Living History by Unknown (the lemonade war series txt) 📗

dry wit and meticulous standards, who supervised my work on procedural and constitutional issues. Bob Sack, a lawyer with an elegant writing style who frequently leavened our serious moments with puns and asides, was later appointed to the federal bench by Bill. But most of us were young, eager law school graduates who were willing to work twenty-hour days in makeshift offices, reviewing documents, researching and transcribing tapes.

Bill Weld, later the Republican Governor of Massachusetts, worked with me on the constitutional task force. Fred Altschuler, a superb legal draftsman from California, asked me to help him analyze the reporting structure of the White House staff in order to determine what decisions the President likely made. I shared an office with Tom Bell, a lawyer from Doar’s family firm in New Richmond, Wisconsin. Tom and I spent late nights together wrestling over fine points of legal interpretation, but we also laughed a lot. He didn’t take himself too seriously and wouldn’t let me either.

Andrew Johnson was the only previous President to be impeached, and historians generally agreed that the Congress had misused its solemn constitutional responsibility for partisan political purposes. Dagmar Hamilton, a lawyer and professor of government at the University of Texas, researched English impeachment cases; I took on the American cases. Doar was committed to running a process that the public and history would judge as nonpartisan and fair, no matter what the outcome. Joe Woods and I drafted procedural rules to present to the House Judiciary Committee. I accompanied Doar and Woods to a public meeting of the committee and sat with them at the counsel’s table while Doar presented the procedures he wanted the members to accept.

There were never leaks from our investigation, so the media were grasping for any nugget of human interest to report. Since women were rare in this environment, their mere presence was considered newsworthy. The only problem I encountered was when a reporter asked me how it felt “being the Jill Wine Volner of the Impeachment inquiry”

We had seen the media focus on Jill Wine Volner, the young lawyer who had served in the office of Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski. Volner conducted the memorable crossexamination of Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s private secretary, about the missing 18½-

minute section of a particularly significant tape. Volner’s legal skills and attractiveness were the subject of many stories.

John Doar was allergic to publicity. He enforced a strict policy of total confidentiality, even anonymity. He warned us not to keep diaries, to place sensitive trash in designated bins, never to talk about work out side the building, never to draw attention to ourselves and to avoid social activities of all kinds (as if we had time). He knew that discretion was the only way to achieve a fair and dignified process. When he heard the reporter ask the question comparing me to Volner, I knew I would never be let out in public again.

After working on procedures, I moved on to research the legal grounds for a presidential impeachment and wrote a long memo summarizing my conclusions about what did―and did not―constitute an impeachable offense. Years later, I reread the memo. I still agreed with its assessment of the kinds of “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” the framers of the Constitution intended to be impeachable.

Slowly and surely, Doar’s team of lawyers put together evidence that made a compelling case for the impeachment of Richard Nixon. One of the most meticulous, inspirational and demanding lawyers with whom I have ever worked, Doar insisted that no one draw conclusions until all the facts were evaluated. In those days before personal computers, he directed us to use index cards to keep track of the facts, the same method he had applied in the civil rights cases he tried. We typed one fact per card―the date of a memo, the topic of a meeting―and cross-referenced it with other facts. Then we looked for patterns. By the end of the inquiry, we had compiled more than five hundred thousand index cards.

Our work accelerated after we received the subpoenaed tapes from the Watergate Grand Jury. Doar asked some of us to listen to the tapes to further our understanding of them. It was hard work sitting alone in a windowless room trying to make sense of the words and to glean their context and meaning. And then there was what I called the “tape of tapes.” Richard Nixon taped himself listening to earlier tapes he had made of himself and discussing what he heard on them with his staff. He justified and rationalized what he had previously said in order to deny or minimize his involvement in ongoing White House efforts to defy the laws and the Constitution. I would hear the President saying things like, “What I meant when I said that was …” or, “Here’s what I was really trying to say…” It was extraordinary to listen to Nixon’s rehearsal for his own cover-up.

On July 19, 1974, Doar presented proposed articles of impeachment that specified the charges against the President. The House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment citing abuse of power, obstruction of justice and contempt of Congress. The charges against President Nixon included paying off witnesses to silence them or influence their testimony, misusing the Internal Revenue Service to obtain the tax records of private citizens, directing the FBI and the Secret Service to spy on Americans and maintaining a secret investigative unit within the Office of the President. The votes were bipartisan, earning the confidence of both the Congress and the American public. Then, on August 5, the White House released transcripts of the June 23, 1972, tape often called the “smoking gun,” on which Nixon approved a cover-up of the money used by his reelection committee for illegal purposes.

Nixon resigned the Presidency on August 9, 1974, sparing the nation an agonizing and divisive vote in the House and trial in the Senate. The Nixon impeachment process of 1974 forced a corrupt President from office and was a victory