In light of President Trump’s decision to fire James Comey yesterday, I thought a few people might be interested in a refresher on the Watergate Affair. This is something I put together for my students years ago:
An
Affair Called Watergate
A few days
before President Richard M. Nixon left office in disgrace, an advisor tried to
cheer him. History would mark him as one of our great presidents, the aide predicted.
A
gloomy Nixon could only reply, “That
depends, Henry, on who writes the history.”
*
If you
ask people what they remember about President Nixon’s time in office today, most
of what he did right is forgotten. The Watergate Affair is what they are likely
to mention. Nixon
is the only president ever driven from office before his term ended as a result
of the impeach-ment process.[1]
His downfall
began with a botched burglary at “The Watergate” building in Washington, D. C. It
was there, on June 17, 1972, that a night watchman with a flashlight noticed
something unusual. The locks on several doors, including those in the offices of
the National Democratic Party were taped open. Police were called and five burglars
rounded up.
Normally,
burglary isn’t national news. This was no ordinary break-in. The suspects carried
$1,754 in cash, along with cameras and film. They had sophisticated equipment for
tapping phones and recording conversations. One burglar, James McCord, had
worked for the C.I.A. Even stranger, police found this notation in his address
book: “Howard E. Hunt, W. House.”
From
the start police were suspicious. Why would burglars break into the headquarters
of the Democrat Party? Could McCord’s note mean the White House? Could the suspects be spying on Democrats because
1972 was an election year? Who had hired them and turned them loose?
The
next day White House staff members spoke to reporters. No one who worked for the
President, they said, knew anything about the break-in. President Nixon shrugged
it off as a “third-rate burglary.” Then
he assured reporters there was no reason for concern. Everyone, from the President
down, seemed surprised. Almost all of them were lying.
*
Today we know what was involved. Nothing
added up in the summer of 1972. Nixon had been elected four years earlier,
partly on a promise to end the Vietnam War. (Lyndon Johnson, president before
him, had been attacked over handling of the fighting in Vietnam. Johnson took criticism
so hard he decided not to run for reelection in 1968.) Even after Nixon took office,
however, the war dragged on and on. The list of dead grew with each week.
Americans
who believed the government had made a mistake by leading us to war turned on the
new man in the White House. In 1970 there were anti-war protests on college
campuses across the country. Four student protestors were killed at Kent State University
(Ohio) when National Guard troops opened fire. In 1971 thousands of peace marchers
flooded the streets of Washington, D. C. They threatened to “shut the government down” unless bloodshed
ended. Americans who weren’t sure what to think had real doubts about the war.
Criticism
of Mr. Nixon mounted. With the election of 1972 approaching, he seemed unable
to end the fighting.
We
couldn’t win the war; but the President refused to accept defeat, to be part of
what he said would be a “cowardly
retreat.” He insisted the United States must have “peace with honor.” Nixon chose to increase pressure on the enemy.
American warplanes rained bombs on North Vietnamese targets. Fighting spilled
over into neighboring Cambodia. The President had promised to end the war. Instead,
it seemed to grow. Meanwhile, Daniel Ellsberg, who once worked for the U.S.
government, added fuel to the debate. Secretly, Ellsberg removed thousands of
pages of documents from government files. These papers he handed over to
reporters. Soon known as “The Pentagon Papers,” the documents seemed to show that
U.S. leaders before Nixon took office
had failed to tell the truth about the war and had overstated our chances of winning.
American
troops had been fighting in Vietnam for nearly a decade. Voters were weary. Democrats
who planned to run for president in 1972 increased attacks on Nixon,
questioning his handling of the war.
Hadn’t
he had four years to find a solution? Wasn’t it clear he had failed? Why not elect
someone new and let them end the war?
Senator
George McGovern, for one, claimed he could stop the fighting “twenty-four hours” after he was sworn
in as president. Opinion polls that summer indicated that Nixon might lose the
election in November.
*
So,
what went wrong? In his heart, President Nixon believed anti-war protests were
hurting U. S. chances for victory in Vietnam. The enemy would not give up, he
argued, if they thought the United States might quit first. Nixon was angered
by the criticism—and considered Ellsberg nothing less than a traitor. More
importantly, the President believed if America backed down in Vietnam we would
lose respect round the globe. To the President and his advisors the danger seemed
clear. For the good of the country, to insure our nation’s strength, Nixon had
to be reelected. The protestors and Democratic rivals had to be silenced—had to
be put out of action—even if that meant drastic action.
Government
agents received secret instructions to begin tapping phones and opening mail of
anti-war individuals and organizations.
Newspaper
writers who criticized Nixon had their phones bugged, too, all these actions
taken without search warrants.
John
Erlichman and Charles Colson, top White House aides, ordered several illegal
break-ins, what became known as “black bag jobs.” The office of Ellsberg’s
psychiatrist was raided in an effort to gather information that would make him appear
“sick” or crazy. These actions were clearly illegal. The men who worked for Nixon,
however, felt justified. They were acting for the “good” of the country. Ellsberg
and those who leaked material to reporters were a threat—to the safety of America—or,
so said Nixon’s men. They even coined their own nickname: “The Plumbers.” In an
effort to stop “leaks” of information to the press, they repeatedly broke the
law.
As Election Day approached, questionable
activities multiplied. In the spring of 1972 it looked like Senator Edmund
Muskie, a Democrat from Maine, would be Nixon’s strongest challenger. A
Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), was set up by some of the President’s
allies and swung into action. Donald Segretti and several young political
workers were hired to harass and damage Muskie’s campaign any way they could.
On one occasion, Segretti put in a
fake order for 200 pizzas to be delivered to a Muskie campaign dinner. That
might sound funny; but more serious tricks quickly followed. Fake campaign
literature was passed out. Supposedly, it laid out Muskie’s positions on
various issues. Materials were written to make him sound bad, like someone you
wouldn’t want for your president. Important records turned up missing from his office.
Fake callers cancelled meetings and changed plane reservations. A fake letter
to a newspaper ruined Senator Muskie’s campaign for good.
Nixon encouraged
top aides to gather information on Senator Ted Kennedy, another possible challenger.
A private detective was hired to look into details of a car accident involving
Kennedy in 1969, during which a young lady drowned. Colson turned up a picture
of Kennedy, who was married, leaving a night club with a hot blonde. It was
printed in several papers. Nixon congratulated Colson for his work. Colson moved
on to more questionable activities. Once he hired several men to pose as
homosexuals and stand outside Senator McGovern’s meetings. Pretending to support
McGovern for president, Colson knew their presence would cause many Americans to
vote against McGovern instead.
Laws on the collection and use of
money in elections were broken in various ways. Several companies secretly
donated as much as $250,000 to CREEP.[2]
Nixon overstepped the rules, himself, asking the Internal Revenue Service to
check the tax returns of individuals who questioned his handling of the war. If
people on an “enemies list” the White House now kept could be caught in
mistakes it might silence their criticism.
*
Before June 17, 1972 these activities
were mostly secret. Now, with the arrest of five Watergate burglars, the White
House had problems. The original burglars and G. Gordon Liddy who helped with
the break-in and was arrested shortly thereafter, knew plenty. Some of Nixon’s
closest advisors had knowledge of the break-in plan. The trail led right to (and
possibly through) the door to the Oval Office. Police investigations soon
showed a direct connection between the burglars and Howard Hunt. Hunt had an
office in the White House. Liddy and McCord were on the CREEP payroll. CREEP
was headed by John Mitchell, Nixon’s personal friend.
Fearing the investigation might spread
like cancer the White House decided their best bet was to “cover up.” The day
after the burglary, Mitchell lied, denying any connection to the men arrested. The
day after that one of Mitchell’s workers, a lawyer named Jeb Magruder, asked
what to do with notes that might prove CREEP knew what was going on. Mitchell’s
reply: “Maybe you ought to have a little
fire at your house tonight.”
John Erlichman, second in line to
leadership of the White House staff, panicked when the F.B.I. joined the case. Erlichman
had been deeply involved with Hunt and Liddy. He knew about the Ellsberg
burglary. Now he ordered John Dean, President Nixon’s personal lawyer, to empty
the safe in Hunt’s White House office. Dean did what he was told but not before
putting on a pair of surgical gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints. What about the evidence in the safe? What
should he do with it? Erlichman told Dean to “deep-six” the contents. He should dump everything in the Potomac
River. Dean, like several top men at CREEP, got busy with a paper-shredder. Box
after box of evidence turned to confetti.
Despite these cover-up efforts, reporters
kept sniffing. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who wrote for the Washington Post, did more than anyone to break the story.
Early on, a secretary at CREEP warned them privately, “The whole thing is being very well covered up and nobody will ever
know what happened.” Then the two reporters uncovered a key lead. CREEP
officers had used a secret fund of $350,000 to pay for illegal activities. Another
source, deep inside the F.B.I., began providing them with a variety of leads.[3]
Woodward and Bernstein picked up Donald Segretti’s trail. A friend who worked
for the phone company checked records for them—ironically, in illegal fashion. Segretti
had used a credit card to call Hunt and Dwight Chapin at the White House.
Chapin was Nixon’s private secretary.
As early as June 23, 1972—six days
after the break-in—Nixon made a fatal decision.
That day he told H. R. Haldeman, his
chief of staff, to pressure the F.B.I. to go slow on the investigation. From
that point forward the “Watergate Affair” was something more than a “third-rate
burglary.” At first, the question was: “Who planned the break-in?” There was a
possibility Nixon was innocent. After the meeting with Haldeman, an illegal
cover-up was underway. And the President of the United States of America was
involved.
*
By late summer, the trials of Liddy
and the five burglars had begun. Several witnesses lied in hopes of keeping the
investigation from spreading, adding perjury to a growing list of crimes. The
White House secretly arranged to pay the burglars to remain quite, to “hush
them up.” John Dean hinted to defendants that after the election, when it was politically
safe to do so, Nixon would “take care”
of them. A quick pardon would follow.
Judge John Sirica, who heard the
case against the Watergate burglars, was suspicious from the start. The six men
insisted they planned the job themselves. So, when it came time to sentence the
defendants, Sirica put on the squeeze. They were expecting three-to-five years,
fairly typical in burglary cases where no one was harmed. Sirica wanted to
force them to talk. So he slapped them with the maximum penalty: thirty-five years
in prison.
James
McCord broke immediately. In a letter to the judge, written almost as soon as
he returned to his jail cell, he admitted money and pressure had been applied
to keep him silent. Sirica read the letter to reporters and a stunned courtroom
audience the following day.
Nixon and his aides kept a lid on
the story enough so that he was able to win reelection. But the shadow of Watergate
lengthened. Congress set up a special committee to investigate. Reporters from various
news organizations kept digging. Doubts about Nixon grew with each passing week.
By the spring of 1973 the story was making daily headlines. To show he was “anxious”
to get to the bottom of the mess, the President appointed Archibald Cox as “special
prosecutor” to investigate matters.
Startling developments only complicated
Nixon’s dilemma. During questioning in Congress, a White House aide named Alexander
Butterfield let a critical detail slip. The President, he admitted, “bugged”
his own office. “I was hoping you fellows
wouldn’t ask me about that,” Butterfield told the Congressional panel. For years
President Nixon had recorded every conversation he held in his White House
office, including dozens which might tell who knew what, when, and how much
about the Watergate affair. Nixon wrote in his diary soon after: “At the present time we are really caught
without knowing how to handle it.” Normal White House business was at a
standstill. The presidency seemed “paralyzed.”
The key
question was clear: WHAT DID THE PRESIDENT KNOW AND WHEN DID HE KNOW IT?
Opinions vary even today. We do know
Nixon chose, at the very least, to protect friends rather than tell the truth. At
one meeting he told John Mitchell how aides should testify in Congress and in
court. Let them “stonewall it” and
say nothing. They could “plead the Fifth
Amendment,[4] cover up or anything else if it’ll save
it—save it for them,” he explained.
It was
harder and harder to keep a lid on the truth. By March 21, 1973 Nixon’s lawyer,
John Dean, was warning his boss there was “a
cancer on the Presidency” which would grow. He (Dean), Colson, Haldeman,
Erlichman and others were likely to face criminal charges. The worst problem
was Howard Hunt, who was blackmailing the White House. Dean explained that it
would take $1,000,000 to keep Hunt and the original burglars quiet. Even that might
not be enough. The President was willing to pay. But it made no difference. Dean
began spilling the truth to investigators himself. So did other top officials.
One by
one, Nixon’s closest aides were caught in a spider web of lies. Top CREEP officials
were found guilty of planning the burglary and lying in court. Chapin, Colson,
Haldeman, Erlichman and Dean were charged with a list of crimes. Mr. Nixon continued
to insist he had not been involved.
During
one famous TV address he looked into the camera and assured a worried nation: “I am not a crook.”
*
The beginning of the end came in
September 1973. Archibald Cox, the special
prosecutor, asked to listen to nine tape recordings from the Oval Office,
covering key conversations related to Watergate. Nixon refused to give him the
tapes, offering written transcripts instead. Fresh problems arose. One recording,
a meeting on June 20, 1972, was found to have a mysterious 18 ½ minute “gap” or
erasure. No one could explain how this happened. Nixon’s secretary said she might
have erased a few minutes by mistake. It seemed like more than a “coincidence” that
this tape covered the first meeting between H. R. Haldeman and Nixon, days
after the break-in.
Cox insisted transcripts were not enough.
He demanded the recordings. Nixon responded by firing him, the very man he had chosen
to get to the “truth.” When the President asked Attorney General Elliot
Richardson to carry out his order, Richardson quit. His top assistant quit,
too. Finally, a third official was found who would carry out the order. The
firing and resignations of these three top law enforcement officials became known
as “The Saturday Night Massacre” and stirred a storm of protest.
A week
later the White House roused the nation’s anger again. Nixon’s staff reported
that one of the nine tapes Cox asked for did not exist. A third ran out in the
middle of a conversation. In the last ten days of October a million telegrams and
letters poured into Congress, demanding action. On November 12, 1973, Time magazine ran its first editorial in
fifty years. The headline: “The President
Should Resign.”
Nixon tried
to save himself. He appointed a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski. But the President
had no time to relax. Jaworski asked for more tapes, sixty-four in all. Nixon
released thousands of pages of transcripts but no tapes. The printed record was
bad enough. It showed our nation’s leaders had been involved in what one magazine called “sleazy, cheap and vulgar” activities. Nixon dug in his heels and refused
to give up any more transcripts or any tapes at all. According to the powers
granted by the U.S. Constitution, Nixon said, Congress had no right to pry into
his private records.
Faced
with evidence of a long list of crimes, the House of Representatives opened impeachment
hearings in the spring of 1974. On July 24 the United States Supreme Court
sealed Nixon’s doom. By an 8-0 vote, with one justice in the hospital, the court
ruled that he was required to turn over the tapes investigators wanted. When
they were released Congress had all the evidence it needed. The tape of June
23, 1972 was labeled “the smoking pistol.”
Like a smoking gun in a criminal’s hand, it showed Nixon had been involved in
an illegal cover-up from the start.
The
House quickly voted to impeach. As required by law, the Senate prepared to hold
the trial and perhaps remove the President from office under the process set
forth in the U.S. Constitution. With no hope left, Nixon resigned on August 9,
1974.
Soon
after, a beaten ex-president headed home to California in disgrace.
Sadly,
on one of his last mornings in office, Nixon questioned two staff members. “Well, I screwed it up good, real good,
didn’t I?” he asked. Neither man had the heart to answer.
Your
work:
1. What
did the burglars expect to gain by breaking into the Watergate building?
2. Why
did Nixon feel that the United States could not afford to lose the Vietnam War?
3. In
what ways did Segretti and other Nixon supporters disrupt Democratic election plans
in 1972?
4. What
illegal activities were used against news reporters, anti-war groups and Daniel
Ellsberg?
5. What
was Nixon’s “fatal decision” on June 23, 1972 and how did it change the
Watergate affair?
6. How
did Nixon suggest aides should testify in court?
7. By
March 1973 why was the White House having trouble keeping the story from
spreading?
8. After
the President refused to give Congress any more transcripts or tapes, how was
the legal battle settled?
9.
Identify or explain the importance of:
A.
Woodward and Bernstein
B.
CREEP
C.
Daniel Ellsberg
D.
“deep-six”
E.
Judge Sirica
F.
Alexander Butterfield
G.
The 18 ½ minute gap
H.
The Saturday Night Massacre
I.
“the smoking pistol”
[1] President
Andrew Johnson was impeached in 1867 and barely survived the Senate vote, 35-19.
President Bill Clinton was impeached in 1999 but never came close to losing his seat in the Oval Office. Embarrassingly, however, the vote on one article was 50-50.
It requires a two-third’s vote by the Senate for removal.
It requires a two-third’s vote by the Senate for removal.
[2] This
is illegal—because it might rightly be called an attempt to buy “favors” from
the government.
[3] The
identity of this man, whom Woodward and Bernstein called “Deep Throat,”
remained secret till 2005. His name was Mark Felt, in those days, a top man
with the F.B.I.
[4] Under
the 5th Amendment no defendant can be forced to give information
that might lead to his or her own conviction for a crime.
