WASHINGTON — With an air of desperation, a hunkered down White House hatched a plan to save Richard Nixon’s presidency as the Watergate crisis began to consume it: Demonize the prosecutor in the eyes of lawmakers and the people.
The effort fell flat.
Hardball rhetoric was the order of the day in the Nixon White House, a collection of memos and tape recordings released Tuesday by the Nixon Presidential Library makes clear. This was so whether the president was willing the downfall of a Democratic “pipsqueak” — Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, the Democratic vice presidential candidate — or pressing South Vietnam to accept a peace deal that would leave it open to the communist takeover that followed.
The records show Nixon seemingly resigned to the likelihood of South Vietnam’s eventual collapse even as he strong-armed its president, Nguyen Van Thieu, to accept a settlement that would extricate the U.S. from the massively unpopular war.
He told his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, he’d do anything to get Thieu to accede, “cut off his head if necessary.”
The materials show Nixon as sharp-witted, crude, manipulative and sometimes surprisingly liberal by comparison with mainstream Republicans today.
In one letter, he solidly endorses the Equal Rights Amendment, saying that for 20 years “I have not altered my belief that equal rights for women warrant a constitutional guarantee.” The amendment failed.
Yet in a taped conversation with George H.W. Bush, then GOP chairman, he pitched the recruitment of pretty women in particular to run for the party, after two caught his eye in the South Carolina Legislature.
Watergate was a gathering drumbeat through it all. The peril is palpable in memos that surfaced Tuesday.
A nine-page handwritten note by Nixon domestic policy adviser Kenneth Cole reflects on the unfolding “Saturday night massacre,” when Nixon fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox and ousted the two top Justice Department officials in October 1973, bringing the nation to the edge of constitutional crisis.
Cox pressed relentlessly for Nixon’s White House tape recordings as he investigated the president’s involvement in the Watergate cover-up. Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, balked at Nixon’s decision to fire Cox — and were removed, too.
Cole recommended tearing down the investigator’s reputation.
“Cox wanted to keep this an unending crisis of the body politic,” Cole wrote, laying out an argument for Nixon partisans. “Cox threw down the gauntlet — at a time when we don’t need some 4th Branch of gov’t telling P (the president) to go to hell.”
About 30,000 pages of documents were opened to the public at the National Archives in College Park, Md., and the Nixon library in Yorba Linda, Calif., part of a long unfolding and staggered declassification of papers and tapes from the Nixon years.
In addition, the library posted more than 150 hours of tape recordings online. The tapes cover January and February 1973.
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