Summits by David Reynolds

Author:David Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books

IT IS UNLIKELY that Nixon knew about Watergate before the arrests. But thereafter he participated actively and illegally in the cover-up—suppressing evidence, funneling hush money to the accused and using federal agencies to obstruct the investigation. Moreover the original break-in stemmed directly from the ethos of the Nixon White House. A prime target of the president’s paranoia was Lawrence O’Brien, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, whom he feared had got hold of some serious dirt about his financial dealings. Nixon’s constant injunctions to find out prompted his underlings—rather like the story of King Henry II and Thomas Becket—to plant bugs in O’Brien’s Watergate office.142

Watergate did not inflict immediate damage on the Nixon presidency. Although the burglars were financed by Nixon’s reelection campaign, the White House successfully managed to insulate itself during the summer.While the Democrats feuded, “every effort was made to create an economic boom for the 1972 election,” Defense Secretary Melvyn Laird recalled. His department did its bit by ordering a two-year supply of toilet paper.143

In November Nixon duly won his second term, carrying every state except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. And after another ferocious bombing campaign over Christmas, North Vietnam finally agreed to a ceasefire, allowing Nixon the political cover to extricate U.S. troops. It was, the president kept insisting in another Chamberlainesque phrase, “peace with honor.”144

During 1973, however, Watergate became all-consuming news, thanks to the federal court case and televised Senate committee hearings. To save their own skins, lower-level operatives started to implicate their superiors. In April, as the trail came ever closer to the Oval Office, Nixon forced Haldeman and Ehrlichman, two of his closest aides, to resign. And in July a White House staffer confirmed that Nixon had taped most of his private conversations, prompting demands that he release the evidence. Although Nixon fought a stubborn rearguard action for another year, from that point his presidency was doomed.

So too was his foreign policy. In June 1973 Brezhnev spent a week in the United States visiting Camp David, Washington, and Nixon’s California home in San Clemente.The two leaders got on well again and Brezhnev, a fan of John Wayne, loved playing with Nixon’s gift of a six-shooter and holster. At the level of substance, the summit continued the détente process and produced a few more concrete agreements in areas such as aviation, agriculture and the peaceful use of atomic energy. But there was nothing on the scale of the ABM Treaty; moreover no real progress was made on a full-scale arms control agreement—SALT II. Above all a week’s exposure to the American media demonstrated to the Soviets that Nixon was now under massive political pressure over Watergate. So Brezhnev started to distance himself on a personal level: there was no point in linking his prestige to that of a failing president. And, at a time when the Soviet leader was consolidating Moscow’s commitment to détente—in April he removed Shelest, his main critic, from the Politburo and elevated allies such as Gromyko to full

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