Richard Hauser wanted three days off — the weekend plus the following Monday. It seemed a reasonable request. The strains of being in the White House counsel’s office during the Watergate scandal were wearing on him, and the prospect of a few days away from the troubles of Richard Nixon and the crisis that was enveloping the capital seemed inviting. But Fred Buzhardt, his boss and the man attempting to steer the 37th president through the troubled waters of Washington, made it clear: Be here Monday.
Monday, Aug. 5, 1974, was the day the dam broke on Watergate.
Hauser, then 31 years old, sensed something was up. The previous Friday, John Dean, himself once the White House counsel and then Nixon’s chief accuser in the Watergate imbroglio, had been sentenced to one to four years in prison for his role in the scandal’s cover-up. Many of his colleagues had been at Camp David over the weekend. That fateful Monday, Buzhardt confided to him, in a phrase that has been mangled by history, “The smoking pistol had been found.”
Now, as Friday’s 50th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation approaches, what is known as the smoking-gun tape — a secretly recorded June 23, 1972 conversation with Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, in which the president directed him to tell Vernon Walters, deputy director of the CIA, to ask L. Patrick Gray, the acting director of the FBI, to “stay the hell out” of the Watergate investigation — was the final straw of the final days. When it became public, Nixon lost the allegiance of the Republicans who opposed the impeachment resolutions in the House Judiciary Committee and of Sens. Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP presidential nominee, and Hugh Scott, the Republican leader in the chamber.
Buzhardt said the president was in denial about the importance of the tape. James St. Clair, the courtly Boston lawyer who was Nixon’s last Watergate attorney, told Hauser that the tape was an “unmitigated disaster,” and that top Nixon staff personnel agreed: Nixon must make a statement, and a transcript of the tape needed to be attached.
All this is set out in a remarkable eight-page set of recollections that Hauser prepared while still in the White House, distributed only to his five daughters, and that he only reluctantly shared for this column. It positions Hauser as something of the Watergate equivalent of Samuel Pepys (1633-1703), whose diary provides vital insights into the English restoration; or Mary Chesnut (1823-1886), whose diary illuminates Southern life during the stresses of the Civil War era.
In Hauser’s recollections are the tensions and worries swirling around the White House as the talk of resignation — and then the imperative of resignation — filled the air. And then there was his own effort to resign because of what he called Nixon’s “nonforthrightness.”
Plus: The concerns of Edward Cox, who was married to presidential daughter Tricia Nixon, about gifts the couple received as part of the extended Nixon family. Worries about who would pay the family’s moving expenses. Questions about whether it was appropriate for the White House staff “to box and crate furniture and personal belongings of the Nixons.”
These recollections include the strong belief of Leonard Garment, a one-time Nixon law partner and longtime confidant of the president, that Nixon needed to relinquish the office he had sought in three national elections. “Len stated that he was committed to get the president to resign, that it was in the interest of the president, and I recall distinctly that he had characterized the president as deranged.”
Hauser recalled that the night before the resignation was like a “death watch.”
He had dinner in the White House Mess with a friend. “On our way to dinner, we were stopped at the bottom of the ramp of the Old Executive Office Building as we were walking toward the West Wing,” Hauser wrote. “The president at that moment was crossing West Executive Avenue to his office in the Old Executive Office Building. He looked like the world’s loneliest man as he slowly crossed the street and walked up the steps.”
Hauser recalled that dinner as “an odd mixture of the morose, the ominous, (with) sick joking, good humor, all with the realization of the inevitable — the president’s resignation.” During the meal, White House personnel asked that the mess doors remain closed and that the diners remain inside for 20 minutes. “The president,” he said, “did not want to be seen by the staff.”
The next evening, Aug. 8, Hauser, St. Clair and others gathered around a television in their offices on the White House grounds to watch Nixon tell the people whom he had served as vice president for eight years and as president for five and a half years that he was resigning. “I discussed the resignation with St. Clair and we both agreed that the president had difficulty distinguishing between right and wrong, and finally, believing that the staff was not trying to do him in, decided that resignation was the only course.
“Much liquor was consumed by White House Staff personnel during the pre-, during and post-resignation period that night.”
The next morning, with the president about to depart the White House, the Marine Band played “When You Walk Through a Storm,” from the 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Carousel.” Though the words of the first stanza are well known (“keep your chin up high”), it may be the second stanza that is more appropriate for Hauser and his colleagues:
Walk on through the wind
Walk on through the rain
Though your dreams be tossed
And blown
Walk on, walk on.
Hauser did walk on. He went into private law practice; was deputy counsel to Ronald Reagan, who named him chairman of the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corp.; served as general counsel of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the George W. Bush administration; was president of the National Legal Center for the Public Interest; and became vice president and assistant general counsel of the Boeing Corp.
Now 81 years old, he still is marked by those final days in the White House, especially by the final hours — and by Nixon’s teary departure, described poignantly in his account of how “the helicopter slowly lifted and gradually turned towards the Washington Monument, disappearing into a humid, hazy air.”
Then, he added, “People looked at each other in disbelief — it’s over, he’s gone.”
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
