I was clenching the heart of a watermelon when the heart of the Watergate scandal was bared to a gasping nation Aug. 5, 1974.
Now, more than 40 years after the day that sealed the fate of the country’s most depraved president, the famous reporter that helped undo Richard Nixon helps understand one question still unanswered after all these years and effusive scrutiny.
“Why?” Washington Post legendary reporter-now-editor Bob Woodward said during an interview regarding his new book, “The Last of the President’s Men.”
“What was eating away at Nixon?” Woodward said in a phone interview. He comes closer than ever to answering the question in his new book, based on recollections, memos and other White House documents from former Nixon Deputy Chief of Staff Alex Butterfield, the man who famously revealed to the nation that Nixon had bugged his own office, recorded his own crimes, and contributed to his eventual undoing.
The book points back to when Nixon first began building his presidency, and it lets the reader peer at Nixon closer than we ever have before, right up to the final days that preceded his ruin.
Nixon’s was a monumental fall that had been set in motion by his own arrogance, criminality — and Woodward.
Woodward, who together with Post reporter Carl Bernstein, famously led the nation through the biggest political scandal story ever told. Woodward was in Aurora at the end of October as keynote speaker for the Aurora Economic Development Council annual A-List event.
In his new book on Nixon and the Watergate scandal, Woodward reveals stunning information about the Vietnam War, and a macroscopic look at Nixon’s social dysfunction and rampant paranoia as recounted and document by Butterfield.
For four years, Butterfield was an integral part of the White House inner sanctum, somehow skirting the worst of the malevolence of the Nixon presidency. He was never drawn into the evil that famously brought down all the president’s men, and ultimately Nixon himself on an ominous August day when the world watched his political and personal demise.
For months that summer, my annual routine of heading “down home” to Rocky Ford to fish, lounge and help out on family farms and ranches had been hugely disrupted by the televised Watergate hearings. Few 14-year-old boys cared at all about the scandal. What I cared about was that my custom of watching game shows and Leave it to Beaver reruns, pounding peanut-butter cheese crackers and drinking Pleasure Time Lemon Lime was turned upside down. The hearings and the scandal commandeered the airwaves and ultimately the entire country. But my annoyance became fascination as the committee and the country drew closer to Nixon. There was nothing else to watch.
At 14, few adults said much of anything I considered worth listening to, but I was mesmerized by the gravity of the political drama, of Sen. Sam Ervin’s drawl and persistence, of John Ehrlichman’s and H.R. Haldeman’s twitchy and cagey mannerisms. Rather than play pinball at the local Rancher’s Cafe, like I usually did, I soaked up the Watergate talk among the farmers and ranchers around the big talk-table as they soaked up gallons of weak coffee and reviewed what the president knew and when he knew it. Over the summer, talk of Nixon being a victim of political enemies evolved into Nixon’s poor choice of aides and supporters, and finally, how he was certainly complicit in a growing number of crimes and unsavory schemes. The circle of sheep ranchers, onion growers and watermelon farmers had all but impeached Nixon about the time the melons started coming on in late July.
The Arkansas Valley heat in August is legendary and relentless. The fields are filled with suffering migrant workers and every hand farming families can spare. Picking watermelons is especially grueling because they have to be handled gently. Working in the fields, the danger of dehydration is real. The answer is a secret only migrants and other melon pickers wield. Under the convection-oven sun and wind, you pick up a heavy watermelon. Heavy means juice. Cool juice. If you’ve got big, meaty farmer hands, you rap the top of the melon hard with your knuckles. If you’re 14 years old, you press your knee into it until you feel it crack just a little. Then holding your hand stiff like a shovel blade, you plunge it deep into the center of the melon, twist the hand just little, scoop out the center, pulling it out of the melon, and directly into your open mouth. The effect is dizzying. Then you walk a few steps to the next melon and do it again, and again, until you’ve had enough.
I was somewhere past eating the heart out of yet another melon, when the tone of the newscaster’s voice blaring from the truck radio made it clear something dramatic had happened during the hearing. Later, it was dubbed the “smoking gun” tape.
On it, Nixon and his aides clearly discussed the break-in, why it was done, who did it, and how they would plot to use the CIA and FBI to cover up the crime. His presidency immediately imploded and he resigned just days later.
Woodward, in his new book, takes readers through the first days of the Nixon presidency and Butterfield’s uncomfortable and unlikely role in the the White House.
“I had never, in 21 years in the Air Force, been witness to such behavior,” Woodward quoted Butterfield. “He was an ignorant boor, a bumpkin, as far as I was concerned, and I readied myself to jump ship.”
It goes downhill from there in many ways, although Butterfield stayed the entire first term of Nixon’s presidency,
Woodward parallels Butterfield’s tenure in the Oval Office with what we now know to be going on at the time. Despite his razor-close relationship with Nixon and H.R. Haldeman, he was essentially unscathed by Nixon’s taint. He was later, however, branded as some type of traitor by those who either denied or justified Nixon’s atrocities.
Woodward lets Butterfield paint Nixon’s near xenophobia and excruciating awkwardness in high-definition detail. While Nixon seemed often so reassured in public, and even on TV as his presidency crumbled, Nixon was nearly unable to function on a social level, Woodward writes.
An incident where Nixon stepped into the birthday party for a staffer makes the reader cringe for Nixon’s discomfiture, unable to utter even coarse words for the occasion and instead having to back awkwardly out of the room.
His verbal abuse of staff, of “friends” and even his own wife are presented in glaring detail, drawing the reader to nearly gape at Nixon’s creepiness and extreme inadequacy. It makes it impossible not to despise and pity him at the same time.
There are two instances in the book where Nixon makes some type of sexual advances on two staff women, as others recalled and even Butterfield observed. The advances came off as weird rather than worrisome, Butterfield recollected, bringing the reader temptingly close to understanding something new about Nixon that could explain his pathology.
At one point somewhat into his presidency, Nixon noticed that some White House staffers had pictures of President Kennedy in their offices. It inflamed him. He wanted them gone and spent time writing memos as well as following up on details of how Butterfield managed to “sanitize” the government of the “infestation” of Kennedy worship.
Instance after instance revealed Nixon’s weeping paranoia and resentment for anyone with money, influence or social status.
The effect is a clearer picture of Nixon’s pathetic life without Nixon himself revealing why he was so disturbed.
The most shocking revelation from Woodward’s account of Butterfield’s vast collection of memos, memories and documents had to do with the Vietnam War Nixon inherited from President L.B. Johnson and perpetuated in his own administration.
While talking publicly about the importance of the anti-communist effort that was dragging the country down emotionally and physically, he regularly talked up “successful” efforts to bomb the communists into defeat, which was a lie.
But in private, Nixon cynically admitted how futile the extended bombings were, acknowledging their huge price here and in Vietnam even though they netted “zilch.”
That information from Butterfield shocked Woodward more than anything else he gleaned from his extensive interviews and examination of memos.
“What is to be said about a wartime leader who goes on with war knowing a key part of the strategy is not working?” Woodward asks in his book.
It was a virtual “war crime,” Woodward said last week.
So many lies, sucking in so many people, Butterfield told Woodward.
“When you’re in the White House,” Butterfield said, “everyone lies. You can sort of get feeling immune.”
Or jaded. So many Americans now casually say they believe that all politicians are just as nefarious as was Nixon, they simply have not yet been caught.
And political opponents excoriate each other for political crimes they call out, lobbing the same level of disgust and outrage as they felt for Nixon.
None of those people nor their real or imagined transgressions, however, come close to Nixon and his crimes, Woodward said.
But people don’t act that way. President Barack Obama has been detailed as a heretical psychopath by his critics. Even Nixon might pale at the effusive charges and counter charges lobbed around Washington these days.
It was impossible for me to keep loading melons that hot August day after learning that the president had blatantly lied for months as the scandal unfolded, that he had recorded his own criminal admissions, and that he’d actually conspired and pulled off such crimes.
I listened to the adults discuss the fate of the president and the country. I went home to Denver and listened to Nixon calmly explain that he would resign — after months of saying something completely different. None of it really made much sense to a kid who understood so little about politics anyway. But even years later, even now, it just made no sense that someone could be so mentally dysfunctional and become president and remain president for as long as he did. Even win a second term.
Like Woodward, I, too, am still intrigued by the overwhelming questions about “why.”
Unless someone else comes forward with information detailing the events, if there were any, that made Nixon such a mean, pathetic and vengeful human before he got into the White House, this is probably as close as we’ll get to answer that question.
Dave Perry is editor of the Aurora Magazine and Aurora Sentinel