Aug. 7, 2024, noon
This is the third part in a five-day series chronicling Richard Nixon's last week as president in 1974, exactly 50 years ago. As a young correspondent for Newsweek, National Journal’s Tom DeFrank was at the White House from Aug. 5, when damning transcripts of taped Nixon conversations were released by Supreme Court order, until Aug. 9, when Nixon resigned and Gerald R. Ford was sworn in as the 38th president. [CLICK HERE TO READ PART 1 AND PART 2, both free for now]
As the political firestorm roared ever closer to the Oval Office, Vice President Gerald Ford headed to the Capitol on Aug. 7 for a meeting with the Chowder and Marching Club, a Republican social group founded in 1949 by 15 young House members, including both Nixon and Ford. The president-in-waiting never showed for breakfast.
Midway up Pennsylvania Avenue, Ford took a call from Alexander Haig, who said the veep was urgently needed back at the White House. After a quick U-turn, Ford walked into his Executive Office Building suite at 8 a.m. Nixon’s chief of staff was waiting.
“Mr. Vice President,” Haig said, “I think it’s time for you to prepare to assume the office of president.”
In short order, Ford summoned top aides, including his old Grand Rapids law partner Phil Buchen, and authorized them to launch a full-bore transition operation, which in fact Buchen had already secretly begun without telling Ford.
He then turned his attention to the draft of his inaugural speech, which aide Bob Hartmann had finished at 3 a.m. The veep liked its brevity and tone, with one exception: He thought a line about America’s long national nightmare finally being over might be overly cruel to Nixon.
Nixon along with his daughter, Tricia Nixon Cox, take a stroll in the Rose Garden at the White House in the afternoon. (CREDIT: Richard Nixon Presidential Library/NARA, White House Photo Office #E3353-12A)
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“It’s been a nightmare for everybody … in this country,” Hartmann vehemently argued. “It’s something that has to be said, and you’re the only one who can say it.” Ford knew his favorite wordsmith was right.
At 11:30, Ford finally reached Capitol Hill for a regular prayer meeting with several of his closest House pals, including former Rep. Mel Laird of Wisconsin and Rep. Albert Quie of Minnesota. Typically, each attendee would speak briefly, ending with a prayer. On this momentous Wednesday, each asked divine guidance for their friend Jerry.
Late that afternoon, as all three television networks quoted sources saying resignation was imminent, the three top Republican congressional leaders spent 23 minutes with Nixon in the White House reviewing the bleakness of his situation.
Haig had warned them not to urge Nixon to resign. It would be counterproductive, he said, and just might prompt him to reverse course and hang on.
So they didn’t utter the R-word, But the three old pals of the one-time congressman and senator delivered an extremely dire prognosis to the president. House Minority Leader John Rhodes of Arizona was already on record supporting impeachment. Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania guessed Nixon might get 12 to 15 votes for acquittal (he’d need at least 34) at a Senate trial they all—even Nixon—agreed was now inevitable.
Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, long a mentor to the president, was characteristically blunt. He said Nixon could count on no more than a dozen votes—and strongly suggested he himself wasn’t one of them. In fact, he‘d already told Nixon’s legislative team he would vote to convict.
“It looks damn bad,” Nixon agreed, promising a quick decision on his future path.
Nixon aides, as well as Ford, would later say Goldwater’s defection was the mortal blow, convincing Nixon he was finally a dead man walking politically.
Afterwards, the trio braved the hideous August humidity to debrief a scrum of some 100 reporters beneath an ancient white oak tree on the north lawn. Rhodes described the meeting as “four old friends talking over a painful situation.” As Haig had urged, they hadn’t asked Nixon to resign, even though they all knew that was the only sane course left.
The tipoff was Goldwater’s remark that “whatever decision he makes, it will be in the best interest of our country.”
Deputy press secretary Gerald Warren’s tone in the daily briefing, meanwhile, featured a telltale omission. The day before, Warren, a well-respected former editor from California, flatly asserted, “Ladies and gentlemen, he does not intend to resign.”
Was that guidance still operative, reporters wanted to know?
“There is no reason for me to add anything today to what I’ve said before,” Warren replied, aware his boss Ron Ziegler had joined the ranks of senior aides urging Nixon to step down.
“It’s like death,” a dry-eyed White House secretary told a reporter in a voice scarcely above a whisper. “You know it’s coming, but it doesn’t really hit you until after it happens.”
“Looking back on it all now,” a Nixon aide mused that afternoon, “it is almost as if the president, at every key turn, at every moment of decision when he might have saved himself, almost deliberately chose the path calculated to lead where we are now.
“As anyone who knows him well realizes, Richard Nixon is several people, and one of those people has for the past year-and-a-half seemed hell-bent on self-destruction.”
