Nixon's Watergate speech - 25 August 1973

I don’t suppose there's anybody alive who hasn’t at one time or another judged another human being by his or her face.

That simple sentence is hardly an epigram, but I’d like to suggest at once that it’s a very dangerous game and that without anything else to go on, simply the face or a photograph of it, it’s a guessing game with even odds, which means, it’s a game that you are just as likely to win, or lose.

If I seem to speak in riddles, let me put it another way – have you ever played the game of clipping photographs from the papers or magazines of unknown people, who have suddenly leapt from obscurity into the news? It's essentially that the players don’t know the identity of an of them, you spread the pictures out and then hand around a list of the picked subjects occupations as, for instance, the judge, the bank robber, a singer, a novelist, a murderer, a statesman, an athlete, a bishop. The trick is to match the face with the profession. It is, like golf, a very humbling game.

When we know that a man is a distinguished judge, we immediately see judicial calm and wisdom written all over his features. Identify a new athletic hero, and we mentally see him scoring goals or running up centuries. I wonder if, a couple of years ago, we’d been shown the faces of Olga Korbut and Mark Spitz, if we could possibly have guessed they had devoted their lives respectively and exclusively to gymnastics and swimming?

Now, nobody knows better than motion picture casting directors that we see in a face what we bring to it. And that when we have nothing at all to go on, we regularly make ludicrous errors. Old-time movie goers may recall that William Powell was for a long time cast as a villain, and Myrna Loy as an oriental seductress. They really didn’t find themselves until some unsung genius spotted that if you considered Powell’s moustache as a come-on and his bulging eyes as those of a droll and amiable clubman, he could become a very agreeable switch-on, a hero. And that, if Myrna Loy stopped narrowing her kohl black eyes and stopped wearing spit-curls and long beads, she was, in fact, an enchanting, and tolerant wife of the same William Powell, seen from the new angle.

I have played this game on tense evenings when I suspected that some know-all among the present company was being a little too cocksure about the obvious charm of some famous lady he admired, or the obvious malice in the face of some politician he detested.

This rather elaborate introduction is a cautious or precautionary way of bringing up a game that is now being played all over America – though very few people seem to see it as a game – and one that is full of vanity and peril.

It’s the game of first guessing what Watergate has done to Mr Nixon and then saying that you can see it in his face. The press has been having a fortune-tellers' field day tapping everybody who knows the president or has known him, from his daughter to congressman, old college friends, random navy acquaintances from the second war.

Since Mr Nixon has been in the public eye, for a quarter of a century it's surely a little late to be doing a character analysis on him. But demonstrably, he is a baffling character, and while I have met nobody I can think of who has fundamentally changed his or her first impressions, the pollsters are counting by the millions the people who once trusted him and, apparently, trust him no more.

So much so that the latest Harris poll – which down the years and whenever a finding could be proved, has been only a percentage point or two in error – the Harris poll reported last week that three Americans in four, are still not convinced that the president was not in on the Watergate cover-up.

Now this poll was taken after the president made his nationally-televised speech about Watergate. Most people called it disappointing, and there was a widespread feeling of scepticism, verging on sarcasm, about two points. They had to do with his main reason for not releasing the tape recordings of conversations with his aides – with one aide in particular – that most people seem to think would absolutely clear him or incriminate him.

The reason was, and Mr Nixon was very earnest and measured about it, that there are certain precious relationships whose confidence should never be broken – confidentiality is the lawyer's, and now the White House word – such as that between a lawyer and a client, a priest and a penitent, a husband and a wife.

I wonder how many millions of listeners talked back to the box? How about the relationship between a doctor and his patient? For what everybody had in mind, was the president's approval of having his secret White House investigating team known as "The plumbers", break into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist with the admitted intent of rifling files and finding the doctor's confidential record on his patient.

The second point was an even more glaring example of the president's seeming, at any rate, to be delivering a sincere sermon against the very thing he practiced, I mean, the secret bugging or taping of every conversation that took place in the three main rooms of the White House. It seemed odd for the president to be teaching us so gravely about the sacredness of confidential conversations when he was always the only person present who knew they were being recorded.

Five minutes after the speech was over, I was in a cab and riding up town and the driver said in a few choice words what, apparently, a majority of Americans felt, then, or since. The driver said "Who did you think he was taking to – a kindergarten? He should tell me what’s sacred?".

Now the president, I think it’s well established, had told his advisors that his television address was to be the final speech on Watergate – the clincher, that would convince the people, drop Watergate overboard, and leave him unburdened to sail the ship of state. Well, plainly the speech didn’t do it. Watergate will not sink, it bobs around that ship of state like a floating mine that, in a rough sea, is, maddeningly and always, out of reach.

So, last Wednesday the president tried again. he held his first press conference in five months, and though its ostensible purpose was to announce that Dr Henry Kissinger is to succeed Mr Rogers as secretary of state, with the consent of the Senate, the questions flowed on about Watergate and the president talked with an openness that might have done him much good three or four months ago.

He said he had delegated responsibility for investigating Watergate to one of the directors of his campaign committee – who turned out to be a key conspirator in it. Also, to one man in the White House who delegated responsibility to another White House legal counsel. The president never took it up with his closest pal and advisor John Mitchell, the resigned attorney general because, he said, he thought that if Mitchell knew anything about it, he’d have mentioned it. That's a weird confession of naivety like not believing strong evidence that your country is being invaded unless your army chief of staff brings it up.

The president did not say again what must have been an ordeal to admit to a national audience, that he, the President of the United States, had all the resources of the FBI and the CIA, and his closest White House advisors and pals, all working on it, and yet everything he was told, for nine months, was wrong.

Now this is what sticks in the people's craw, and apparently I do believe the president is one of the few people who doesn’t see it. I found the televising of his press conference fascinating, because I felt that he really did look older, gentler, almost humbled by the merciless pressure he has been under, and I mean, the pressure of the unanswered facts that will not go away.

The papers, and the television soothsayers, tell us that the president is a changed man. He has marked swings of mood. Who doesn’t? He broods, he takes lonely walks, then he is boisterous and cheerful for a time and then withdrawn again. Well, maybe. When I hear such stuff, however impressively dressed out with psychological jargon, I always remember the old American vaudeville comic who used to say to his pal – a mine of alarming and intimate gossip – "was you 'dere, Charlie?"

Certainly however, there was one moment that made me feel a quite new impulse of compassion for this subtle, strange man. He could now bring up the once-taboo word of resignation. No, he would not resign he had been elected to do a job, and for the next three and a half years, he was going to do it, which is to make this world safer for this generation and the next and make life better for the people at home and their children after them. He deeply deplored Watergate but now, it was behind us, it was all over.

Now, this was the moment he gave that hesitant chuckle which to his admirers signifies a spasm of genuine modesty, and to his haters, a hint of Uriah Heep. "We’ve had", he said, "thirty minutes of this press conference, I have yet to have one example, one question on the business of the people".

He didn’t say it defiantly with his jaw out, and the invisible flag waving as he often does, he had once said, quietly he "wasn’t criticising the press, he just found it curious that they went on and on, about Watergate", and in that moment, he was almost trembling, red-eyed, truly at bay, proud prisoner worn ragged by the drip drip drip of the tap that's never turned off.

In the last great scandal that swirled around the White House, the crookery and successful greed that was kept 50 years ago from President Harding, the verdict of history is already in. Harding was a friendly, courteous, magnificent-looking dupe. A dupe of his cronies, his kitchen cabinet.

Mr Nixon says that, years from now, the verdict of history will turn in his favour, will record admiringly what his administration did for détente with the Russians and the Chinese. Maybe it will be so and, as the president wistfully put it, in the long run...

But alas, few of us, few people and, certainly, politicians never live their lives in the long run. It’s the short run that all of us have to cope with, the short run is indeed the business of our lives. And, I am bound to say that in that one plaintive moment when the president begged them to turn off Watergate and talk about the business of the people, I for one felt he could well be saying to himself in the words of the old slave song, "Sometimes I'm up and sometimes I'm down, and sometimes I'm almost to the ground".

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