"We've Got to Still Shoot Some Sparks"

The Oval Office, January 1, 1973

Richard Nixon welcomed the New Year in quiet solitude. He arose early and made his way to the Oval Office, arriving shortly after 7:30 AM, surprising the security guards who had to scramble to find keys to open the office for the president. First Lady Pat Nixon was in Pasadena, California, the guest of honor in the eighty-fourth Tournament of Roses Parade, which was scheduled to begin later that morning. Nixon was by himself in the White House. He scribbled notes about his second term on one of his ubiquitous lawyers' yellow pads and dictated some personal letters for his secretary, Rose Mary Woods, to transcribe whenever she finally made it to her office on that holiday morning.

Nixon had rare time to reflect. As he looked out over the next four years, his immediate focus was to put an end to America's involvement in the war in Vietnam, something he promised to do in the 1968 campaign. Time was running out on his first term and his ability to keep that pledge. He desperately wanted a peace agreement before his inauguration on January 20.

He knew that he was at the end of the rope with Congress — he had tested its limits in December with his bombing campaign in North Vietnam, and he was alert to the fact that the new Congress set to convene later in the week was likely to vote to cut off further funding for the war.

The ex-presidents club, such as it was, had decreased to one with the passing of Harry S. Truman, the nation's thirty-third president, the day after Christmas in Independence, Missouri. The only living ex-president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was seen popping nitroglycerin capsules to relieve acute angina at a civil rights symposium he had hosted in Austin in the middle of December, but Johnson had survived several previous heart scares, and he was only sixty-four years old.

Despite the fact that Nixon was trying to dismantle many of the reforms of the Great Society, he needed Johnson's support in his handling of the war, and he intended to respect LBJ's legacy with an end to the war that was something more than an abrupt pullout. "Peace with honor," Nixon called his plan. Johnson and Nixon had developed a peculiar relationship, at times bordering on friendship.

As 1973 dawned, the domestic calm that prevailed was a thin veneer. The stock market was reaching new highs, but within a year, after another devastating Middle East war and an oil embargo, the economy would be in real trouble. The cutoff of oil would touch off both a severe recession and trigger high inflation — "stagflation" — a vexing condition that would persist well into the 1980s. For this and other reasons, the stock market would start a long downward spiral after reaching its high in January 1973.

Under the surface ominous forces were churning. The trial of the Watergate burglars was scheduled to begin in the second week of January, casting a menacing shadow that Nixon could not ignore. He was bedeviled by this scandal — this "third-rate burglary" — that simply would not go away, even in the face of his landslide victory in November.

By January 1974, only one year later, Judge John J. Sirica would be on the cover of Time as the "Man of the Year," and Richard Nixon would be scrambling to explain an eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in a White House tape recorded several days after the break-in. By then, Nixon's presidency would be in a death spiral.

All of that seemed unfathomable as January 1, 1973, began. Most of the president's advisors were out of town, still on holiday vacations, enjoying the fruits of their hard work in the 1972 reelection campaign. Everyone assumed that the worst was behind them and that the second term would be less tempestuous than the first.

* * *

Steve Bull, the president's thirty-one-year-old aide, was in the West Wing when he heard the buzzer in Rose Mary Woods's office going off, indicating a call from the president. Bull responded, telling the president that Woods had not yet arrived; he asked if there was anything he could do, as nobody else seemed to be around.

Nixon replied that only Woods could help with his personal letters. But he told Bull to be on the lookout for Washington Redskins quarterback Billy Kilmer and Coach George Allen and his family, whom Nixon had invited to come to the White House later that morning.

The day before, the Redskins had surprised Tom Landry's Dallas Cowboys, winning 26–3 in a sensational NFC Championship Game, propelling the Redskins to a berth in Super Bowl VII. They would face the AFC champion Miami Dolphins, who were undefeated.

Bull told the president that he had attended the Redskins game and the two then compared notes on the gutsy performance of their home team, which had shut down the defending Super Bowl champion Cowboys, led by quarterback Roger Staubach. Nixon was a huge football fan and had spent big chunks of his weekends in December by himself watching the NFL playoff games at Camp David, Maryland (in part because the NFL at the time blacked out all home games, whether or not they were sellouts).

Soft-spoken and deferential, Steve Bull coordinated the president's schedule and appointments. Bull had lost his father when he was thirteen years old, and he came to see Nixon as something of a father figure. Though Bull was from a well-off New York family, he enlisted and served in Vietnam as a second lieutenant in the marines and later found work as an executive with the Canada Dry Corporation. He signed up to be an advance man for the Nixon campaign in 1968. Impressed with Bull's skills, Nixon's chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, asked Bull to stay on after the campaign. Bull rose in responsibilities as others left the...