Tim Weiner is a former New York Times correspondent and the author of five books. This article is adapted from his latest, One Man Against The World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon, published by Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright © 2015 by Tim Weiner. All rights reserved.

The Nixon administration began disintegrating—the president unable to play his role as the leader of the nation and the free world—at 7:55 p.m. on October 11, 1973.

The newly appointed secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, picked up his telephone. His trusted aide at the National Security Council, Brent Scowcroft, was on the line from the White House. The Arab-Israeli war of 1973 was in its fifth day, escalating toward a global crisis and a potential nuclear conflict.


SCOWCROFT: The switchboard just got a call from 10 Downing Street to inquire whether the president would be available for a call within 30 minutes from the prime minister. The subject would be the Middle East.

KISSINGER: Can we tell them no? When I talked to the president he was loaded.

President Richard Nixon—ravaged by more than four years of war in Vietnam, 15 months of Watergate investigations and countless nights of intense insomnia—was incapacitated.

As Nixon sank deeper into the swamp of the Watergate scandal, Kissinger gained an imperial power over foreign policy. And his former underling, Gen. Alexander M. Haig, now the White House chief of staff, behaved like the acting president of the United States. “Actually Al Haig was the president of the United States,” said William Lloyd Stearman, the NSC’s leading Indochina expert.

Nixon occasionally unburdened himself on the telephone after midnight—exhausted, intoxicated or both. He talked to Haig about quitting in one taped conversation back in May 1973, 15 months before he resigned, after he learned that Vice President Spiro T. Agnew was facing indictment for bribery and corruption.

“Wouldn’t it be better for the country, you know, to just check out?” Nixon said. Haig laughed. “No, no, seriously,” Nixon insisted. “You see, I’m not at my best. I’ve got to be at my best, and that means fighting this damn battle, fighting it all-out. And I can’t fight the damn battle,” not with bad news hammering him hour after hour. “The goddamn thing has gotten to me. … And you get to the point that, well, if you can’t do the goddamn job you better put somebody in there that can.”

But Nixon had to fight the damn battle himself—a battle that intensified in the fall of 1973.

***

On the afternoon of October 10, hours after Agnew’s resignation, Nixon told Elliot Richardson, the attorney general, “Now that we have disposed of that matter, we can go ahead and get rid of Cox.”

The Senate Watergate Committee hearings had revealed the existence of Nixon’s secret White House tapes; the special prosecutor in the Watergate case, Archibald Cox, had subpoenaed nine conversations. The president refused to turn over the tapes, and was determined to oust Cox from his job.

But Nixon could not fire Cox. Under an agreement Nixon himself had struck, only Attorney General Richardson had that power.

“We’ve got an even worse problem than Agnew,” Richardson said to his newly appointed deputy William D. Ruckelhaus, five days after his afternoon conversation with Nixon.

“That’s not possible,” Ruckelshaus said.

“Yes, it is,” Richardson replied. “The president wants to fire Cox.”

Nixon had a new incentive for this improper demand: His ousted White House counsel, John Dean, had just agreed to plead guilty to obstruction of justice. Under the plea agreement, struck with Cox, Dean would first serve as a sworn government witness against the president’s men—and the president himself.

“The president all along intended either to force Cox’s resignation or induce Richardson to fire him,” Ruckelshaus said in 2009. “The reason was simple. Cox was getting too close. In the nine tapes in question, or those subsequently acquired by the special prosecutor, were several smoking guns. … The act of firing Cox was that of a desperate man. Adverse public reaction must have seemed preferable to handing your accuser the still-hot weapon with your fingerprints all over it.”

The showdown came on Saturday, October 20. Cox called a press conference: “I am certainly not out to get the president of the United States,” he said, but Nixon was not complying with the law or the legal agreement that gave Cox the right to follow the evidence where it led.

Richardson, after receiving an angry telephone call from Haig ordering him to fire Cox forthwith, requested a face-to-face meeting with Nixon. The meeting took place at 4:30 p.m. on Saturday. It was short and ugly. Richardson refused and resigned. He was back in his office, beginning to describe the confrontation to Ruckelshaus and the third-ranking man in the Justice Department—the solicitor general, Robert Bork, whose job was to represent the president before the Supreme Court—when the phone rang again. Al Haig calling: This time for Ruckelshaus.

Their conversation was brief—and brutal, too. Fire Cox now, Haig said; this is an order from your commander in chief. Ruckelshaus declined. He was fired forthwith. Bob Bork was now the acting attorney general of the United States—and Haig wanted him to carry out the president’s command. “Both Elliot and I had urged Bork to comply if his conscience would permit,” Ruckelshaus remembered. “We were frankly worried about the stability of the government. Bork indicated to us that he believed the president had the power to fire Cox, and he was simply the instrument of the exercise of that power.” In exchange, Bork wrote in a posthumously published memoir, Nixon offered him the next available seat on the Supreme Court. (Bork would never get that seat. Ten months later, the Supreme Court unanimously ordered Nixon to unhand the tapes, which proved that the president tried to obstruct justice in the FBI’s Watergate investigation.)

At 8:00 p.m. on October 20, the White House announced that Richardson had resigned and Ruckelshaus and Cox had been fired. The special prosecutor’s office was abolished by presidential order and sealed by FBI agents. Thus ended the Saturday Night Massacre and began a political conflagration. When asked what he would do next, Cox’s spokesman James Doyle said, “I’m going home to read about the Reichstag fire.”

***

The night that the battles of Watergate became a constitutional cataclysm, the war in the Middle East almost went global.

On October 20, the Yom Kippur War between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria had been going on for nearly two weeks. Syria and Egypt, who wanted to regain territories lost in the Six-Day War, launched a joint surprise attack on Sinai and the Golan Heights on October 6 and gained the upper hand in the first days of the war thanks to the element of surprise. Israel and the United States, which relied heavily on Israeli intelligence, were caught unaware.

“All our intelligence said there would be no attack,” Kissinger said at an emergency Cabinet meeting on October 18th. “Why did Israel not figure there would be an attack?” He answered his own question, as was his style. The Israelis thought “there was no threat. The Arabs are too weak. So they interpreted the intelligence this way. We did the same.”

The Israelis pleaded for American arms to help repel the invaders. Kissinger, Haig, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Thomas Moorer tried to mobilize a covert airlift of American weapons. Owing to a series of snafus, secrecy was lost. Giant U.S. Air Force cargo planes, their insignias visible, landed in Tel Aviv, as television cameras whirred and Israelis cheered.

Both the Soviets and the Saudis had warned the Americans that this war in the Middle East was coming. The Saudis had explicitly told William Casey, the undersecretary of state for economic affairs and future CIA director, that they would use oil as a weapon unless America used its influence to pacify the Israeli army in its continuous conflicts with the Arabs. It had been only six years since the Arabs and Israelis last clashed.

A few months earlier, Casey’s assistant Willis C. Armstrong had attended a lunch with Casey, the Saudi foreign minister and the Saudi oil minister. He vividly recalled that the Saudis had said, “If you don’t do something to restrain the Israelis, there’s going to be a war in the Middle East. When the war breaks out, we’re going to have to put an embargo on oil to the United States.”

Armstrong remembered: “Casey and I looked at each other after the lunch, and I said, ‘Shall we write that up?’ He said, ‘Nobody would believe us.’ ”

But the embargo started shortly after the American arms shipments arrived in Israel. The world price of oil soon quintupled. Millions of Americans would spend hours sitting in their cars, waiting in line to fill their gas tanks.

The Soviets, meanwhile, became deeply involved in the war, resupplying their allies in Syria and Egypt. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev sent Nixon an increasingly tense series of messages in mid October, the first proposing they work together diplomatically to stop the war, the second strongly suggesting that a joint U.S.-Soviet military task force serve as peacekeepers. A brief ceasefire had stopped the war, but then the Israelis broke it by striking at Egyptian forces.

The third message from Moscow was a threat: The Soviet military might act unilaterally in the Middle East.

The threat was real. American intelligence sensors in the Dardanelles, the narrow strait connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, detected Soviet ships carrying nuclear arms. This startling fact was confirmed 30 years later by David Michael Ransom and Helmut Sonnenfeldt, NSC staffers under Kissinger.

“The Soviets were shipping warheads to Egypt,” said Ransom, later a U.S. ambassador in the Middle East. “That sent Kissinger into an extraordinary series of moves to bring the fighting to an end.”

These moves began one hundred hours after the Saturday Night Massacre, in the White House Situation Room. The president was not present. “Nixon was in his family quarters,” Sonnenfeldt said. “There were rumors that he was drunk.” They were not rumors.

Kissinger, Schlesinger, Admiral Moorer, Al Haig and CIA director Bill Colby were the principals. Their midnight conclave was recorded only in Moorer’s diary, which was declassified in 2007; until then, the meeting remained one of the more mysterious events in modern American history.

Moorer’s diary for the night of October 24 begins at 10:30 p.m., when Kissinger’s high-ranking aide Larry Eagleburger called Moorer for an urgent meeting in the Situation Room. The record begins: “We had just received a real piss-swisher from Brezhnev regarding the Arab/Israeli Conflict.” ( Piss-swisher is navy slang; its polite equivalent is pot-stirrer.)

“The Brezhnev letter proposed that the USSR/US urgently dispatch to Egypt, Soviet and American military contingents to ensure implementation of the Ceasefire and, further, containing the threatening sentence: ‘ … it is necessary to adhere without delay. I’ll say it straight. If you find it impossible to act jointly with us in this matter we should be faced with the necessity urgently to consider the question of taking appropriate steps unilaterally.’ ”

All agreed that what the Soviets proposed in the Middle East was a potential disaster. If U.S. and Soviet soldiers started landing in the middle of the battle, each side standing with its allies, it could look like the opening day of World War III.

“This would not be a NATO war,” Moorer wrote (his italics are verbatim). “Any direct confrontation on the ground with the Soviets would be very difficult. In short, the Middle East is the worst place in the world for the US to get engaged in a war with the Soviets.” No one disagreed.

“The big question then became Why did the Soviets suddenly reverse themselves and without any warning all day then ‘bang’ we receive the Brezhnev threat?”

Nobody had any clear answers. But they all surmised that the Soviets were responding to Israel’s violating the brief cease-fire. That broke the camel’s back, Kissinger agreed.

Kissinger had bigger thoughts, recorded word for word by Moorer: “the Soviets were influenced by the current situation the President finds himself in … if the Democrats and the US public do not stop laying siege to their government, sooner or later, someone will take a run at us. … Friday the Pres US was in good shape domestically. Now the Soviets see that he is, in their mind, non-functional. … The overall strategy of the Soviets now appears to be one of throwing détente on the table since we have no functional President, in their eyes, and, consequently, we must prevent them from getting away with this.”

In the absence of a functioning president, these five men, led by Kissinger, decided to send strong signals to the Soviets to back off. They raised America’s global nuclear alert level to DEFCON III, one step short of imminent nuclear war. They dispatched three warships to the Mediterranean, alerted the 82nd Airborne Division, and recalled 75 B-52 nuclear bombers from Guam. Since that entailed the immediate movement of many thousands of American soldiers, sailors and airmen, Moorer said the decisions would immediately be leaked—not a bad thing, since the Americans wanted to signal to the Soviets how seriously they took the threat.

“At 0400 we went to bed to await the Soviet response,” Moorer’s record ended, save for one last thought: “If the Soviets put in 10,000 troops into Egypt what do we do?”

The United States might have gone to war—or it might have done nothing. As Larry Eagleburger, who served as secretary of state under President George H. W. Bush, later noted, “One of the things that I recall now with a great deal more equanimity than I did at the time is what was never really understood: the degree to which the Watergate crisis, particularly in its final months, meant that if we had been put to the test somewhere in the foreign policy arena, we would not have been able to respond. We were a ship dead in the water.”

***

This story was excerpted from Tim Weiner's book One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon, out in hardcover from Henry Holt & Co. on June 16.

Through good luck and, perhaps, blind fortune, Moscow and Washington backed away from the specter of a Third World War. Kissinger, to his great credit, began a three-year attempt to try to negotiate peace in the Middle East. To his discredit, when word of the nuclear alert leaked, as it did almost instantly, he deceived the press, saying the president had saved the day, when Nixon had spent the night in a drunken stupor.

The other question raised by reporters was how a handful of unelected officials could raise a global military alert and send nuclear bombers aloft in a secret midnight meeting without consulting Congress. In the charged atmosphere created by the Saturday Night Massacre, it looked like the Nixon administration might indeed become a government of men, not laws.

It seemed worse to Elliot Richardson, the sacked attorney general. He reflected in a memoir: “A government of laws was on the verge of becoming a government of one man.”

Nixon had reasons to drink himself to sleep on the night of October 24th. The president had told Kissinger that day that his enemies wanted “to kill the president. I may physically die.”

Real threats faced Richard Nixon along with his roiling fears.

Just hours before the Situation Room meeting, the House of Representatives, for the first time since 1868, had begun formal proceedings to impeach the president of the United States.