Sam Ervin and Watergate - 19 May 1973

I don’t know if Friday 12 October 1973 will become a memorable date in the American history books, but when the glitter and strangeness of it are looked at a few years from now, it may well appear more historic than the Wednesday only two days before on which, for the first time in the 200-year history of the republic, a vice president resigned on the threat of criminal charges from the government.

In the backwash of that event, there was a foam of comment and speculation about when the president would appoint a new vice president and who it would be. Not only was the resignation something new, but the constitutional procedure for dealing with it also, for the 25th amendment to the Constitution, on which the president had to act, was passed by Congress only so late as 1965. It takes a two-thirds majority and both houses to propose to the states the constitutional amendment and it doesn’t become law until three-quarters of the 50 state legislators approve it and so ratify it, and that they did in February 1967.

Before then, there had been no mechanism for replacing the vice president. Truman went without one for the more than three years of the dead Roosevelt’s unfinished term, and Lyndon Johnson likewise went a year before he ran for president on his own account and so was able to have a running mate in the election of 1964.

I am sure the first thing the brighter members of the class will wonder was why the Congress suddenly conceived in 1965 a Constitutional amendment to take care of the unprecedented contingency that has now happened. Well they certainly didn’t have in mind the prospect of a vice president who might be forced to quit on the grounds that he had evaded his income tax. The 25th amendment carries the title, "Presidential disability and succession" and it was proposed in the week of the assassination of President Kennedy as means of assuring that if, as had happened eight times, the president suddenly died, the vice president who stepped up to the White House would, if something also happened to him, have on hand the responsible and worthy successor.

The amendment was written also with the two serious illnesses of President Eisenhower in mind, and it meant to anticipate and avoid the strange lapse in presidential power which occurred when President Woodrow Wilson was so severally crippled by a stroke that for 17 months he languished as a total invalid in a shaded room in the White House.

So the main clauses of the 25th amendment say what shall happen if the president is disabled, but sentient, and sends to the Senate and the House a written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. But it also foresaw the awkward – the, er, George III situation – in which a president might be out of his mind and refuse to give up his office.

In that case, the vice president and the majority of the Cabinet or any other body that Congress might set up would declare to the Senate and the house that the president was unfit to carry on. But there is one other sentence in the 25th amendment, put in almost as an afterthought. That sentence concerns the vice president and was added to take care of the unlikely event that he might suddenly die. It says, "Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the vice president, the president shall nominate a vice president who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both houses".

This sentence doesn’t have the precision springing from the cagey foresight of the founding fathers who wrote the whole original document of the Constitution. What is a majority vote of both houses? Sitting together where a majority of the house say, outweigh a minority vote to the senate? Or must they each approve the president’s choice by separate majorities? Well that's what we have come to infer.

Anyway, that is the only sentence in the 25th amendment that President Nixon had to act on, and he promised to do it very soon. I don’t think anybody expected him to do it in two days – the pundits and the commentators had a field day, first of all drawing up long and knowing lists of the men the president would be mostly likely to consider. And at the head of those lists were three names, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, of New York, Governor Ronald Reagan the ex-movie cowboy of California, and former Governor John Connally of Texas.

The pundits might well have saved their breath on these three, for they typify one sort of man the Democrats, who are in a majority and run both houses, would not possibly take. And the speaker of the house, Carl Albert – who is, in the American system, also a party man and in fact the leading voice of the Democratic majority in the house – speaker Albert made it plain to the president in words of one syllabub, that his party would not take a man who could be expected to use the vice presidency as a launch pad into the White House in 1976; in other words, any man who had ambitions for the presidency.

Well, the presidential ambitions of Rockefeller, Reagan and Connally are, to put it mildly, raging. Most obnoxious of all to the Democrats was the man who in fact, was the "darling man" – his first choice – John Connally of Texas, for the simple and hurtful reason that John Connally was a Democrat all his life, weaned on the Democratic bottle by none other than Lyndon Johnson himself. A man who, when he saw the marvel of Richard Nixon’s overwhelming victory in 1972, turned Republican and without a blush started to speak at Republican fund-raising dinners around the country, which is a blowsy and tedious chore, which nevertheless is the first sure sign of a man who hopes to run for the presidency next time.

After first setting up these three, and then knocking them down, the pundits went on to consider the most likely alternatives. I won’t bore you with their names, they were mostly party regulars of such distinguished lack of distinction as never to be a threat to a real presidential contender, or as they were called "caretaker" vice presidents – men who would fill the vacant seat of Spiro Agnew as inconspicuously and unassertively as possible, until the campaign of 1976 throws up a real ego. If you read enough columnists you could make a list of about thirty such men.

There was one other, and his revived attractiveness must have given the president the collywobbles. He is Senator Barry Goldwater, who has reemerged through the mess of Watergate and the government's list of appalling charges against Mr Agnew as the conscience of the Congress.

Barry Goldwater will be remembered by, shall we say, mature listeners as the hopeless Republican candidate clobbered by Lyndon Johnson in 1964 by what still stands as the largest popular majority in history. Goldwater was beaten because at the time, he sounded like a firebrand. He actually wanted to win in Vietnam, and too many people feared he might bomb North Vietnam and send many more thousands of American troops there.

Lyndon Johnson on the contrary –the old Texas schoolmaster and friendly farmer – preached nothing but piety and restraint. He seemed a more prudent bet, and was elected, and thereupon bombed North Vietnam, and put half a million Americans there.

Goldwater was always conceded to be a man of downright character and rueful charm, in appearance astonishingly like the Thomas Jefferson profile on the nickel, with horn-rimmed glasses. Well, in the past few months, Goldwater, has been the only senator, the only congressman to speak up with straightforward tart contempt for the devious shenanigans of the White House advisors who concocted and dictated Watergate and the other collateral spyings and robberies and wire tappers.

He also did not hesitate to say that the charges against Vice President Agnew should be aired and resolved. Goldwater did not say, as the president goes on saying, through thick and thin – mostly thin – that America is at the dawn of a new era of greatness. Goldwater decidedly did not say, as Mr Agnew alarmingly said the other night in his farewell address to the nation, that "our democracy with its balanced federal system its separation of powers, and its fundamental principles of individual liberty, is working better than ever".

Goldwater said, in several, feisty phrases, that the government was in a hell of a mess, that the system was being betrayed, that it was time the president released the Watergate tapes, settled the Agnew charges and tried to restore some sense and decency to the administration.

Now this sort of talk of course, did not endear him to Mr Nixon, but very many of the Republicans whom the president canvassed thought Barry Goldwater would be just the man to fill the vice president's seats. So, the president turned down Rockefeller, Reagan, Connally with reluctance, Goldwater with relief, and all the caretakers that had been mentioned.

And so then, on the evening of Friday 12 October, there occurred that glittering bizarre scene I mentioned at the start. It was in the east room of the White House, an elegant 18th-century setting, with a shimmering crystal chandelier and a troop of diplomats and the leaders of Congress and the president's beaming family – everywhere gleaming teeth and a festive air. You could have turned on the telly and thought they were enacting Mr Fezziwig's ball from A Christmas Carol.

The marine band played the president's theme song, Hail to the Chief and in he came a-rollicking. What he was there to do was to announce that the republic had been shaken as never before by the retirement of a vice president after the government had drawn up an appalling list of criminal charges. In this grave hour the president alone had to pick an American who could, in that always forseeable emergency, rise to the presidency and dignify it.

But Mr Nixon said none of these things he saw, once again, that new era of greatness, and with a grin pinned from ear to ear and much jollity, he picked the Republican leader of the house, Mr Gerald Ford, an absolutely dependable rubber stamp, of any and every Nixon policy, a reliable party hack, of minute stature. The Congress in the flesh, and in the spirit, applauded. It will have kept to the letter of the 25th amendment, and simply ignored the lessons of the catastrophes and the threats of catastrophe that brought that amendment about.

So, the Congress ducked the issue, and the president made a family party of it. It was like George Orwell rewritten by Dickens. A time for gravity is a time for jollity, war is peace, and shame is greatness.

A strange, unreal occasion, whose tastelessness and irrelevance to the constitutional crisis only time will blur, or perhaps sharpen, as an historic moment, when the spirit of the Constitution was mocked.

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