For a whole generation of Americans, the Watergate scandal is a vague patch of history – something about political dirty tricks, a “third-rate burglary” and a cover-up, all of it exposed by a couple of cub reporters. But here are the living plotters, like Mafia dons in the Oval Office, scheming and bugging their enemies and turning on each other like cornered rats as the plot falls apart; and here is the president, destroying himself as he betrays the Constitution and the office he fought so hard to win. It is both low farce and high tragedy, part of the endless morality play of democracy.
In fact, there was enough drama for several operas in _B_Watergate, b and it makes for riveting viewing in the five-part series, Watergate, to be broadcast starting Aug. 7 on the Discovery Channel. Fred Emery, who covered the scandal for The Times of London, prompted the TV series and wrote the book, _B_Watergate: The Corruption of American Politics and the Fall of Richard Nixon b(555 pages. Times Books. $27.50). Both documentary and book are informed by the copious Watergate literature and by lively interviews with most of the important characters, from the Keystone Kop Tony Ulasewicz to the late White House chief of staff Bob Haldeman. Taken together, they tell a story still hard to believe.
The break-in itself, to plant wiretaps and gather information from the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, was almost comically bungled. But when one of the arrested burglars, James McCord, turned out to work for the Committee to Re-Elect the President, Nixon and his top aides automatically mounted a cover-up. “No one ever considered that there would not be a cover-up,” Emery quotes Jeb Magruder, the deputy campaign director who was to serve seven months in prison for his part in it. The reason was starkly simple: by that point, Nixon and his men had done so many seamy things that any exposure risked wholesale collapse. As presidential counsel John Dean dryly told Nixon, “There is a certain domino situation here. If some things start going, a lot of other things are going to start going.”
Attorney General John Mitchell was to call them the “White House horrors” – a series of illegal schemes and exploits to stop leaks, punish Nixon’s “enemies” and ensure re-election. When the FBI proved reluctant to take on such chores, Nixon and his aide John Ehrlichman set up their own undercover squad, dubbed the “Plumbers,” in the White House. One of the Plumbers’ first jobs was the burglary of a psychiatrist’s office (an attempt to get damaging information on Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon papers). They made elaborate plans to disrupt the 1972 Democratic convention, entrap delegates with call girls, spy on Democratic candidates and bug their campaign communications.
The key man in the Plumbers was the madcap G. Gordon Liddy, a caricature undercover op who gave himself third-degree burns to prove his toughness and proposed to assassinate the columnist Jack Anderson, among other bizarre plans. Nixon’s men snickered at Liddy and toned down his schemes, but found him useful. Magruder wanted to fire him, but that was vetoed. “Liddy’s a Hitler,” Magruder was told, “but at least he’s our Hitler.”
All these plots, and later the cover-up, were financed from a vast pool of campaign money, much of it illegal. The Watergate burglars demanded and got nearly $500,000 in hush money. In the book, Emery follows the complex scandal meticulously, cross-checking memoirs, tapes and testimony to highlight fine points and discrepancies. And the TV series builds tightly edited sequences from fresh interviews, old photos and 20-year-old tape recordings. Former White House counsel Chuck Colson recalls how E. Howard Hunt, one of the Plumbers ensnared by the break-in, called to demand more money; the camera turns to a whirring tape recorder, and we hear Hunt saying ominously (with transcript superimposed) that loyalty “is a two-way street . . . Surely the cheapest commodity available is money.” Flash back to Colson’s interview: “In my heart of hearts, I knew this guy was blackmailing us.”
In another call, Hunt talked about the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. But all he said, he explains on camera, was that “dire consequences for the administration could result. Just a plain statement of fact, not a threat.” To gather hush money for Hunt and the others, Nixon’s political fund raiser, Herbert Kalmbach, crisscrosses the country; at one point Northrop Corp. chairman Thomas V. Jones hands him $75,000 from his desk drawer, no questions asked. And Tony Ulasewicz doles the money out in clandestine drops to the burglars’ lawyers and wives, until he finally draws a line: “Mr. Kalmbach, this is not kosher.” Others pick up the duty.
The great highlights of Watergate are all here. The young Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, doggedly chase the story. The cover-up comes unglued with James McCord’s letter to Judge John Sirica, who throws the book at the burglars. At the Ervin committee hearings, folksy Senator Sam faces down the White House men – and stages the breathtaking moment when Alexander Butterfield discloses that Nixon has taped all his conversations. An 181/2-minute gap turns up on a key tape, and Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, takes the blame for it. We live through the Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox, and Cox’s replacement by the equally tenacious Leon Jaworski. We see the vote to impeach by Peter Rodino’s House Judiciary Committee, and Emery quotes Rep. Barbara Jordan intoning, “My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total, and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.”
The Nixon White House was a sleazy place, and the deleted expletives that outraged so many voters symbolized its shabby amorality. Until the tapes were forced out, the idea of such dealings in the White House seemed literally unbelievable – and as the story emerged, the bungled plots looked like fantasies. On one tape, Haldeman tells Nixon: “The whole thing is so totally f—ed up, so badly done, that nobody believes . . . " " . . . that we could have done it,” Nixon says.
When the cover-up starts crumbling, Nixon throws one aide after another off the back of the sleigh. His acting FBI director, Pat Gray, is slavishly dependable in the cover-up but hopeless at testifying to Congress, so Nixon decides to abandon his nomination. “Let him hang there,” Ehrlichman tells Dean. “Let him twist slowly, slowly in the wind.” Nixon agonizes over the idea of sacrificing his old friend Mitchell – and in Emery’s only fresh scoop, he discloses that Mitchell himself offered a deal to the prosecutors, saying he would take the fall if they would stop chasing Nixon. They refused.
Loyalty is a scarce commodity. The White House men tell each other lies, jockey for position and debate endlessly over new scenarios to preserve the cover-up. And only low-level naifs seem affected by considerations of right and wrong. When John Dean opts to tell his story to the prosecutors, beginning the endgame of the Nixon presidency, contrition is the least of his motives; he simply thinks he’s next to go. “I’d pulled my oar as hard as anybody in the cover-up,” he explains coolly on the TV series.. “I thought it was unfair that I was being asked, in essence, to take the fall. And it angered me.”
Dean is Nixon’s Judas and nemesis; his astonishing memory and lawyerly cunning take him through a rough passage when it’s his lonely word against the whole White House. But he outmaneuvers the president time after time, deluding Nixon that he is still on board long after he has spilled the secrets. And the tapes bear him out, after Nixon is forced to disgorge them.
The enduring image is Nixon himself, by turns maudlin, crafty, gleeful and vengeful. He orders a payoff for Hunt – “You better damn well get that done, but fast.” When a Dictabelt under subpoena turns up missing, he casually suggests making another one. He promises to take the gloves off after he’s re-elected: “I wouldn’t want to be on the other side right now . . . We haven’t used the Bureau [FBI], we haven’t used the Justice Department. But things are gonna change now . . . They’re gonna get it right.” Firing Haldeman and Ehrlichman, his closest aides, he tells each in turn that he had prayed not to wake up to this day. And he delivers his strange homilies, so at odds with his actions: “Those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.” If he had actually believed that, Emery observes, the whole story might have been different.
The conventional wisdom is that Watergate was a triumph of democracy, and in a sense it was: with a good deal of luck and some well-placed decency, the system purged itself of a bad regime. But Emery’s book also indicates, without pointing up the moral, how the system went awry. Impeachment, he writes, was meant to punish high crimes and misdemeanors, with the emphasis on the word high – “an abuse of power that damages the state.” Nixon and his supporters whittled down that sweeping concept to a narrowly defined violation of law, and then insisted that no matter what he had done, he couldn’t be impeached without a “smoking gun.”
In Nixon’s case, the smoking gun turned up: a tape on which he passed orders to the CIA to take part in the cover-up. That eroded the last of his support and forced him to resign. What Emery doesn’t say is that barely a dozen years later, when the Reagan administration fell into even worse abuses in the Iran-contra affair, there were no fortuitous tapes to provide a smoking gun, and the nation had no stomach to defend the Constitution again. So Richard Nixon got the last word, in a marathon interview with David Frost three years after his fall, and you can watch him say it again next week in the opening segment of the TV series: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” It’s infuriating.
