Reporter
Colonel of Truth
How my grandfather, Leon Jaworski, saved America.
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They might have expected this to be a moment of jubilation. After all, a few of the younger prosecutors kept a tally board in which Watergate-related victories were chalked up either for "CC," the Children's Crusade, or for "WK," the Wicked King. And yet, as Jill Wine-Banks (formerly Volner) would put it, the audible proof of Richard Nixon's criminality "devastated your entire concept of the office. It was horrifying."
And, they quickly agreed, it was something Leon needed to hear. Carl Feldbaum lugged the reel-to-reel machine into the boss's office and dropped it on his desk. He sat across from his superior, studying his round, implacable face as the damning words were replayed. After the tape ran out, the older man took off his headphones and said to his associate, "Thank you."
On his way back to his desk, Feldbaum was swarmed by his colleagues. Well? What did Leon say? "Nothing." Come on! His face must have registered something. "Zero."
But later that afternoon, Jaworski's secretary, Florence Campbell, said to deputy Henry Ruth, "I'm worried about Mr. Jaworski. He's been in his office all day with the door closed."
Ruth knocked on his boss's door. He found the prosecutor sitting at his desk with his head in his hands, staring at the floor. "Leon, what's going on?" Ruth asked.
The drawl was dirgelike. "I can't believe I just heard the president of the United States telling someone to say, 'I don't recall; I don't remember,'" he murmured.
Ruth thought, This is a turning point. By the end of the day, everyone in the office knew it: Leon was radicalized.
"I'D SEEN SOME OF THE ABUSES of the Cox operation," says Al Haig today. "With Leon, you'd get an honest shake. To me, you can't ask for more than an honest, objective, patriotic prosecutor, and I think we were lucky to have one."
But neither side felt that way at the time. The Watergate staff remained leery of Jaworski, especially when he would leave the office in mid-afternoon with a bulging briefcase and tell no one of his intentions. Sometimes a member of the prosecution force followed him—saw him disappear into his hotel or his firm's Washington office or, perhaps, behind the White House gates. The imagination reeled, but imagination was all it was. The Colonel's periodic meetings with Haig involved no secret deals. He left his own office to make calls and read documents because he craved uninterrupted moments and because he correctly guessed that his subordinates were parsing his every utterance. For that matter, he flew home to his ranch in Wimberley whenever he could. And there, in the womb of his family, he would at last let loose, grumbling about the hothead Ben-Veniste and Nixon's lawyers—and then speaking in cryptic but malevolent tones of what the White House tapes revealed about the leader of the free world.
He wanted Nixon out of there. Not prosecuted as a sitting president, as some of the assistant prosecutors urged. Jaworski preferred the constitutional remedy of impeachment. Yet for Congress to impeach, it needed evidence, and the special prosecutor did not want to prejudice the imminent trials of Nixon's top aides by releasing the dynamite he and his staff had been quietly sitting on for months or by broadcasting what he believed was on other tapes the White House still possessed. Throughout the spring of 1974, Jaworski and his young associates jousted. To treat Nixon as the caretaker of America's most sacred institution? Or to treat him as subject to the laws like anyone else? The compromise they struck was as elegant as it was unprecedented: The Watergate grand jury, in a sealed report to Judge Sirica, would designate Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator and authorize Jaworski to name him as such whenever he deemed it necessary. What this meant was that the grand jury would not, as Jaworski put it, publicly "brand [Nixon] indelibly without an opportunity to defend himself." But if and when Nixon's lawyers refused to turn over the tapes for use in the Watergate cover-up trial on the grounds that the grand jury had not named Nixon as a conspirator, Jaworski could reveal his trump card.
And that is exactly what transpired, leading to a showdown at the U.S. Supreme Court on July 8, 1974. Never strong on appellate matters, Jaworski had not wanted to be the one to argue the case, but its magnitude required that the special prosecutor be a participant. In the end, his thirty-year-old co-counsel, Philip Lacovara, smoothed over the boss's uneven performance with a magnificent closing argument. On July 24, the high court ruled unanimously that Nixon must surrender the tapes. Twelve days later, the White House did so. The president acknowledged that what they revealed was "at variance with certain of my previous statements." On August 9, 1974, Richard Nixon quit his office.
Nixon's resignation liberated the young Watergate prosecutors. Now they could pursue the ex-president as rigorously as they had prosecuted his lieutenants, unsaddled by constitutional issues. With the single exception of the brilliant Nashville trial lawyer James Neal—who was in his forties and not from a Northeastern liberal tradition—all of Jaworski's assistants urged that Nixon be indicted. "But Leon took a broader view," says Neal, "that I'm a citizen, and a citizen with a great deal of power, and I should use that power in a way that redounds to the ultimate good of the country." Jaworski could not be shaken from his belief that the massive pretrial publicity would mean endless trial delays, and perhaps no fair trial ever. When he consulted his heart, he found pity there. Haig had informed him of Nixon's "deteriorating health." Said Senator James Eastland: "He's in bad shape, Leon," elaborating that Nixon had weepily begged, "Don't let Jaworski put me in that trial with [Bob] Haldeman and Ehrlichman [former top Nixon aides]. I can't take any more." With the quarry dead in his sights, the Watergate special prosecutor put the voluminous case against Richard Nixon aside, pausing to consider the moment, the man, the country, his duties, and his conscience.
A day came in early September when Nixon's new ace attorney, Herbert J. "Jack" Miller, met secretly with Jaworski in the restaurant of the Jefferson Hotel and asked the special prosecutor if he would challenge a presidential pardon or in any way attack it on the airwaves. Miller walked out of the Jefferson that afternoon with the definite sense, he now says, "that if a pardon were granted, Jaworski would consider that the prerogative of the president." Thus was Nixon bestowed executive clemency by President Gerald Ford on September 8, 1974. The press release issued by Jim Doyle the following morning declared that "the special prosecutor will not discuss the subject of the pardon granted former president Nixon."
Dismay rocked the office at 1425 K Street. "The blow delivered by the pardon was that it established the opposite point of no one being above the law," says Lacovara, who resigned in protest. According to Ben-Veniste, "Some said, 'There goes Leon. He's done it. There's the Deal.'" Forever thin-skinned, Jaworski could scarcely bear to face his staff. On September 19, he stepped out of his office to find a cake on his secretary's desk and the staff gathered around it, singing "Happy Birthday." The Colonel blushed, thanked them, and retreated to his office without taking a bite. On October 12, he submitted his letter of resignation to the attorney general.
The New York Times charged that my grandfather's decision to leave the force while the trials were still in progress bordered on "desertion of duty." Many of his staffers shared that view. Others recognized that their boss's work was done and that he badly yearned to rejoin his former life. There would be, in any event, no going-away party, just as there had been no welcome wagon. And though the Colonel would later tell people that it had been a fond parting, replete with picture-taking and autograph-dispensing, the stone-cold reality is that the Watergate special prosecutor returned to his world in Texas, Archie Cox's protégés to theirs, and their historic association came to a decisive end.
One day in October 1974, Jim Doyle and John Barker accompanied Leon Jaworski to Dulles airport, where the two staffers had first laid eyes on the new boss a year earlier. The air in the car was thick with poignancy—and yes, finally, with warmth. For the divide had been crossed, a monumental moment shared. And who could not be grateful for it? Barker had brought a bottle of wine and three glasses along for the occasion. They uncorked it in the car, passed it around, and remembered. When the plane arrived in Austin, the former Watergate special prosecutor stepped out into the terminal to greet his wife and then realized that he was not carrying his garment bag—that it must still be on the plane, trapped somewhere between his world and the world he had left behind.
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