WASHINGTON — On Jan. 23, 1973, when the Supreme Court struck down laws
criminalizing abortion in Roe v. Wade, President Richard M. Nixon made no
public statement. But privately, newly released tapes reveal, he expressed
ambivalence.
Nixon worried that greater access to abortions would foster “permissiveness,”
and said that “it breaks the family.” But he also saw a need for abortion in
some cases — like interracial pregnancies, he said.
“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a
black and a white,” he told an aide, before adding, “Or a rape.”
Nine months later, Nixon forced the firing of the special prosecutor looking
into the Watergate affair, Archibald Cox, and prompted the resignations of
Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William D.
Ruckelshaus. The next day, Ronald Reagan, who was then governor of California
and would later be president, told the White House that he approved.
Reagan said the action, which would become known as the “Saturday Night
Massacre,” was “probably the best thing that ever happened — none of them
belong where they were,” according to a Nixon aide’s notes of the private
conversation.
Those disclosures were among the revelations in more than 150 hours of tape and
30,000 pages of documents made public on Tuesday by the Nixon Presidential
Library, a part of the National Archives. The audio files were posted online,
as were a sampling of the documents.
The tapes were recorded by the secret microphones in the Oval Office from
January and February 1973. They shed new light on an intense moment in American
history, including Nixon’s second inauguration, the Vietnam War cease-fire, and
the trial of seven men over the break-in at the Democrats’ headquarters at the
Watergate complex amid mounting revelations about their ties to the White House.
The tapes also capture more mundane details of life in the White House —
conversations about what to pack for a trip, when to schedule a trip to the
barber, whether the president’s wife would enjoy going to Trader Vic’s for
dinner.
Most segments of the tapes relating to the Watergate scandal, which would lead
to Nixon’s resignation 20 months later, have already been released. But there
are some new materials that were previously held back because the audio quality
was so poor that archives officials could not be certain whether they contained
discussion of any classified topics. Improvements in audio technology have
allowed archives staff to clear additional ones.
They include a Jan. 5, 1973, conversation between Nixon and his aide Charles W.
Colson in which they discussed the possibility of granting clemency to E.
Howard Hunt Jr., one of the Watergate conspirators, according to a log compiled
by archives staff. Scholars say the same topic was addressed in several other
tapes that were previously made public.
The documents also include nine pages of handwritten notes by a domestic policy
aide about plans for what the White House would say about the dismissal of the
Watergate special prosecutor, Mr. Cox.
The tapes also provide new material about the circumstances surrounding the
Paris treaty to end the United States’ military involvement in Vietnam.
A call between Nixon and Mr. Colson just after midnight on Jan. 20 showed that
Nixon anticipated, when the treaty was announced, that he would be vindicated
for continuing to bomb North Vietnam. He especially relished the hit that he
believed members of Congress who opposed the war — whose public statements he
pronounced “treasonable” — would suffer.
Several conversations center on the pressure Nixon placed on South Vietnam’s
president, Nguyen Van Thieu, to accept the cease-fire agreement. Ken Hughes, a
Nixon scholar and research fellow at the Presidential Recordings Project at the
University of Virginia, said he was struck by listening on one of the new tapes
to Nixon’s telling his national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, that to
get Thieu to sign the treaty, he would “cut off his head if necessary.”
Mr. Hughes said the conversation bolstered his view that Nixon, Thieu and Mr.
Kissinger knew at the time that the cease-fire could not endure, and that it
was not “peace with honor,” as Nixon described it, so much as a face-saving way
for the United States to get out of the war. In 1975, North Vietnam would
violate the cease-fire and conquer South Vietnam.
The tapes also include a phone call from February 1973 between Nixon and the
evangelist Billy Graham, during which Mr. Graham complained that
Jewish-American leaders were opposing efforts to promote evangelical
Christianity, like Campus Crusade. The two men agreed that the Jewish leaders
risked setting off anti-Semitic sentiment.
“What I really think is deep down in this country, there is a lot of
anti-Semitism, and all this is going to do is stir it up,” Nixon said.
At another point he said: “It may be they have a death wish. You know that’s
been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries.”
The documents also include three newly declassified pages from a National
Security Council brief discussing secret Israeli efforts to build a nuclear
weapon.
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
Published: June 23, 2009
