Senior Senator Hugh Scott: Nixon’s chief apologist

“There are only so many lies you can take, and now there has been one too many. Nixon should get his ass out of the White House—today!”

— Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, Aug. 6, 1974

Hugh Scott believed in Richard Nixon, though he knew the president had lied to him. While Scott, the senior senator from Pennsylvania, would have preferred a Romney or a Rockefeller as his party’s nominee in 1968, he was a good Republican soldier, part of the Truth Squad that dogged Democratic presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey during that campaign.

Scott and Nixon were never close; the relationship between the president and the Senate minority leader was often strained. In his memoir, Nixon’s domestic affairs chief John Ehrlichman described Scott as a “rotund, owlish … machine politician.” For his part, Scott believed that Nixon and his gang had a basic “disrespect for Congress.”

Still, Nixon was shrewd and Scott was malleable, responding both to Nixon’s flattery and bullying. As the Watergate scandal began to unfold, Nixon told Scott that while he had confidence in House Republicans, “the country thinks the Senate is a bunch of assholes.”

It was a move calculated to make Scott work harder to shore up support for the president. He became one of the president’s staunchest defenders.

Over the next months as the dominoes began to fall, Scott commended the president for accepting the resignations of Ehrlichman and John Haldeman, declared his “full confidence” in Nixon, and excoriated John Dean as “a little rat” seeking to save himself by implicating his betters in scandal. He thought the revelation that the White House had been secretly taping conversations was, in today’s parlance, a nothing burger. He guessed previous administrations had done the same thing. (He was right.)

After Spiro Agnew resigned and pleaded no contest to tax evasion and money laundering charges in October 1973, Scott even held out hope Nixon would pick him to be vice president. But Nixon clapped him on the shoulder and told him he was more valuable in the Senate. There was no clear successor to him as minority leader and the GOP couldn’t afford an internecine power struggle. Disappointed, Scott said he understood.

But he wondered if the same applied to the man who occupied an analogous position in the House, Rep. Gerald R. Ford of Michigan? Absolutely, Nixon said. Ford needed to stay put as well.

So when reporters directly asked Scott about the ongoing search for a vice president, he confidently explained that neither he or Ford were in contention for the job.

Less than a month later, Nixon nominated Ford for veep.

Scott asked Ford if it was OK to still call him “Jerry” after he became president. At the time, he thought he was making a joke.

As the seriousness of the accusations against Nixon compounded, Scott may have had doubts. But he never publicly wavered. He urged Nixon to fight back, to display moral indignation. Even after Nixon had fired the first special prosecutor Archibald Cox and news of a mysterious 18 ½ minute gap on one of the tapes became public, Scott was Nixon’s champion in the Senate and in the media. He might have been

Nixon’s stooge.

In December, White House chief of staff Alexander Haig showed Scott a transcript of a conversation the president had with Dean. Though Haig only did so after Scott promised he wouldn’t reveal he’d read it and spirited it away before he could finish it, Scott believed what he read proved Nixon’s innocence.

So in January 1974, Scott went on CBS’s Face the Nation and announced he had “some information which is not yet public … [that] seems to me to exculpate the president … I have found nothing that indicates any guilt on the part of the president of a nature that would be impeachable.”

He went on to urge Nixon to “let it all hang out” and to release all the tapes.

But Haig had shown Scott a heavily edited transcript. What Scott didn’t see was part of the conversation where Dean told the president that White House aides had perjured themselves and were being “blackmailed.” Part of what Scott didn’t read was Nixon asking: “How much money do you need?” and telling Dean “… you could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash …” to pay off the Watergate burglars.

In April 1974, Scott reminded his constituents that Nixon was due the presumption of innocence. He warned against making moral judgments on the president. Then on May 3, 1974, the White House released an edited 800-page transcript of the tapes. Four days later, Scott decried the “deplorable, disgusting, shabby, immoral performances” of those caught on tape. “He did not exclude President Nixon in his evaluation,” The New York Times dryly reported.

Yet as late as May 13, Scott was telling his constituents he was not in favor of Nixon’s resignation. Damning as that transcript was, the House Judiciary Committee, which had subpoenaed the tapes of 42 White House conversations, wasn’t satisfied. They issued another subpoena, this time for the tapes of 64 conversations. Nixon refused, citing executive privilege.

On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the argument that courts are compelled to honor without question any presidential claim of executive privilege and ordered the White House to release the tapes. It did, and it was clear impeachment could not be avoided. Hugh Scott counted heads in the Senate. There were perhaps 15 senators willing to consider acquitting the president. The game was over.

On Aug. 7, 1974, Scott, Barry Goldwater and House Minority Leader John Rhodes, another Arizona Republican, went to the White House to lay out the facts to Nixon. Goldwater told reporters that the question of resignation never came up in the meeting (Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein would report that Haig directed the trio to avoid the topic during the meeting) but in his 1988 autobiography he wrote, “None of us doubted the outcome. He would resign.”

He did, on Aug. 9. While Scott admitted that Nixon was indictable, he argued it would be impossible for the former president to get a fair trial. All that Watergate publicity. All that scandal. He applauded when Ford pardoned Nixon; it was “a decision which will spare the former president and his family and the nation further and unnecessary suffering.”

He might have been right. As far as I can tell, Hugh Scott was a decent guy who cherished the attention of the powerful and tended to play it safe. If you’ve never heard of him, I guess there’s a reason. pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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