The Hidden Watergate Story: How Larry Nichols and U.S. House Speaker Carl Albert Made the Difficult Choice to Say ‘No’
 |
| House Speaker Carl Albert, D-McAlester, center is shown in 1974. To Albert's left is his press secretary, Joe Foote. |
OKLAHOMA CITY – This is a story about power and politics. A story about the choices men are given and the choices those same men make.
This is also a story about history, a little-known tale regarding one of the biggest political scandals in American.
This is a story about Watergate.
But it’s not a typical Watergate story: It’s a story that few know and even fewer talk about.
This is a Watergate story about two Oklahomans: The late Carl Albert, then-Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and a young Justice Department attorney named Larry Nichols. One a Republican, the other a Democrat who, at the height of a national crisis, when the country was divided and people were furious and frightened, made an incredibly difficult choice.
The Scandal That Brought Down A President
Fifty years ago, Watergate – the break-in, the coverage, the investigation and the politics – was a growing national problem. Media outlets across the country broadcast and published daily stories about the break-in and the investigation.
The story goes like this: Around 2:30 a.m. on the morning of June 17, 1972, five burglars, one of whom was a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency and a security consultant for President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign, broke into the headquarters of Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Office complex in downtown Washington, D.C.
The burglars were there to photograph documents and plant listening devices on the Democrats’ telephones. They were caught and arrested and were arraigned before a judge. The Washington Postpublished the first story about the break-in. A short time later a federal grand jury announced an investigation.
Then all hell broke loose.
Over the course of the next two years, the public would learn how the administration of then-President Nixon and his staff attempted to cover up its involvement in the break-in. By the time the story played out, the president would be forced to resign, 69 government officials would be charged with crimes and 48 would be found guilty.
The scandal would taint the 1976 elections, cause the Republican Party to lose its hold on the presidency and decimate its numbers in Congress. Democrats would pick up 49 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and five seats in the Senate.
All this just two years after the Republican Party had won the presidency with the largest landslide vote in American history.
Watergate, Rose State Associate Dean James Davenport said, was such a scandal that it remains, even today, a touchstone in American politics.
“We were coming off the heels of another kind of scandal: The Pentagon Papers had been discovered during the Johnson Administration and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy,” Davenport said. “We were only a few years separated from some of that and here you have a crisis that hits a president.”
The blatant disregard for law and for ethics, Davenport said, did permanent damage to the trust the American public has for its government. Watergate left scars on the public, the press and the government.
“It led to great suspicion of elected officials and it’s not just suspicion, it’s cynicism,” Davenport said. “It is up front distrust. We go in assuming that they (the government) are doing something wrong.”
Watergate didn’t foster a healthy skepticism of government and other public institutions, Davenport said, but instead it created damaging cynicism.
That cynicism continues today.
Mr. Nichols Goes To Washington
Late in 1969 Larry Nichols was a young Justice Department attorney.
Nichols, born and raised in Oklahoma City, earned a geology degree from Princeton University and attended law school at the University of Michigan. He received his Juris Doctorate degree in 1967. That same year he worked as a clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren. Not long after that Nichols joined the Office of Legal Counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice.
“It was a very small office of 15 or so lawyers who reported to the attorney general,” Nichols said. That office was also staffed by a young assistant attorney general, William Rehnquist who would later become Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Nichols’ job included vetting the qualifications of potential Supreme Court candidates. The process required a deep look into the nominee’s legal background: Education, work, service and legal opinions. The vetting was intensive and included a different group at the Justice Department who examined the nominee from the political side.
Nichols made friends with fellow employees in the department. One of those men would become a major player in the Watergate scandal.
“President Nixon came in (in the 1968 election) and nominated a couple of people we worked on,” Nichols said. “In working on that – from the legal side – I got to know John Dean.”
Dean, also a Justice Department employee at the time, served in the office of Deputy Attorney General on political matters. Dean and Nichols had worked together examining appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Dean was a political animal. Nichols kept his politics at arm’s length.
“I was apolitical at the time,” Nichols said.
In May 1970 Dean left the Justice Department to become White House Counsel for the Nixon Administration after being recruited by Egil ‘Bud’ Krogh, a member of the Nixon White House legal team. In his book, Blind Ambition, Dean wrote he was surprised to be offered the job.
“The counsel would not be involved in program or policy development,” Dean wrote. “The counsel’s office would be responsible for keeping the White House informed about domestic disorders and antiwar demonstrations, investigating possible conflicts of interest for the White House staff and Presidential appointees, handling all matters related to Presidential clemency and the staff with legal problems.”
Unknown to Dean at the time was the fact that Krogh was also the leader of Nixon’s team of White House Plumbers, a secret special investigative unit charged with investigating how information from the administration was ‘leaked’ to the press.
For Dean, the White House post was a job about “doing whatever…lawyers do for those who need you.”
It was also one of the highest profile legal jobs in the country. Serving as part of the President’s legal team would elevate any legal career and almost guarantee a future job at any law firm in the country.
“My job at the Justice Department was relaxed and enjoyable with importance and promise for advancement,” Dean wrote. Even with that, in 1970 Dean flew to San Clemente, California, to meet with H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff.
The next day he accepted Haldeman’s offer to become the president’s lawyer.
“I decided, as I had always known I would, that it was too great a chance to be turned down,” Dean wrote. “What I lacked in legal skill, I could compensate for by extra effort, that was what I had done all my life. If I did turn it down, I might become a marked man and never get another opportunity to move up the ladder.”
That evening, following his interview with Haldeman, Dean wrote that he settled in for the evening with his drink, and imagined “what a big shot I would be as counsel to the President.”
A short time later, Dean began his new job.
And it wasn’t long after taking his post at the White House, that Dean began looking for a deputy. He needed someone he could trust. Someone he knew worked hard to get things right. So, John Dean turned to another young Justice Department attorney.
John Dean called his friend Larry Nichols.
“He called and asked if I’d like to join him and be deputy counsel to the President,” Nichols said, “which is a job I would have taken a year or two earlier.”
But Nichols, who like Dean knew a post at the White House could be life changing, hesitated. Though he understood the cutthroat political nature of Washington, D.C. politics, Nichols had concerns about the methods used by Nixon and his staff to place a man on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Nichols had worked for both President Lyndon Johnson and then Nixon as part of the Justice Department team charged with examining the legal background of court nominees. He knew how difficult it was to get a nominee confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court. He’d also watched both Democrats and Republicans shoot down well-qualified nominees.
“Johnson had nominated Abe Fortas to be Chief Justice,” Nichols said. “And the Republicans destroyed that nomination, voted that nomination down on a variety of charges that strained credibility. For example, they attacked him for decisions on pornography. But the Supreme Court at that time wouldn’t touch pornography with a 10-foot pole just because no one knew quite how to define it. It made the Democrats mad to have that nomination defeated.”
After Nixon was elected President, Nichols said Democrats did the same thing to the president’s nominees.
“So, Nixon comes in and he nominates Clement Haynsworth, who was a very capable jurist from the Fourth Circuit in the upper South. The Democrats gunned him down on totally fallacious arguments. It was sorta’ revenge,” he said. “The Democrats…they succeed in bombing that nomination. I had worked a lot on that (nomination).”
During the hearings, neither Democrats nor Republicans, Nichols said, presented themselves in an ethical way.
After Haynsworth’s nomination was shot down, all of Washington, D.C. waited to see who President Nixon would nominate next. Nixon needed a win but, as both Nichols and the President knew well, getting a president’s choice on the U.S. Supreme Court, especially after the first nomination was defeated, would be a herculean task.
“I was sitting in my apartment with one of my roommates one evening and saw Nixon come on (television),” Nichols said. “He announced that he had nominated G. Harrold Carswell. He said, ‘The Department of Justice has checked this guy out thoroughly. He’s perfectly competent. He’s my nomination.’”
Nixon’s announcement shocked Nichols because neither he nor his office knew of Carswell. In addition, Nichols hadn’t examined Carswell’s background.
“I was really stunned and hurt,” Nichols said. “I’d worked really hard and I thought I’d done a decent job in doing the legal research into the opinions and legal work that the previous nominee had done and I’d never heard of this guy Carswell.”
At the time, Nichols said he thought the review of the nomination had been given to someone else. “I moped into the office the next day you know, 27-years-old, and (William) Rehnquist comes into my office and says, ‘Larry have you ever heard of this guy, Carswell?’”
Nichols said, “No. Have you?”
Rehnquist acknowledged that he, too, had never heard of Carswell. Rehnquist said he had the same concerns that Nichols had about the President’s statement.
“Rehnquist said, ‘We heard the President last night say the Department of Justice has checked him out. I haven’t done that,’” Nichols said.
Concerned, the pair made a plan. Rehnquist said he would call his fellow assistant attorneys general to check. He asked Nichols to contact his friends in the counsel’s office to see what they, too, could find out.
A short time later the pair met a second time. Neither could find anyone in either department who had vetted the Carswell nomination. Later that afternoon, Rehnquist returned to Nichols’ office with yet another message: Attorney General John Mitchell wanted to see them.
The meeting with Mitchell was short.
“Mitchell said, ‘We just got notice. I assume you saw that the President said we check it (the Carswell nomination) out. Well, we now need to go check it out,’” Nichols said.
It was at that point Larry Nichols learned a dark truth about Richard M. Nixon.
“I sat there and half of my brain was relieved that I had not been bypassed and my work had not been found insufficient and they hadn’t given my job to someone else,” he said. “The other half of my brain said, ‘Larry you have total, absolute proof that the President of the United States has told the American people a gratuitous lie when he said the Department of Justice had checked this guy out. That’s totally false and you know that.”
Though Nichols said he was relieved that his career wasn’t in jeopardy, from a patriotic standpoint Nixon’s lie was an insult to the young attorney.
“I never could figure out who suggested Carswell,” he said.
Once Nichols and his team began reviewing Carswell’s legal background, the group quickly discovered that Carswell’s legal skill was less than sterling.
“The guy was incompetent,” Nichols said.
Records show that Carswell had more than 40 percent of his rulings overturned on appeal. The percentage drew harsh jabs from both Republican and Democratic senators during Carswell’s confirmation hearings.
“Republican senators were bailing right and left on this guy,” Nichols said.
On April 8, 1970, Carswell’s nomination was shot down by the Senate on a 45-51 vote. In the end, 13 Republicans joined Democrats to vote ‘no.’
The incident, Nichols said, left him with a bad feeling about Nixon.
It was just a few months after the Carswell nomination, in the Fall of 1970 that John Dean – now firmly entrenched at the White House – called Nichols and offered him the job as Deputy White House Counsel.
“John Dean called. I knew him. He knew me, we’d both worked on some of these nominees and he offered me the job,” Nichols said. “I said, ‘Thank you very much but I have no desire.’”
Nichols said he refused the job because of his concern over the Carswell nomination and because of his “experience in dealing with a President who would do that kind of thing.”
“I was ready to move on. I’d had fun there for three years but it was time to go get a real job,” he said. “I was in the process of interviewing with law firms in Washington, D.C. planning to practice law in Washington, D.C. So, I was looking around.”
At the same time, Nichols said his father John had pitched the idea of the pair starting an oil company. “I was mulling that over. In that context, I was still irritated with Nixon deliberately lying to the American public. I was pretty well fed up with politics and more specifically fed up with Nixon.”
Larry Nichols was done.
He said he had no desire to work for a President who would deliberately lie to the American public, nor did he want to work for that President’s staff.
It was at that point that Larry Nichols turned down the offer to become one the President’s men.
Speaker Albert Faces A Difficult Choice
Not long after Larry Nichols decided to leave Washington, D.C., across town, in the U.S. House of Representatives, another Oklahoman was struggling with his own set of problems.
That man was Carl Albert, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives – the third most powerful man in the country.
And Speaker Albert had a big problem: Watergate.
Albert, who stood only 5 foot, 4 inches tall, had only been Speaker for a year when late in the summer of 1972 America saw the first stories of what President Gerald Ford would later call “our long national nightmare.”
But before that nightmare could unfold, the American public – at the 1972 November presidential election – would re-elect Richard Nixon and his running mate, Spiro Agnew, to a second term by the largest voting margin in history.
On month later, the Watergate story, led by efforts The Washington Post and The New York Times, took on a life of its own.
The story would get worse in 1973.
Just as the country had settled in for the second act of Nixon and Agnew, an investigation by George Beall, the U.S. District Attorney for Maryland, charged that Agnewhad taken kickbacks from contractors of government projects during his first term as Vice President and when he had served as Governor of Maryland.
The charges included conspiracy, bribery, extortion and tax fraud.
At first, Agnew fought the charges. Initially, he attempted to rope the House of Representatives into investigating him instead of the courts. Outspoken and popular among conservatives, Agnew pushed the idea that a sitting Vice President could not be indicted.
In September of 1973, Agnew met with House Speaker Carl Albert to ask the Speaker for an investigation. At the same time Agnew was quietly negotiating a plea bargain agreement that would keep him out of jail.
Albert, unaware of the plea bargain deal, told the Vice President that it would be improper for the House to conduct the investigation at that time.
The political pressure increased. By October of 1973, Agnew’s days in office were numbered. On October 9, Agnew told Nixon he was resigning from office. On October 10, Agnew delivered a letter to Albert’s office announcing his resignation as vice president.
“Two or three of us knocked on the door and went into his office,” Foote said in a television interview. “We said, “Mr. Speaker you’re next in line to the presidency and there are six or seven gentlemen outside the door who plan to be with you for the next few months.”
The impact of Agnew’s letter hit Albert immediately.
Under the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, Carl Albert had essentially become the Vice President of the United States, due to the “resignation or removal of the vice president.” The issue grew even more complicated because Albert was a Democrat, Agnew a Republican.
For Albert the crisis caused by the on-going Watergate scandal and now the Vice President’s resignation would continue to grow. With Agnew gone and Albert now a de facto Vice President, pressure was building on Albert to take more drastic steps.
Many members of Congress pushed to impeach Nixon. That fact, and the fact that the country had no elected Vice President put Speaker Albert in a very difficult position, his former press secretary Joe Foote said.
“It was a pretty stressful time,” Foote said. “It was arduous and it was difficult.”
Foote, a storied journalist who served as Albert’s press secretary during Albert’s tenure as Speaker, would later become Dean of the University of Oklahoma’s Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication. But at that moment, Joe Foote was in the room with Albert – a witness to Albert’s on-going struggle with Watergate.
After Agnew’s resignation, Nixon – following Albert’s recommendation – nominated House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford as his new Vice President. Ford’s nomination, however, had to be confirmed by a majority of both the U.S. House and Senate.
Because the nomination of a vice president was new territory for Congress, Albert thought Ford should have a thorough vetting without that rose above the partisan nature of Washington. He also told Nixon that Ford, well like by members on both sides, had the best chance of getting confirmed.
To accomplish this, Albert referred Ford’s nomination to the House Judiciary Committee – the same committee that had written the 25th Amendment. Albert told The New York Times he hoped the committee would demonstrate to the public that “Congress can function and that it’s a far better operating mechanism that commonly perceived.”
Earlier that Spring, the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities had launched its own investigation of Watergate. Those hearings, broadcast on television, brought Watergate into sharp focus for the American public.
The pressure to impeach Nixon increased and a new Vice President had not been confirmed. The country had Albert as a de facto Vice President who could, in theory, replace Nixon should he be removed from office.
Some Democrats believed moving Albert from the Speakers Office to that of the President was the perfect solution – but they needed to convince Albert.
Not long after Agnew’s resignation a large group of Democrats, led by members from California and New York made their move. Citing the 25th Amendment, the group approached Albert with a two-pronged plan to fix the problem: speed up the impeachment process and, at the same time, slow down and delay any effort to vet and approve a new Vice President.
Under the provisions of the 25th Amendment the group said Carl Albert – Oklahoma’s most powerful native son – could become President of the United States.
“Bella Abzug, the feminist Democrat from New York, led the coup to place him on the presidential throne,” historian Heath Anderson wrote. “She cornered him outside his office and told him, ‘Get off your ass and we can take this Presidency.’ Punching the little Speaker in the chest for emphasis, Abzug shouted, “‘We can get control and keep control.’”
Abzug and other progressives in the House challenged Albert to move quickly. They wanted an end to Watergate, they wanted to rid the country of Nixon and they wanted Carl Albert to become president. Albert, himself, never planned on running for president – but he also understood there was a slim chance he could end up in the office.
Albert didn’t like the idea but he wanted to be prepared so he asked former presidential advisor Theodore “Ted” Sorenson for advice. Sorenson, a skilled political operative, had served as a speech writer and adviser for two other presidents -- Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy.
Sorenson’s answer was a 22-age memo. The document, which is now archived at the Fordham Law School, outlined the posture and steps Albert should take if he became president. Dated Nov. 8, 1973, the memo was written to help Albert “think through in advance the steps you will need to take in those first hours and days of unprecedented pressure.”
“Do not let the press or anyone else set artificial deadlines for you,” Sorensen wrote, adding that “no one else, no matter how much authority he had in your House office, should be allowed to commit you to any action, person or point of view without your specific approval in advance.”
Sorensen’s memo continued, outlined broad ideas about how Albert could effectively assume the presidency and govern as a man who was not elected to the office.
With the ratification of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution in 1967, many political leaders felt there was a chance to rid the country of Nixon and Agnew and hit the restart button on the presidency.
“I remember vividly after one House leadership meeting, Rep. John Moss of California, outside that meeting afterwards, just raking Speaker Albert over the coals,” Foote said. “(He was) just yelling at him: Carl this is our chance, this is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for.”
Foote said Moss told the Speaker all he needed to do was “slow down the confirmation of (Gerald) Ford. Speed up the impeachment. We can do this and take the presidency.”
The House Democrats, Foote said, believed making Albert president was the only option that should be pursued.
“And they were very vocal about it,” Foote said.
But Albert, like Larry Nichols, thought differently. Instead of manipulating the hearings so he could step into the presidency, Carl Albert told his friends no.
“That wasn’t sound thinking,” Albert said in a recorded interview archived at the Carl Albert Center at the University of Oklahoma. “I never did believe that (he could have become president). I would have either been the beneficiary or the person who took it on the chin.”
Privately Albert did not think Nixon should be impeached, saying the trail would be a natural disaster and one that Congress should avoid. Albert said he also wanted to hold true to the public’s vote in the last presidential election.
Albert’s position was simple: Richard Nixon had been elected president in the biggest landslide in history and the country would continue to have a Republican presidential administration until the presidency was decided at the next election.
“He said, as long as I’m Speaker there will be four years of Republican rule and then we’ll have an election and fight that hard to get the White House back,” Foote said. “That was one of his most courageous moments, standing up to them.”
Albert was also showing his pragmatic side.
While it would have been possible for him to slow down the hearings for Vice President and to speed up the impeachment process, the possibility of making Albert President would have been difficult at best.
“Any other alternative wouldn’t have gone very far at all – both practically and ideologically,” Foote said. “It’s sorta like the Monday morning quarterbacking of a football game. Even if you were for it, the chances of that succeeding were very remote.”
Still, there were those outside of Congress who also thought Albert was the right man for the job of president.
In his essay about Albert, Anderson the historian wrote that Albert’s home office in McAlester, Oklahoma, “received its own cargo of letters, most wishing for a new, Oklahoman, president. One letter stated that Albert’s becoming president would “suit the greater part of the citizens in this country, because the thought of three more years under the current administration makes most folks shudder.”
It was obvious, too, that Republicans – like the American public – were divided over Watergate. Though Nixon’s actions would later prove disastrous for Republicans in Congress many members of the GOP were hesitant to openly criticize the President and only a handful were public in their support for impeachment.
That atmosphere, Foote said, would have made it almost impossible to replace Nixon with Albert.
“In the way the impeachment came out, you had only six or seven Republicans from the House Judiciary Committee recommending impeachment,” he said. “That was a very fragile environment. If it had gotten more partisan, if the Speaker had shown any signs of partisanship, I think those Republicans would have backed up and you would not have gotten a single Republican vote.”
Back in Oklahoma, the state’s biggest newspaper, The Daily Oklahoman, editorialized that it was sinful to impeach Nixon, “if it meant bringing in Carl Albert as President.”
Though Albert found himself between the proverbial rock and the hard spot, by declining the challenge to take the presidency and by letting the Congressional investigations continue, Albert prevented a political civil war and a Constitutional crisis.
At the same time, he reinforced the House’s efforts to remain bipartisan and gave the country the opportunity to move forward.
Albert’s decision would prove to be the right one.
That December, the Speaker watched as the House of Representatives cast 218 votes to confirm Gerald Ford as Vice President. Once Ford assumed his new office, the pressure to speed up impeachment was over and Albert returned to the job of being Speaker – for the moment.
On Aug. 8, 1974 Nixon – now facing the real possibility of being impeached by Congress – went on television and told the American public he would resign. Nixon’s letter, dated Aug. 9, made the act official.
Once Nixon left the office, Ford – who had only recently become Vice President – became President of the United States.
And once again Carl Albert, with Ford now President and the office of Vice President vacant for the second time, became the country’s de facto Vice President. And though Ford would nominate Nelson Rockefeller as his second-in-command, until Rockefeller’s nomination was confirmed Carl Albert again found himself a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Still, Carl Albert never wanted to be President.
By telling his friends no, Albert played a key role in protecting the country and, at the same time, maintaining peace. Albert’s actions also gave the American public a chance to catch its breath during Watergate.
Albert’s decision received scant attention at the time. However, today, historians praise Albert for making the right call and quietly avoiding a major Constitutional crisis.
“It speaks, perhaps to Carl Albert’s understanding of his place and his time and his understanding of his role in this process,” Davenport, the Rose State College professor, said.
Albert’s refusal to manipulate the process and to take the reins as President, Davenport said, shows that Albert considered his own interests separately from those of the nation at large and that Albert believed he should not tailor the processes for his own benefit.
“It’s something I think politicians have lost somewhat,” Davenport said. “We don’t seem to have as much of that today as we used to have. In this moment Speaker Albert resisted the temptation for personal gain to ensure the process was viewed as a trustworthy process by the public.”
The Simple Power Of Saying, ‘No’
Five decades later, the stain of Watergate remains. This year – the 50th anniversary of the Watergate hearings – serves as a reminder that many of the wounds caused by the scandal are still open ones.
Skepticism is at an all-time high and the country’s partisan divide has become larger than ever. Americans’ faith in their government remains low with only two-of-ten Americans – about 20 percent – saying they trust the government to do what is right most of the time.
Before Watergate, that percentage stood around 75 percent.
Yet for Larry Nichols and House Speaker Carl Albert, the simple act of saying no served as a vivid reminder that even in the most difficult of times, doing the right thing is a smart political move.
For Nichols, the ideal of working for a President who would blatantly lie to the American public was unacceptable.
Fate would quickly prove Nichols right.
Before 1973 ended John Dean, the attorney who offered Nichols a job as Deputy White House Counsel, would plead guilty to a charge of obstruction of justice before federal judge John Sirica. Dean would be disbarred as a lawyer and sentenced to federal prison. Because he eventually testified against several other members of Nixon’s staff, his sentenced was reduced to four months.
For Nichols, Watergate wasn’t that much of a surprise.
“It was basic behavior by the President,” he said. “But I still wonder what purpose was there in lying? I’ve never been able to figure out why.”
By telling Dean no and turning down the offer to work in the White House, Nichols avoided any hint of the Watergate scandal. He left Washington, D.C., returned to Oklahoma and founded Devon Energy with his father, John.
Now, five decades later and retired from a wildly successful career as an oil company executive, Larry Nichols has absolutely no regrets about refusing a job with the Nixon Administration. In fact, looking back through the lens of history, Larry Nichols knows he made the right call.
“If I had taken the job, at some point I would have definitely faced a big fork in the road,” he said. “And I hope I would have said, ‘I’m not going to do this. I’d resign and leave. But even if I’d done that, I would have still been called to testify. I would have been called and asked, ‘What do you know? Were you in the room?’ And if I had not done the right thing and resigned, I’d have been in jail like John Dean was.”
For House Speaker Carl Albert, the little-known story of the Speaker’s refusal to work the machine of government so he could become President reinforced the nickname Albert received in high school: The Little Giant.
Albert’s story also helped buttress the public’s fragile faith in their government, Davenport said. Albert’s belief in government coupled with his understanding that he should put the country’s needs ahead of his own was proof the Speaker knew how to govern.
“I think one of the most important things I did was that I handled, successfully, the Watergate crisis,” Albert said in a recorded interview years after he retired from Congress. “I sent it to the right committee over the objection of a lot of people. It came out exactly and I thought it would come out.”
After the drama of the Watergate scandal faded and the country elected Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976 as president, House Speaker Carl Albert decided it was time to return to Oklahoma.
Albert retired in 1977 and went back to his home in Bugtussle. Along the way, he turned down several lucrative offers to lobby and instead taught political science at his alma mater, the University of Oklahoma.
The New York Times, writing about Albert’s tenure in Congress praised him, called Albert “a conciliator and a patient persuader, trusted for his fairness and integrity.”
But Carl Albert, Foote said, was simply being himself.
Albert refused to give under pressure from both his friends and his enemies. And in a time when he could have become the only man to ever serve as President without running in a presidential election, Carl Albert simply said no.
“He made the right choice,” Foote said. “And he didn’t regret it.”
We Are Our Choices
It’s said that that people are defined by their choices. At some point in each person’s life, a choice defines the future.
For men like Larry Nichols and Carl Albert one single decision had a major impact on both their lives. By telling their friends no, by making the choice to stand against the norm, both men succeeded.
And even though few knew of the decisions, the choice made by Nichols and Albert serves as a reminder that sometimes the best choice is simply saying no.
Comments