Nixon and the oil crisis - 9 November 1973

Three months ago, if you travelled much around the United States and were required to say, in the space of a telegram, what was on people's minds, you could have done it easily at the minimum rate by writing "Watergate and the price of beef".

Well in the past month I've gone from northern New England through the three largest cities of the north-eastern seaboard on down through the south-west up to the mile-high city of Denver in the Rockies out to Los Angeles and San Francisco and the capsule report is different but just as terse – it's Nixon and the oil shortage.

What literally concerns the people's heart and homes is the Arab, the embargo on oil to the United States and what concerns their hearts and minds is the question, which is now as incessant as a beating pulse, ought Mr Nixon to be forced out of the presidency?

I'm writing this letter to you from the first cold climb that we've touched, it's been balmy for almost everywhere, but last night we touched down on the prairie in Minnesota, it was a night as clear as crystal – too cold for snow, sharp midnight wind, the first snap for these hardy people. There were top coats and windbreaks everywhere and before long they will have on their earmuffs and be bending into 20 below zero and it'll be the same all across this northern third of the country, a couple of thousand miles from the Rockies, east across the frigid prairie cities and through all the Alleghenies and on into New England right through Vermont.

Now, without oil for the home furnaces, the prospect for one-third of this nation is at best uncomfortable. At worst, if the recently announced 25% cut in Arab production does its damnedest, this winter or next could be literally a perishing time for many millions.

It's simply not possible to stay alive and well if there's no fuel to stoke the home furnaces. The lumbermen are all already on to this prospect, a young smart man I know in northern California – and I mean up in the timber and snow country, for while California has tropical desert in the south, 800 miles to the north it has some very shivery mountain towns.

He thought he'd get the jump on the oil distributors by going to a lumberyard and buying several cords of wood to store against the winter, he figured that he "might need it" as he dramatically put it, "for survival". Normally he pays $10, about £4 a cord. The man says "From now on sonny it's going to cost you $90 – that's about £36 – a cord". Well he can't afford it and he begins to wonder in a guilty way if he feels quite as strongly as he used too about the government's policy on Israel. That of course is the nub of the American problem.

In 1948, President Truman laid it down as an irrevocable principle of American policy that the state of Israel was sovereign and inviolable and must remain so and every administration since has renewed the pledge. Of the European countries, only Holland has taken an equally firm stand and so Holland now is feeling the pinch and has taken to its bicycles, but a bicycle is supremely useless on the prairie.

So the nations of northern Europe will endure some anxiety, but so long as they remain "friendly" to the Arabs, that's to say so long as they do not declare an intention to protect Israel against obliteration, they can expect to get the oil they need.

If they did assert the American principle, I need hardly remind you that the physical prospect would be acutely unpleasant and quite possibly perilous. For though your winters are comparatively mild, however damp and sniffly, your dependence on Arabian oil is unlike America's total. The unbeatable weapon the Arabs hold is the threat of darkening the towns and halting the industries of Europe.

Well, I've been pretty pessimistic in this report so far and no question at least, a third of the American people have the image of a bleak winter very much on their minds, but this image still dims before the quiet nightmare that stalks the headlines and is the prime topic of talk and speculation everywhere, the new the entirely unfamiliar spectre of the White House inhabited by a caretaker president in the wake of the impeachment or resignation of Richard Nixon.

A few months ago, only the European papers and television commentators cried up as an immediate threat the impeachment of the president. They were not by a long shot more perceptive than the American press on the contrary, they were selling papers by playing up an improbable melodrama. The best of the American commentators and a majority of Congress certainly foresaw the very grave consequences of merely punishing Nixon and thereby, through the many months of the exhausting process of impeachment, leaving this country with a government in recess.

But now it's on every lip and very present in the minds not only of the president's published list of media enemies, the notion that the president's resignation is desirable if not inevitable is being discussed by even the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which is a very conservative wing indeed.

This last week, the Detroit News, a staunch a Nixon supporter as you could find throughout the past four years came out with an editorial entitled "Enough is Enough", urging him to resign. Senator Barry Goldwater thought the least Mr Nixon must do was to appear before the Senate Watergate committee and lay his cards on the table.

Mr William Buckley's conservative National Review – and again you have to think of something well to the right of the British Conservative Party – the National Review thought Mr Nixon's usefulness was over and predicted his early resignation.

Time, the news magazine which came out for Mr Nixon in '68 and '72 and which has never in its 50 years published an editorial, published one this week saying Mr Nixon has irredeemably lost his moral authority, the confidence of most of the country and therefore his ability to government effectively.

Now the inference about public opinion on which these judgments are based is debatable, the latest Harris poll shows two Americans in three against the impeachment, but it also shows that only one American in four believes he's doing a good job. That's not, however, grounds for impeachment; at one time only one American in five thought Harry Truman was doing a good job.

What counts at this critical point more than the evidence of the polls is the deep anxiety of the Republican party and the spreading disillusion of Mr Nixon's oldest supporters. Why, why should they believe, along with most of the people, that his administration is suspect to the point of disablement?

First there was a series of acts that could well be interpreted as bribery, high crimes and misdemeanours, which the Constitution lays down as grounds for impeachment. It is a crime for a president to obstruct justice or hamper the execution of the laws of the United States.

If his personal aides commit crimes or obstruct justice, the president is held accountable, a hard fact that Mr Nixon has never hinted that he might concede. And yet at this moment, his vice president has resigned to avoid a heavy jail sentence for a catalogue of high crimes, his old attorney general and closest advisor is under indictment for fraud, so is his old Secretary of Commerce. No less than 13 of its old top aides have either been convicted of crimes or pleaded guilty or been indicted or been fired for misdemeanours.

The president himself approved of burglary to keep tabs on radicals, he himself created his own private secret service to use wire tapping and forgery to keep an eye on his political enemies. He personally approached the presiding judge in a government prosecuted case and offered him the directorship of the FBI, his own lawyer used money raised for the president's reelection campaign to pay off the convicted defendants in the Watergate case.

Now all this has brewed an unprecedented atmosphere of alarm and distrust, which at least embarrassed the Republicans, but two men stood above it and they gave to the administration the only public confidence it could claim. One was the attorney general, Mr Richardson, the other was Mr Cox, the special Watergate prosecutor, he was appointed on an understanding between the Senate and the president that he could track down the truth wherever his tracks led.

By the way, it's doubtful that Mr Cox's promised status was constitutional, since Congress has no power to set up an officer under the president who will be free to override the president;s executive authority and, for instance, take him to court; still Mr Nixon gave a pledge that Mr Cox would be independent.

When Mr Cox, however, demanded that the president turn over the Watergate tapes to the courts, the president broke his promise and fired him and attorney general Richardson resigned because he would not obey the president's order to fire Mr Cox and then Mr Nixon, that strange man, turned the tapes over to the court. The obvious inference was that Mr Cox knew other nasty things about the administration and would seek other presidential papers.

The last shocker, which may prove to have been the last straw, was the disclosure that two of the nine taped Watergate conversations that Mr Nixon agreed to yield to the courts did not exist and, as it happened, these were the two crucial conversations which would have supported or refuted the charge of Mr Nixon's main accuser that the president was in on the cover-up of Watergate from the beginning.

This is what turned the Republican embarassment into horror, for the instant response of Congress, not to mention the howling reaction of the press, was that of course the tapes had existed and that they were too hot to preserve and had been destroyed.

Now imagine this fog of suspicion and this train of crooks attached to any prime minister you can think off, or for that matter of any president in American history? And what do the people get from Mr Nixon? They've been getting much earnest rhetoric and almost ceremonious assurances that he has a special knack for handling the Russians and the Arabs, so the Russian say that his worldwide alert of American forces was hysterical and the Arabs slap an embargo on oil.

Mr Nixon goes on doggedly saying that his knowledge of foreign affairs is too precious to be dispensed with, but what people still want to know is if he knew about Watergate and when he started to cover up?

Most of all, they now want to know why he never said that for a month or more he had known that two of the crucial tapes never existed or had been destroyed. The clue to his future, as I mentioned, lies I think in the growing and the possibly irreversible conviction of the right wing of his party that so long as they, the Republicans, are saddled with him, they will go down to a disastrous defeat in next year's Congressional elections and then in '76 in the presidential elections.

So it could be that it will not be Mr Nixon's announced enemies that will bring him down, nor the liberal press, nor the television reporters and commentators he so detests, but his old friends.

It is, I suspect, not impeachment by the House he has most to fear, it is a deputation of the most rock-ribbed Republicans who next week, or next month, or next year will wait on him and say "You have to go".

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