Two days of testimony followed from Secret Service agents and White House aides which turned out to be borderline farcical in nature. Stories frequently changed describing recording device malfunctions or simply running out of tape, and the Special Prosecutor’s Office made Buzhardt look like a fool. Those courtroom antics combined with the public and Congressional pressure led to the reality that Nixon and Bork would have to appoint a new Special Prosecutor.
Haig frantically made many phone calls, and one name kept popping up, Leon Jaworski, who was a former president of the American Bar Association and a former war crimes prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials. Haig felt that Jaworski could be “managed”, unlike Cox, and it appeared that Jaworski was a political ally of John Connally, which meant that Nixon was on board. Jaworski agreed to take the position as long as he was allowed to truly and independently operate and investigate. It was also agreed that it would be far more difficult to remove him compared to Cox, since it would involve leaders from both the House and the Senate to do so.
On 1 November 1973, Bork formally announced Jaworski as the new Special Prosecutor. It would now be Leon Jaworski and Representative Peter Rodino, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, that would carry the baton for the final stages of the Watergate Scandal. Newspapers started to demand that Nixon resign, and Senator Edward Brooke (R; MA) was the first Republican senator to publicly support the idea. From the New York Times to the Denver Post to the Detroit News and many other major newspapers, the opinion was trumpeted that Nixon was unfit to remain in office. Even Time magazine chimed in, breaking its half-a-century tradition of not featuring editorials.
Those days in Key Biscayne were a turning point for Leonard Garment, who no longer was committed to protecting Nixon, and he would gradually phase himself out of his role focusing on Watergate. Nixon, Haig, and Ziegler hatched a plan which the media dubbed “Operation Candor”, where the White House would launch a public relations campaign to convince the nation of its innocence. On 5 November 1973, Jaworski arrived in DC to start his new job as Special Prosecutor. Respect for Jaworski in legal circles and in DC concerning the primacy of the law was unquestioned. To the holdover staffers from Cox, Jaworski’s sterling credentials were actually a source of suspicion, not reassurance, in that they initially viewed him as Nixon’s “fixer”.
The White House still played the delay game, with no word coming from Buzhardt concerning Jaworksi’s recent requests. Through channels, Jaworski made it clear that he would file suit against Nixon in two days unless he received what he requested, which led to Buzhardt calling the Special Prosecutor to start the process. One year to the day after Nixon won 49 states and 520 Electoral Votes in the re-election in 1972, the House voted 361 - 51 to appropriate $1m for the Judiciary Committee’s impeachment inquiry; the media didn’t miss that “Calendar Coincidence”.
During the late-Fall of 1973, Senator Lowell Weicker came across his neighbor John Dean, and asked him if there was something the Watergate Committee missed in terms of its investigation. Dean replied by saying probably not, “except for tax fraud”. Weicker was astonished, in that there was actually more on top of the mountain of other scandals associated with Nixon. It soon became clear to investigators on multiple fronts that Nixon had been running a scheme trying to bolster his legacy while at the same time reducing his taxes. Nixon basically copied what Lyndon Johnson had done, donating his pre-Presidential papers to the National Archives with the intention that they would be included down the road in his Presidential Library. Nixon then claimed a massive tax deduction for the donation.
As investigators from the Watergate Committee looked further, the less altruistic and more sinister Nixon’s donations seemed. There was no record of his VP documents actually being turned over to the National Archives, and no official Deed of Gift indicating the donation registered at the Archives. There had been a deed delivered to the National Archives in April 1970, signed by lawyers (one of them from Kalmbach’s firm), with all signatures dated 21 April 1969, which was an attempt to illegally backdate the donation before the 1969 “LBJ Law” took effect. The transfer of the papers came with a stipulation that archivists could not fully access the records, which negated the “gift” under the new “LBJ Law”.
It soon became clear to the Watergate Committee that Nixon’s arrangement with the National Archives was not a tax-deductible gift, but rather a taxpayer-financed storage facility to enrich Nixon’s wealth and to drastically reduce his federal taxes. That knowledge of tax shenanigans led to other questions concerning Nixon’s personal finances. For years, investigators and reporters had tried to figure out the financial transactions behind his vacation homes in San Clemente and Key Biscayne. During the Fall of 1973, allegations came to light that such as Howard Hughes helped finance Nixon’s estate in San Clemente, and columnist Jack Anderson hinted that Nixon used a Swiss bank account. All of those allegations were proven to be false, but the real controversy centered on that as much as $10m was spent on “improvements” in Nixon’s vacation homes in CA and FL. It appeared that the “improvements”, especially in San Clemente, were not about Presidential security but far more about Nixon’s personal comfort. So an entire other scandal emerged on top of all the others concerning Nixon: the possibility that he profited at taxpayer expense, which was a sure way to lose public support.
On 21 November 1973, Buzhardt called Jaworski to talk about a serious problem in the strictest confidence. In Jaworski’s office, Buzhardt (who had never been in that office before) told Jaworski that there was a problem with one of the subpoenaed tapes, which had the conversation between Nixon and Haldeman on 20 June 1972. The problem was that there was an 18+ minute erasure during the middle part of the conversation. It was a critical conversation, understood to have been the first time Nixon and Haldeman had talked since the Watergate break-in.
That afternoon, Buzhardt, Garment, and Jaworski met in Sirica’s chambers. The judge was horrified by the 18+ minute gap, coming only three minutes into the conversation between Nixon and Haldeman. Buzhardt confirmed that the missing 18+ minutes dealt with Watergate, based on Haldeman’s handwritten notes from the meeting. Sirica ordered another hearing, wanting the problem and the explanation on the record and for the public to hear as soon as possible. Sirica only gave Buzhardt an hour to organize the response from the White House.
Sirica ordered the tapes delivered to him by the Monday after Thanksgiving, and he set a schedule for hearings to try and determine how the 18+ minute gap could have occurred, since it was supposed to be secured in one of the most tightly guarded locations in the world. One of Jaworski’s staffers told the media that the future hearings would expose obstruction of justice in the White House; so much for “Operation Candor”.