The Unreported Middle East Catalyst for Richard Nixon’s Downfall

By Richard H. Curtiss

The U.S. media have made much of the 25th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation as U.S. president, some of it tasteless (whatever that means nowadays), some of it interesting, but, strangely, none of it touching on the Middle East. Since what Nixon had started doing in the Middle East from the beginning of his second term was, in my opinion, the catalyst that led directly to his downfall, the omission was both significant and, unfortunately, predictable, given the U.S. media taboos that protect Israel.

First, however, a personal disclaimer concerning my own feelings about Nixon. My first post-military, post-university newspaper job was in Nixon’s hometown, Whittier, California. The semi-weekly on which I worked had an editorial staff of one and a half. I was the one, serving as the entire reportorial staff and the make-up editor. The half, meaning she worked only three days a week, was the chief editor, an enormously cynical but enormously likable woman, maybe 10 years my senior, who had enjoyed a few years as a reporter with a wire service and a major Los Angeles newspaper during World War II. However, when the boys came marching home, she, and a whole generation of perfectly capable female reporters, found themselves back in the boondocks.

She was bitter about that because, as I realized immediately, she was a very good journalist. From a small town in Ohio, just like Nixon’s Quaker family, her politics reflected the conservatism of Whittier. My persistence in slipping in articles reflecting a very different philosophy on America’s very serious racial problems of the time probably caused some grief in her relationship with our extremely reactionary publisher and with advertisers, but it also got us readers and she dealt with it fairly and amicably.

The enthusiasm she no longer brought to newspapering now went into Republican politics. She was a member of a grassroots committee that, immediately after the war, interviewed perhaps 200 young veterans looking for the perfect candidate to upset the district’s incumbent Democratic congressman, who had held the job forever and was looking forward to greater things.

The committee picked Richard Nixon as the Republican candidate, and in a very rough campaign he won the seat in 1946. Now, with the enthusiastic backing not only of her committee but of well-heeled grassroots Republicans across the state, Nixon was running for senator, and my editor was not only working for his campaign committee, but also inserting her own enthusiastic interviews and features about Nixon and his wife, Pat, into every issue of our newspaper to build up the campaign press kit that circulated to media throughout the state.

“Now it’s time for you to make a land-for-peace agreement.”

My wife-to-be was still in college and she used to take a bus Saturday mornings to the printshop where I was putting the week’s second edition to bed. While she waited for me to finish she would read the current issue’s enthusiastic portrayals of the Nixon family. Then, as we drove off to spend the rest of the day at the beach, she would quote sarcastically some of the gushings about the Nixons.

I didn’t care. My own candidate was a conservative Democratic newspaper publisher who also happened to be a neighbor from my own hometown. When he lost in the Democratic primary to Helen Gahagan Douglas, the wife of popular Hollywood actor Melvyn Douglas, I lost any partisan interest in the race. But I did follow it closely, and therefore was able to see many years later how unfairly Nixon’s anti-Communist charges, and perhaps some anti-Hollywood innuendoes in those charges, had been twisted by his political enemies to imply that he had been an anti-Semite from the beginning of his political career.

I left Whittier after only a year to go to work for United Press, and a year after thatI left United Press after the Korean War began to enter the State Department’s overseas information program. I was working on the U.S. Information Agency’s wire service in Washington in 1960 when former Vice President Nixon ran for president against former Senator John F. Kennedy. In those pre-CNN days I stayed up all night with a special crew to provide minute-to-minute coverage to all embassies overseas of a closely contested election.

Buyer Remorse

I’d voted for Kennedy earlier that day, but by the next morning I was suffering buyer remorse. Kennedy did not win cleanly because of gross and obvious electoral fraud in Illinois. I greatly admired how quickly Nixon conceded the election that he perhaps hadn’t really lost at all in order to avoid throwing the nation into chaos. I wondered if Kennedy would have done the same if the first results had favored Nixon.

I voted for Hubert Humphrey against Richard Nixon in 1968, and my wife and children all worked in the Humphrey campaign in Virginia. But four years later in 1972 my wife and I both voted for Nixon for the first time in our lives. That was the election during which Republican campaign workers broke into the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building to bug a telephone.

But that wasn’t what interested me. I was working in Greece, heading the Voice of America’s Arabic program center in Rhodes, and following U.S. Middle East policy very closely on a day-by-day basis. It was clear to me that, although he had allowed the Israelis to have just about any weapons they requested during his first term, Nixon was very unhappy with the results. Instead of feeling secure enough to accept the entreaties for peace negotiations from Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, the Israelis were hardening their stance against giving back the Arab lands they had seized in the 1967 war and were becoming increasingly aggressive, particularly in Lebanon.

I remember telling my Arab-American colleagues on Rhodes that, as soon as he was safely reelected, Nixon would say to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, “I’ve armed you to the teeth, so that no combination of your Arab neighbors can threaten you. So now it’s time for you to make a land-for-peace agreement with them, based upon U.N. Security Council Resolution 242.”

This turned out to be prescient. In the second volume of his memoirs, Years of Upheaval, Nixon’s second-term secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, recalled that after his 1972 re-election, Nixon penciled a sharp rejection on a Kissinger memorandum recommending continued U.S. inaction on Egyptian and other Arab strategies to induce Israel to withdraw from captured Arab lands: “I have delayed through two elections and this year I am determined to move off dead center—,” Nixon wrote. “I totally disagree [with U.S. inaction]. This thing is getting ready to blow.” This comment, according to Kissinger’s memoirs, was followed by another Cold War-era note from Nixon to Kissinger: “K—you know my position of standing firmly with Israel has been based on broader issues than just Israel’s survival—those issues now strongly argue for movement toward a settlement. We are now Israel’s only major friend in the world. I have yet to see one iota of give on their part—conceding that Jordan and Egypt have not given enough on their side. This is the time to get moving—and they [the Israelis] must be told that firmly…The time has come to quit pandering to Israel’s intransigent position. Our actions over the past have led them to think we will stand with them regardless of how unreasonable they are.”

Why, then, did so little happen that Egypt and Syria finally decided on war in October 1973, proclaiming clearly that they had no intention of attacking Israel, but only of liberating their own occupied territories in Sinai and the Golan Heights? The answer, of course, is Watergate. Every move that Nixon made to pressure Israel into territorial concessions seemed to be matched by a new revelation about Nixon’s activities to cover up his staff’s role in the 1972 Watergate burglary.

Details of Nixon’s personal role in the cover-up found their way into issue after issue of The Washington Post through leaks from a mysterious source whom Post investigative reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein called “Deep Throat.”

Nevertheless Nixon persisted with his Middle East initiatives. In 1974 he visited Egypt and Syria to restore U.S. diplomatic relations broken off with both countries during the 1967 war. I had been stationed in Damascus when relations were broken, and was pleased to return seven years later from Beirut to the Syrian capital to handle the press during the Nixon visit.

I was shocked at his appearance—haggard, limping badly from phlebitis, easily distracted, and inclined to ramble in the toasts and speeches that accompanied the renewal of relations. He was gracious in thanking those of us who provided the support for his visit, but as we drove to the airport to see him off to his next stop in Amman, I asked his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, “Do you think when Americans see television footage of the wildly enthusiastic reception he’s getting from crowds in the Middle East it will save his presidency?”

“We hope so,” Ziegler answered, without conviction. Only a few weeks later, after more revelations from “Deep Throat,” Nixon resigned as president. While his successor, Gerald Ford, tried to keep up the pressure on Israel, he was quickly cowed by Israel’s Washington lobby, which cranked up a dissenting letter from 76 U.S. senators.

After my retirement from the foreign service I published a book about the roles of the various presidents in the Arab-Israeli dispute. It lamented the fact that efforts by Nixon’s first-term secretary of state, William Rogers, to get Arab-Israeli land-for-peace negotiations going were undercut by Kissinger, and that Nixon’s renewed second term efforts were cut short by Watergate. All three living ex-presidents sent warm endorsements, which I used on the cover of the book’s second edition.

I was especially pleased with Nixon’s reaction, however, because my book faulted him for not paying more attention to the details of what Kissinger and others in his administration were doing that ran contrary to his own initiatives for Middle East peace. Nixon also sent me autographed copies of his own subsequent books, and responded graciously and affirmatively to other initiatives I suggested. From all this I assumed that, at least privately, he shared my views on the centrality of the Middle East initiatives in his downfall.

This August I listened to Woodward and Bernstein fervently insist, as they always have, during a televised interview that “Deep Throat” was an individual whose identity they cannot reveal before his death. It only strengthened my own conviction that “Deep Throat” was no more than a middleman who conveyed all manner of damaging information gathered from individuals and institutions friendly to Israel who had access to things going on in the White House or discussed on its telephones.

Most intriguing of all was the revelation that Leonard Garment, a well-connected and amiable former Nixon law partner who was the White House liaison to the Jewish community and who sometimes served as a trusted, informal backchannel between Nixon and Israeli government leaders, is now working on a book called, In Search of Deep Throat. Given Garment’s role in Nixon’s administration, I can’t think of anyone better positioned to find out who or what brought it down, and why. In fact, I suspect that Garment already knows.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.