The Pardon by Jeffrey Toobin

Author:Jeffrey Toobin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2025-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

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Saxbe cut-and-pasted Scalia’s memo into his own message to the president, and the attorney general headed to the White House for a meeting on the subject. But before he did, someone in the Justice Department leaked Saxbe’s memo to the press. This infuriated Ford’s people at the White House, especially the prickly Bob Hartmann, because he thought Saxbe was trying to jam Ford by creating a public understanding that Nixon’s papers belonged to him.

The meeting in the Oval Office became a showdown between Saxbe and Haig on one side and Hartmann and Becker on the other. Saxbe summarized the history that Scalia had outlined. Ulysses Grant held an auction of his papers. LBJ took every scrap with him to Texas. Nixon enjoyed the same rights. His papers belonged to him, and they should be shipped to him in San Clemente immediately. According to Saxbe, if Ford didn’t send the papers posthaste, Nixon would sue for them and win. Haig agreed. Becker fought back, arguing that the precedents didn’t apply. There had never been a full-scale taping system in place before, and the other presidents’ materials were not the subject of ongoing criminal investigations.

The atmosphere in the room was fraught. Hartmann, who already had a rich loathing for Haig and was always alert to any slight, felt that Saxbe, a former senator, was condescending to Ford, who had been a mere congressman. “They thought Gerald Ford wasn’t really very smart,” Hartmann said, “and so he needed them to protect him from his own mistakes… hell, these little shits, they talked down to him and around him.”2 Becker, who had never been more than a mid-level federal prosecutor and was still a mere volunteer in the White House, was happy to challenge the attorney general on the merits. He recalled saying, “If you send those records, papers and tapes, to Richard Nixon, there will be a hell of a bonfire in San Clemente—and whatever happens in the remaining two and a half years [the remainder of Ford’s presidency], is unimportant. Historians will write about the Ford presidency and this is what they will say, ‘Jerry Ford committed the final act of the Watergate cover-up when he sent those records and papers and tapes to Nixon in California.’ ”

Ford disliked contention among his staffers, and he maintained a grumpy silence as the debate played out in front of him. “You could see red from the neck up, literally see the color change,” Becker recalled. “I really angered him with that statement, and I meant to anger him. I wanted to shake him—you can’t do that! Saxbe jumped in and said something like, ‘I’m the Attorney General. You should listen to my advice.’ ”

In the end, Ford came down squarely on Becker’s side. “Those damn things are not leaving here,” he said. “They belong to the American people. They are going to stay here. They are not leaving.”

It was, in many ways, a courageous decision on Ford’s part, to reject the advice of his attorney general and stiff his predecessor on a matter that was obviously important to Nixon.

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