume.”

“Just a minute. Let me talk to him.”

Birt turned to me. “That was exceptional, David. But we can’t relent now.”

“No, we can’t. On the one hand, Jack’s right when he says Nixon won’t go much further under adversary pressure. On the other hand, I have to dispute or at least disclaim any categorization of his conduct which doesn’t reflect ours.”

“Don’t change a thing,” said John.

Amid all the emotional turmoil, Brennan returned from the Nixon room.

“He knows he has to go further,” he said. “I don’t know what he’ll say, and I’m not sure he does. But ask him. Just ask him. He’s got more to volunteer.”

“Look, Jack, we can’t plea-bargain with you,” said John.

“If he’s got something to say,” I said, “we’ll give him every opportunity to say it on his own, but if he falls short, we’ll have to come back at him.”

“The interrogation will have to restart. That’s all we can tell you now,” said John.

“I’ll go and tell him,” said Brennan, “and if it doesn’t happen now, we can always try again on Monday.” John put out his hand and stopped Brennan for a moment. “No, Jack,” he said with intense earnestness. “Don’t let him feel that even for a second. Believe me, if he doesn’t do it now, having come this far, he’ll never do it on Monday.”

I have often read of “electricity” in the air. Of a “highly charged” atmosphere. But I never expect to experience it again quite as I did as Nixon and I walked back on to the set. Everybody felt it. All over the house. John felt it on his way back to the trailer. He stopped, turned, and came back again. He walked across the set to the side of my chair, leaned over, and whispered in my ear, “It is terribly easy for all of us to get caught up in the emotions of the moment. But what happens now and what he says now, and what you say now, will be pored over by historians. That’s the perspective to try and keep.”

The red light on the cameras went on. I tried to recapture the mood of our earlier conversation.

“To come back to where we were just now, Mr. President…because this is a difficult program for you and a difficult program for me. We were talking about the period…March the twenty-first and April the thirtieth. And you were talking about your emotions as you had to bid farewell to Haldeman and Ehrlichman. And talking about the mistakes that you made and so on in doing that…you’ve talked about the mistakes…we’re at an extraordinary moment in a way. Would you do what the American people yearn to hear? Not because they yearn to hear it, but just to tell all, to level and so on. Would you go further than the ‘mistakes’? You’ve explained how you got caught up in this thing. You’ve explained your motives. I don’t want to quibble about any of that. But just coming to the sheer substance—would you go further than ‘mistakes’? The word that seems not enough for people to understand.”

“Well, what word would you express?”

This was the most heart-stopping moment I have ever had in an interview. Richard Nixon was probably more vulnerable than he would ever be again. And he was putting the question back to me. It was a moment I had to seize. Unless I was able to frame, with precision, what it was we wanted to hear from him, the moment would be lost, never to be recaptured. As a symbolic gesture, I took the clipboard with my notes on and tossed it onto the floor beside my chair, trying to indicate that whatever I was about to say was not some prepared ploy. It could never have been prepared, of course, because none of us had been anticipating a moment like this.

“Let me say that my concern is now not to—which is why I chucked the clipboard away—not to be legalistic or anything, about obstructions of justice and so on, and things we’ve discussed so far and so on…I think there are three things—since you asked me that heart-stopping question—I would like to hear you say, and the American people would like to hear you say. One is, ‘There was probably more than mistakes…there was wrongdoing.’ Whether it was a crime or not—yes, it may have been a crime too. Secondly, ‘I did’—and I’m saying this without questioning the motives, right—‘I did abuse the power I had as president or not fulfil the totality, the oath of office.’ That’s the second thing. And thirdly, ‘I put the American people through two years of agony, and I apologize for that.’

“And I say that—you’ve expressed your motives—I think those are the categories. And I know how difficult it is for anyone, and most of all you, but I think that the people need to hear, and I think unless you say it, you’re going to be haunted for the rest of your life.”

Over the next twenty minutes, Nixon addressed all three of these points, but my recital seemed momentarily to drive all the air from his lungs. Then he began slowly, circuitously. No, it had not been a good time for the country. He had made mistakes—“horrendous ones…ones that were not worthy for a president…ones that did not meet the standards of excellence that I had always dreamed of as a young boy.”

He had considered resigning on the day he announced the resignations of Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Along with the bad, he “owed it to history” to remind Americans of some of his great accomplishments—the second and third summits, resolution of the crisis in the Mideast, the continuing processes of détente and normalization with the two Communist powers.

He returned to the point. He hadn’t just made mistakes in this period. Some that he regretted most deeply involved “the statements that I made afterwards” about his claimed efforts to unravel the cover-up.

“I would say that the statements I made afterwards, on the big issues, true: that I was not involved in the matters that I had spoken to…not involved in the break-in, that I did not engage in and participate in or approve the payment or the authorization of clemency, which, of course, were the essential elements of the cover-up.”

But he had been in a “five-front war” with a partisan media, a partisan Ervin Committee, a partisan special prosecutor’s staff, and a partisan House Judiciary Committee staff. “Now, under all these circumstances, my reactions in some of the statements and press conferences and so forth after that, I want to say right here and now, I said things that were not true. Most of them were fundamentally true on the big issues, but without going so far as I should have gone, and saying, perhaps, that I had considered other things but not done them.”

FROST: Well, you mean—

NIXON: And for all those things, I have a very deep regret.

FROST: You got caught up in—

NIXON: Yeah.

FROST:—and then it snowballed.

“It snowballed,” said Nixon. But he quickly repeated his claim that “on the essential issues, I leveled with the American people and told the truth.”

Yet in the face of continuing attacks, his credibility began to go down at home, and it went down abroad. “By the time I resigned, I was crippled. I was crippled even before that.”

He would take the blame for that. He was not blaming anyone else, certainly not Mitchell, Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and the rest. They had all suffered enough.

“I’m simply saying to you that as far as I’m concerned, I not only regret it, I indicated my own beliefs in this matter when I resigned. People didn’t think it was enough to admit mistakes. Fine. If they want me to get down and grovel on the floor, no. Never. Because I don’t believe I should.”

Those words were spoken with conviction, even defiance. But he quickly came back to his more wistful, conciliatory tone. He was, again, not blaming anyone else, not the CIA and not his Democratic and Republican foes, the so-called impeachment lobby. He would reject the claims of those who called him a victim of a coup or a conspiracy.

“I brought myself down. I gave them a sword. And they stuck it in. And they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I’d been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.”

Nixon had moved a tremendous distance. Could I get him to go even further? In addition to making these untrue statements, could he say with conviction “that you did do some covering up? We’re not talking legalistically now, I just want the facts…that there were a series of times, maybe overwhelmed by your loyalties or whatever else, but as you look back at the record, you behaved partially protecting your friends—or maybe yourself—and that in fact you were, to put it at its most simple, a part of a cover-up at times?”

“I did not in the first place commit a—the crime of obstruction of justice—because I did not have the motive required for the commission of that crime.” I reminded Nixon that we would continue to disagree on that. He responded that the matter was one for lawyers to argue and that the House of Representatives had ruled overwhelmingly that he had. But, rather than face a long Senate trial, which the country could not afford, “I have impeached myself. That speaks for itself.”

FROST: How do you mean, “I have impeached myself”?

NIXON: By resigning, that was a voluntary impeachment.

During the critical post–March 21 period, “I was in a very different position. And during that period, I will admit that I started acting as a lawyer for the defense.

“I will admit that acting as a lawyer for their defense, I was not prosecuting the case.”

And during that period, “As the one with the chief responsibility for seeing that the laws of the United States are enforced, I did not meet that responsibility.

“And, to the extent that I did not meet that responsibility, to the extent that within the law, and in some cases going right to the edge of the law, in trying to advise Ehrlichman and Haldeman and all the rest as to how best to present their cases, because I thought they were legally innocent, that I came to the edge.

“And under the circumstances, I would have to say that a reasonable person could call that a cover-up.”

Nixon drifted slightly following this stunning series of admissions, but he had one more message to deliver to the American people. He got into it by recounting his farewell dinner at the White House with his closest congressional supporters. As he had risen to leave for the Oval Office and his final address as president, he had turned and told his friends, “I’m sorry, I just hope I haven’t let you down.”

“Well, when I said, ‘I just hope I haven’t let you down,’ that said it all.

“I had.

“I let down my friends.

“I let down the country.

“I let down our system of government and the dreams of all those young people that ought to get into government but think it’s all too corrupt and the rest.

“Most of all, what I fear the greatest—not that I don’t hope and pray that President Carter will be able to make progress in his peace initiatives—I let down an opportunity that I would have had for two and a half more years to proceed on great projects and programs for building a lasting peace, which has been my dream, as you know from our first interview in 1968, before I had any thought I might even win that year. (I didn’t tell you I didn’t think I might win, but I wasn’t sure.)

“Yep, I…I, I let the American people down. And I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life.

“My political life is over.

“I will never yet, and never again, have an opportunity to serve in any official position. Maybe I can give a little advice from time to time.

“I can only say that in answer to your questions, that while technically I did not commit a crime, an impeachable offense…these are legalisms.

“As far as the handling of this matter is concerned, it was so botched up.

“I made so many bad judgments, the worst ones, mistakes of the heart rather than the head, as I pointed out.

“But, let me say, a man in that top judge…top job, he’s gotta have heart.

“But his head must always rule his heart.”

Nixon’s mea culpa had gone so much further than we had originally expected or even hoped. I was moved—awed—by the experience we had just shared. I suggested to Nixon that whatever burdens he had been shouldering would be lighter now.

“I doubt it,” Nixon replied. In his view, his mortal enemies among the media, liberal Democrats, and academics would never surrender their hatred for him.

Nixon said good-bye and started to leave. But he was ambushed by the two staffs, which had already converged in the living room. We were both surrounded and congratulated for one of the most extraordinary moments any of us could ever recall.

“Do you think they’ll accept what he said as satisfactory?” Khachigian asked after Nixon had left.

“I would certainly hope so,” said Zelnick. “The president was as honest today as God has given him the capacity to be honest.”

“It’s funny,” Diane Sawyer mused sadly, “you people are journalists, and good ones, and you probably learned more about Richard Nixon than any other outsiders in the world; sometimes I think you know him better than we do. But I think we know more about your colleagues than you do. Just watch. They’re going to see your show. And they’re going to tear him to shreds.”

“Wanna bet?” asked Zelnick, extending his hand.

“Why not?” Diane replied, clasping it. “We’ve got nothing to lose.”

THE INTERVIEWS: DAYS 10–12

April 18, 20, and 22, 1977

We had three more sessions scheduled with Nixon. One was devoted mainly to separate individual interviews we had agreed to do for our co-production partners, the BBC, TF1 in France, RAI in Italy, and Channel 9 in Australia. Each country sent one of its leading current affairs producers to work with us on a one-hour interview that would be for broadcast exclusively in their respective territories.

Then it was back to the main theme—the international interviews for Frost/Nixon. Among the most interesting items on our agenda was the break-in into the Los Angeles office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding. Nixon came prepared to talk about national security leaks. He said there had been forty of them in 1969 and seventy-one in 1970. But by mid-1971 alone, the number had shot up to eighty-two. So the mandate of the White House “plumbers’ group” formed by the president was to deal quickly with the greater problem.

Nixon was not modest in discussing Ellsberg. He said he had instructed Bud Krogh of the plumbers to determine what classified documents Ellsberg had access to besides the now-famous Pentagon Papers. Almost as an afterthought Nixon added a second motive, that of publicly discrediting Ellsberg. It was Kissinger, Nixon said, who became the great administration advocate for an anti-Ellsberg campaign. Leaks like Ellsberg’s, said Kissinger, inhibited his ability to conduct diplomacy. Already there were cables from Canada, Australia, and Romania expressing concern about the security of their correspondence with the United States. The order to discredit Ellsberg had come from Nixon himself, “as I said, not Ellsberg as a man, not for the purpose of getting him convicted at a trial, but that would discourage this kind of activity.”

FROST: But in the actual period before the Fielding break-in in August, I think, Mr. Ehrlichman has said that he talked to you about the fact that Hunt and Liddy had to go operational…had to go to California to find information. How much did he tell you at that time?

NIXON: I do not recall a conversation with Ehrlichman on that.

The circumstances here are interesting. Investigators found a memorandum signed by Ehrlichman approving a “covert operation” to examine Ellsberg’s psychiatric files. Despite this, at his 1974 trial, Ehrlichman’s defense was not that the operation had had Nixon’s blessing but that he had never given his okay to Krogh or the other plumbers. Our suspicion was that Ehrlichman was angling for a pardon from Nixon and, until the day the president resigned, thought he was going to get one and thus had no interest in subjecting Nixon to more trouble than he was already in. It became clear to us in short order that without the prod of White House tape transcripts or credible testimony from the likes of John Dean, Nixon would have volunteered nothing.

FROST: And after the event, when he got filled in on the fact that they had done the job and found very little in this—

NIXON: Nothing—

FROST:—illegal break-in…nothing—

NIXON:—dry hole—

FROST:—did he, what did he tell you about it afterward?

NIXON: Nothing…that I can recall. I have no recollection whatever of having been told anything about it afterwards…

The Nixon tapes released to date show no direct connection between Nixon and the Fielding break-in. Earlier tapes did indicate Nixon’s deep interest in the contents of a safe at the Brookings Institution, a think tank located in Washington, D.C., and a suggestion, attributed to Colson, that the building be firebombed and the papers retrieved. At the time of our interview no tapes had as yet captured Nixon issuing a direct order regarding Brookings, and our questions about that order elicited a cautious response.

“I have no recollection of authorizing a break-in at Brookings. I, however, would not say that I did not express deep concern about the fact that Brookings might have this and that I did not express a very great interest in trying to obtain those documents from Brookings. Ah…get them back in some way if we possibly could.”

As always, right below the surface was resentment for having been singled out for conduct he claimed was widely practiced. Why had the plumbers run afoul of the law so quickly? But he did remember that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been bugged by the Kennedys, LBJ had had the FBI bug the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 national convention, and Bobby Kennedy, as attorney general, had had reporters awakened at midnight to answer questions about monopolistic collusion in the steel industry.

If I had to pick our most enjoyable segment, it was the one in which we discussed the subject of Spiro Agnew’s resignation under fire in the midst of Nixon’s own Watergate travails. All of us expected Nixon to show great irritation with Agnew, who falsely protested his innocence and assured Nixon he would survive the charges. In point of fact, Nixon seemed almost relaxed about his vice president’s foibles, suggesting that Attorney General Elliot Richardson—who later resigned over the Saturday Night Massacre—may have carried a personal grudge against Agnew. As for Agnew’s graft as governor of Maryland, the president seemed positively tolerant. After all, demanding money from contractors who wished to be considered for state construction contracts “was common practice in most of the eastern states and many of the southern states. It had not yet swept out to the West.” Furthermore, “there was never an instance when a contract did not go to a highly qualified, and, in his view, the most qualified individual. In other words, his point being that he did not, in effect, accept money from somebody who would not have otherwise been entitled to a contract.” Moments later, Nixon again tried to define Agnew’s philosophy of government. “I do not think for one minute that Spiro Agnew, for example, consciously felt that he was violating the law and basically that he was being bribed to do something which was wrong…because of a payment.”

Had he thought Agnew was guilty? “I was very pragmatic,” he replied. “In my view, it didn’t really make any difference.” There wasn’t any question that Agnew “was going to get it.”

Like Nixon himself, Agnew had been the victim of a “double standard.” “I would say that because he was conservative, because he was one who took on the press, he got a lot rougher treatment than would have been the case had he been one of the liberals’ favorite pinup boys.”

In the production trailer, Birt and Zelnick alternated between bouts of hilarity and incredulity at Nixon’s response. It was not Nixon’s treatment of the Agnew matter at the time that they found hard to comprehend. But how could Nixon now justify defending a man who had misled him so blatantly when confronted with the charges against him? And why would he—trying to regain a semblance of national respectability—line up behind a man who was literally without a constituent in the country?

Nixon’s response later was a simple one: “I just didn’t want to kick him when he’s down.”

To many, Agnew and the Ellsberg break-in have in common the fact that both were intended for use against the liberal media establishment. Throughout his presidency, Nixon was accused of intimidating the media, his tactics having a “chilling” effect on free speech and expression. No charge, not even participation in the Watergate crimes, elicited a more heartfelt response from him. “Now, when we talk about the great period of repression during the so-called Nixon years, who was repressed? My God, was CBS repressed? Was ABC repressed? The New York Times? The Washington Post? What about the dissenters? Were they repressed? Were they afraid to speak? What was the situation? All it did as far as they were concerned was to build up their lecture fees and so forth and so on, those that claim they were depressed—repressed.”

Gerald Ford was not Nixon’s first choice to succeed Spiro Agnew. But the president was told that John Connally, his first choice, would have difficulty winning confirmation, as would Henry Kissinger’s first choice, Nelson Rockefeller. So Ford breezed through the process and, when he succeeded Nixon, assured the nation that “our long national nightmare is over.” But he soon found that our even longer national obsession with Richard Nixon was not. Knowing that an indictment and trial would keep Nixon on the front pages for the remainder of his own term and then some, Ford issued a pardon. His lawyers had researched the subject and concluded that acceptance of a pardon carries with it an implicit acknowledgement of guilt. Nixon, of course, had his own notions of the law and would eventually go to his grave without linking acceptance of the pardon to any confession of guilt. Ford would lose the presidency in 1976, most analysts concluding that the Nixon pardon had cost him the White House. More than a quarter century later, his act would win him a Profile in Courage Award from the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.

For Nixon, the pardon, his narrow but decisive victory over phlebitis, and the Frost/Nixon interviews were the essential preliminary steps toward his return to society as an elder statesman and foreign policy expert.

I asked Nixon whether in any sense he felt that resignation had been worse than death.

“In some ways,” he replied. Not as the “popular mythologists” of the period might describe it. He had had no desire to “fall on a sword” or to “take a gun and shoot myself.” No. “I never think in suicidal terms, death wish and all that…that’s all just…just bunk.”

Resignation, however, had meant a “life without purpose,” a life without the ability to contribute to the causes he believed in, to fight the battles he enjoyed fighting. In that sense, resignation had been “almost unbearable, a very shattering experience, which it has been and, to a certain extent, still is.”

Again, the popular misconception of his fate. People might envy his ability to live in a nice house, wear decent clothes, play golf whenever he pleased. “And the answer is, if you don’t have those things, then they can mean a great deal. When you do have them, they mean nothing to you…

“To me, the unhappiest people of the world are those in the watering places, the international watering places,” he continued. “Like the south coast of France and Newport and Palm Springs and Palm Beach…going to parties every night, playing golf every afternoon, then bridge…drinking too much, talking too much, thinking too little. Retired. No purpose.”

The people who envy that form of existence, “They don’t know life. Because what makes life mean something is purpose. A goal. The battle. The struggle. Even if you don’t win it.” So I asked Nixon what was now his ambition, his purpose. He replied that it was to finish his book, which, along with these interviews, he hoped would “give some lessons to people in the future.”

“You know, there are many famous Confucius sayings, and one of my favorites is ‘One who makes a mistake and does not correct it makes another mistake.’ And I suppose that is the lesson of Watergate; it’s the lesson of life.”