August 9, 2024, marked the 50th anniversary of President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation as president, making him the only U.S. president in history to resign from office. After delivering his resignation speech on August 8, Nixon and a skeleton crew of staff, which included press secretary Ronald Ziegler, Ziegler’s assistant Diane Sawyer, former White House Director of Communications Ken Clawson, and Nixon assistant Frank Gannon, boarded a flight the next day to Nixon’s home in San Clemente, California, to begin Nixon’s proverbial exile.
The flight to California marked the first step in Nixon’s exit from public life, but it also began his quest to reinvent himself. After leaving the presidency, Nixon fell into depression, negotiated a pardon from President Gerald R. Ford, endured hospitalization for phlebitis, and then reemerged to begin work on his memoirs with Sawyer and Gannon, a project that took five years to complete.
During roughly the first month after his resignation, the former president and his small retinue at San Clemente monitored, negotiated, and eventually agreed to a presidential pardon. The John Osborne Papers and Ronald L. Ziegler Papers, both housed in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, provide key insights into Nixon’s longer exile, but especially shed light on his day-to-day activities during the first month in California.
On Friday, August 10, according to Ziegler’s notes, the staff at San Clemente worked their contacts for information from Washington. “Terrible day. [T]he phone calls were impossibly lengthy.” Ziegler eventually connected with acting White House chief of staff Alexander Haig. They discussed President Ford’s most recent cabinet meeting. Haig told Ziegler that only he and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had defended the president in any way. Kissinger later contradicted Haig, claiming only he had “said anything in RN’s behalf,” an early sign of Haig’s perceived disloyalty to Nixon. That point was reinforced at Gannon’s birthday dinner when Steve Bull, Nixon’s former special assistant, accused Haig of being “deceitful and two faced” in a conversation with Ziegler.
Tensions ran high. After his August 10 conversation with Haig, Ziegler grew animated while telling Sawyer that Washington could not keep Nixon in tortured uncertainty: “He won’t be alive in six months if they keep this up.” Clawson confirmed Nixon’s despondency to Osborne months later, telling the journalist that for the first week, upon waking every morning, he worried that “we might find him on the bottom of the swimming pool.”
By the morning of Monday, August 12, before Ford’s address to a joint session of Congress that evening, Nixon believed that support for him was eroding and that Haig, “eager to protect himself,” was “lost.” Ziegler and Nixon watched Ford’s speech in dismay. Ziegler lamented that it had “nothing in it for the President.” When Nixon saw Haig “sitting in the box with Mrs. Ford .. right next to her,” he believed “he no longer has an advocate” in his former chief of staff. The notion was confirmed when Haig didn’t “even bother to call after the speech.”
Regardless of Haig’s true loyalties, Ziegler maintained contact with the Ford administration through deputy press secretary Jerry Warren, with Sawyer operating as liaison. Nixon’s staff also attempted to raise his spirits by ordering a print of American Graffiti, George Lucas’s 1973 hit movie. Celebrities such as Reverend Billy Graham also called to express support.
Still, Nixon remained in legal limbo. Would he be indicted and prosecuted for obstruction of justice due to his role in the coverup of the Watergate break-in? Gannon described the situation in political terms as “a state of suspended animation where your phone lines are being taken out, your cars are being recalled, your salt and pepper shakers are being sent back, and where you feel more than less at the mercy of prevailing sentiment and opinion.” Gannon monitored press conferences, comments by members of Congress regarding immunity, and news stories, producing reports that summarized each. “Unless something is done now,” he wrote in his August 24 summary, “long after the interests and requirements of justice have been met and exceeded, President Nixon will still be pursued and harrassed [sic] by … pettifogs and demagogs trying to prove their points and grind their axes.” Evaluating the media climate on the immunity issue three days later, Gannon concluded, that the general media was in a state of “watchful waiting.”
Similar discussions unfolded inside the Ford administration. On August 28, former Nixon officials Leonard Garment and Ray Price circulated a memo advocating for Nixon’s pardon. Garment argued Ford needed to act or “lose control of the situation” as the public’s mood for conciliation threatened to wane, thereby raising the possibility that “the whole miserable tragedy will be played out to God knows what ugly and wounding conclusion.” Without presidential action, Garment cautioned, “the inexorable logic of the law rather than its sensible administration will take over.” Even anti-Nixon voices such as Osborne, Garment argued, believed “enough is enough.” Though the pardon might engender some initial public resistance, the nation would greet it with “a national sight [sic] of relief.”
Whether or not the memorandum swayed Ford remains difficult to say. In a memoir about his time in the administration, Ford’s advisor Robert Hartman suggested that the president never read the memo, but later noted that Ford asked the memo’s recipient, Philip Buchen, to report to him regarding his pardon power. If a pardon fell under his presidential powers, Ford was inclined to grant one. Haig spoke to Ford about the possibility of pardoning Nixon early in August before Nixon’s resignation, as well as later in the month after Nixon’s departure. Benton Becker, who had become Ford’s counsel in 1973 during Ford’s confirmation hearings for vice-president played a key role in these developments. By August 1974, Becker had been tasked by Ford with negotiating the pardon. According to Becker, August 29 served as the date when “the President indicated a disposition to move on a Presidential Pardon.”
After meeting with Ford and Haig on September 5, Becker arrived in San Clemente that evening. Becker entered negotiations with his eyes wide open, yet despite having been warned by a colleague about “the deceptive Mr. Ziegler” Becker was still taken aback by Ziegler’s initial aggressiveness. “I can tell you right now… that President Nixon will make no statement of admission or complicity in return for a pardon from Jerry Ford,” Ziegler declared during his first meeting with Becker. After Becker threatened to return to Washington immediately, Ziegler relented, and negotiations began.
Ziegler and Becker clashed throughout. However, along with Nixon’s lawyer, Herbert “Jack” Miller, they worked line by line on the text of the pardon and Nixon’s public statement. Many of their edits are visible on a draft version of the pardon, found in the Ziegler Papers.
Draft of Richard Nixon’s pardon with annotations by Ronald Ziegler, September 6, 1974, pp. 1-3. Box 158, Ronald L. Ziegler Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
Each new edit, seen here in Ziegler’s hand, required Ziegler and Miller to leave the room and confer with Nixon. Though Nixon refused to take full responsibility for the Watergate scandal, Becker did convince Nixon to release a public statement in which he expressed some level of contrition. “One thing I can see clearly now,” the former president said in his statement, “is that I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate, particularly when it reached the stage of judicial proceedings and grew from a political scandal into a national tragedy.” For Becker at least, the statement was tantamount to acknowledging the president’s role in obstruction of justice. Haig too was impressed and asked if Becker had “put a gun” to the former president’s head to elicit the admission.
As for Nixon, the emotional toll subsided, only to be replaced by a physical one, phlebitis (inflammation of a vein) requiring hospitalization on September 24 and eventually surgery. After his release from the hospital, with Gannon and Sawyer assisting, Nixon marshalled his strength and began his memoirs, the first step in rehabilitating his political career. That rehabilitation proved so successful that at the time of his death in April 1994, observers remembered him for his foreign policy insights as much as for the Watergate scandal, a historic arc that began with Ford’s 1974 pardon.
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“Phlebitis…” Lawrence K. Altman, “Nixon Enters the Hospital for Treatment of Phlebitis,” New York Times, September 24, 1974.
“Deceitful and two faced…” Notes, August 10, 1974, box 149, Ronald L. Ziegler Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
“We might find him on the bottom of the swimming pool…” Notes, August 10, 1974, box 149, Ronald L. Ziegler Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; John Osborne, notes of his interview with Ken Clawson, October 7, 1974, box 22, John Osborne Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
“Even bother to call after the speech…” Notes, August 12, 1974, box 150, Ronald L. Ziegler Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
“Sawyer operating as liaison…” John Osborne, notes of his interview with Diane Sawyer, October 5, 1974, box 22, John Osborne Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
“Watchful waiting…” Frank Gannon, memorandum to Ronald Ziegler, August 23, 1974, box 157; Frank Gannon, memorandum to Ronald Ziegler, August 24, 1974, box 157; Frank Gannon, memorandum to Ronald Ziegler, August 27, 1974, box 158, all Ronald L. Ziegler Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
“A national sight of relief…” Leonard Garment, memorandum to Philip Buchen, August 28, 1974, box 38, Alexander Meigs Haig Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
“Ford was inclined to grant one…” Robert T. Hartman, Palace Politics: An Inside Account of the Ford Years (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1980), 255-56, 259.
“After Nixon’s departure…” “The Pardon Chronology; Questions on the Pardon,” contained in a briefing book on Richard Nixon’s pardon, prepared for Haig’s Senate confirmation hearings as secretary of state, 1981, box 128, Alexander Meigs Haig Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
“Into a national tragedy…” Statement by former President Richard Nixon, September 8, 1974, box 158, Ronald L. Ziegler Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.