People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [323]
Two former members of Nixon’s cabinet—John Mitchell and Maurice Stans—were charged with taking $250,000 from a financier named Robert Vesco in return for their help with a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of Vesco’s activities.
It turned out that certain material had disappeared from FBI files—material from a series of illegal wiretaps ordered by Henry Kissinger, placed on the telephones of four journalists and thirteen government officials—and was in the White House safe of Nixon’s adviser John Erlichman.
One of the Watergate burglars, Bernard Barker, told the Senate committee that he had also been involved in a plan to physically attack Daniel Ellsberg while Ellsberg spoke at an antiwar rally in Washington.
A deputy director of the CIA testified that Haldeman and Ehrlichman told him it was Nixon’s wish that the CIA tell the FBI not to pursue its investigation beyond the Watergate burglary.
Almost by accident, a witness told the Senate committee that President Nixon had tapes of all personal conversations and phone conversations at the White House. Nixon at first refused to turn over the tapes, and when he finally did, they had been tampered with: eighteen and a half minutes of one tape had been erased.
In the midst of all this, Nixon’s Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, was indicted in Maryland for receiving bribes from Maryland contractors in return for political favors, and resigned from the vice-presidency in October 1973. Nixon appointed Congressman Gerald Ford to take Agnew’s place.
Over $10 million in government money had been used by Nixon on his private homes in San Clemente and Key Biscayne on grounds of “security,” and he had illegally taken—with the aid of a bit of forgery—a $576,000 tax deduction for some of his papers.
It was disclosed that for over a year in 1969–1970 the U.S. had engaged in a secret, massive bombing of Cambodia, which it kept from the American public and even from Congress.
It was a swift and sudden fall. In the November 1972 presidential election, Nixon and Agnew had won 60 percent of the popular vote and carried every state except Massachusetts, defeating an antiwar candidate, Senator George McGovern. By June of 1973 a Gallup poll showed 67 percent of those polled thought Nixon was involved in the Watergate break-in or lied to cover up.
By the fall of 1973 eight different resolutions had been introduced in the House of Representatives for the impeachment of President Nixon. The following year a House committee drew up a bill of impeachment to present it to a full House. Nixon’s advisers told him it would pass the House by the required majority and then the Senate would vote the necessary two-thirds majority to remove him from office. On August 8, 1974, Nixon resigned.
Six months before Nixon resigned, the business magazine Dun’s Review reported a poll of three hundred corporation executives. Almost all had voted for Nixon in 1972, but now a majority said he should resign. “Right now, 90% of Wall Street would cheer if Nixon resigns,” said a vice-president of Merrill Lynch Government Securities. When he did, there was relief in all sectors of the Establishment.
Gerald Ford, taking Nixon’s office, said: “Our long national nightmare is over.” Newspapers, whether they had been for or against Nixon, liberal or conservative, celebrated the successful, peaceful culmination of the Watergate crisis. “The system is working,” said a long-time strong critic of the Vietnam war, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis. The two journalists who had much to do with investigating and exposing Nixon, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, wrote that with Nixon’s departure, there might be “restoration.” All of this was in a mood of relief, of gratitude.
No respectable American newspaper said what was said by Claude Julien, editor of Le Monde Diplomatique in September 1974. “The elimination of Mr. Richard Nixon leaves intact all the mechanisms and all the false values which permitted the Watergate scandal.” Julien noted that Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry