By Hook or by Crook (Watergate Part 10)

Nixon says, "I am not a crook," 11/17/1973

For previous installments of my irregular series tracing the history of the Watergate scandal, click here. This week, Richard Nixon says, “I am not a crook.”

Immediately after Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of Richard Nixon’s White House taping system, the tapes themselves became the central issue of the unfolding Watergate scandal.

While certain key facts (the burglary itself, the link to the Committee to Re-Elect the President) were not in dispute, the critical question was the one being asked by Watergate Select Committee chairman Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina: “What did the President know and when did he know it?” Now that tapes were available, that question could be settled definitely once and for all.

Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox filed a subpoena for eight of the tapes almost immediately, and for his trouble was fired in the Saturday Night Massacre. The backlash forced Nixon to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who continued to press for the tapes.

The Saturday Night Massacre took place on October 19, 1973. Just about a month later, on November 17, 1973, Richard Nixon traveled to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, for a question and answer session before the 400 members of Associated Press Managing Editor’s Association.

As expected, the first questions involved the Watergate scandal and its consequences for the nation. The president of the Managing Editor’s Association wondered if Watergate was serious enough to take down the country.

“Mr. President,” he asked, “This morning, Governor Askew of Florida addressed this group and recalled the words of Benjamin Franklin. When leaving the Constitutional Convention he was asked, ‘What have you given us, sir, a monarch or a republic?’ Franklin answered, ‘A republic, sir, if you can keep it.’ 

Mr. President, in the prevailing pessimism of the lingering matter we call Watergate, can we keep that republic, sir, and how?” Nixon assured him that the Republic would continue.

The Louisville-Courier asked about two of the subpoenaed tapes that had gone missing. Nixon replied that he had other information — Dictaphone belts, diary notes, and telephone call recordings — that would substantiate his claims of innocence. The Rochester (New York) Democrat and Chronicle followed up, but gained no more information.

The Rochester Times-Union asked about the connection to the Ellsberg case, and Nixon replied that it was not part of Watergate, and should be considered a national security matter. The Detroit News followed with a softball question that allowed Nixon to once again reassure the public that everything was under control. The St. Petersburg Times asked about Nixon’s praise of Ehrlichman and Haldeman. Nixon replied, “First, I hold that both men and others who have been charged are guilty until I have evidence that they are not guilty.” (The president of the association later corrected Nixon, who agreed that he had misspoken.) The Des Moines Register and Tribune asked another question about the Ellsberg case, and Nixon reiterated his claim of national security.

Next, the subject of Nixon’s income tax returns came up. Nixon, according to the Providence Evening Bulletin, had paid only $792 in Federal income tax in 1970, and $878 in 1971. Nixon replied that he’d paid $79,000 in income tax in 1969, and the dramatic reduction in tax resulted from Nixon’s donation of his vice-presidential papers to the U.S. government, for which he’d taken a $500,000 deduction. (This practice was outlawed in 1969, so Nixon had gotten in just under the wire.)

The Tennessee Oak Ridger threw in another softball, asking Nixon if the demands of the Presidency were such that he just hadn’t had time to manage the re-election campaign directly. Nixon replied that yes, he’d taken a hands-off approach, but added “I say if mistakes are made, however, I am not blaming the people down below. The man at the top has got to take the heat for all of them.”

Before he took another question, however, Richard Nixon decided to go back to the question of his income tax payments. His government service had not been particularly lucrative, he said. “When I left office…you know what my net worth was? $47,000 total. Now, I have no complaints. In the next 8 years, I made a lot of money [from his book and law partnership]. And so, that is where the money came from.”

Even though the focus of the questions was on Watergate, it was the suspicion of financial irregularities in his personal life that seemed to concern Nixon most of all. Whatever anyone believed of him, his personal finances, he wanted to make clear, were completely aboveboard. It was in defending those finances that Richard Nixon made one of the most famous quotes of his lifetime:

“Let me just say this, and I want to say this to the television audience: I made my mistakes, but in all of my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service--I have earned every cent. And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I could say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I am not a crook. I have earned everything I have got.” [Emphasis added.]

That seemed to stop the questions about Watergate. Reporters asked about the wiretapping of Richard Nixon’s brother Donald, additional matters of national security, the desirability of shield laws for reporters, executive privilege, the energy crisis, possible gas rationing, milk price supports, and what Nixon planned to do in retirement. (Hint: work for campaign finance reform.)

The event, televised live, went a few moments over the scheduled time, but that was okay in Nixon’s book. “It is a lousy movie anyway tonight.”

And when it was over, Richard Nixon said, “Well, thank you very much, gentlemen. I guess that is the end.”

But the end was still nine months away.

Saturday Night's Alright (for Firing) — Watergate, Part 9

Watergate Special Prosecutor
Archibald Cox

For previous installments of my irregular series tracing the history of the Watergate scandal, click here. This week, the Saturday Night Massacre, October 20, 1973.

The Watergate burglary itself took place on June 20, 1972, but following Richard Nixon's overwhelming re-election in November of that year, it looked as if the worst of the scandal had been contained. As long as the burglary could be put down to overzealous underlings at the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP, but often abbreviated CREEP) and kept away from the White House itself, all was in order.

There were loose ends. One of the burglars had checks from E. Howard Hunt, a member of the White House "plumbers" who was connected to Special Counsel to the President Charles Colson, known as Nixon's hatchet man. As part of the cover up, White House Counsel John Dean went to acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray to keep the situation under control. As Dean later wrote, "[We] could count on Pat Gray to keep the Hunt material from becoming public, and he did not disappoint us."

Gray went so far as to burn what were billed as "national security documents [that] should never see the light of day" from Hunt's personal safe at the request of Dean and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs John Ehrlichman. These documents weren't officially about Watergate, Gray later said. "The first set of papers in there were false top-secret cables indicating that the Kennedy administration had much to do with the assassination of the Vietnamese president (Diem). The second set of papers in there were letters purportedly written by Senator Kennedy involving some of his peccadilloes, if you will."

Unfortunately, Gray wasn't the only person who knew about the Hunt material. His deputy, FBI Associate Director W. Mark Felt, who actually ran the FBI's day-to-day operations, was also "Deep Throat," the confidential informant providing Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with information. As the material began to leak, Gray became shaky.

In February 1973, Nixon nominated Gray to be permanent director of the FBI, handing the Senate its first opportunity to interrogate a high-ranking Administration official about Watergate. Gray went into full self-defense mode. He volunteered that he'd provided investigation files to John Dean, saying FBI lawyers had told him it was legal, confirmed the dirty tricks activities of CREEP — and worst of all, testified that Dean himself had "probably lied" to the FBI. Enraged by the betrayal, Ehrlichman told Dean that Gray should "twist slowly, slowly in the wind." (Ehrlichman was evidently a fan of Huxley's Brave New World.) Gray withdrew his nomination, and after he learned that Dean had rolled over, Gray resigned from the FBI altogether. Although he was later indicted, he was never convicted.

In March 1973, Watergate burglar and CREEP security specialist James McCord wrote Watergate Judge John Sirica that his testimony was perjured under pressure. One month after that, seeing the handwriting on the wall, John Dean rolled over and began cooperating with Federal prosecutors. Desperate to distance himself from the scandal, Nixon responded by firing Ehrlichman, White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. (Kleindienst had taken over from John Mitchell when Mitchell was tasked with leading the re-election effort. His involvement with the scandal was peripheral, and he ended up with a misdemeanor conviction for perjury and paid a $100 fine.)

With the Justice Department compromised, Nixon had little choice but to allow the appointment of a nominally independent special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. After the revelation of the White House tapes and Nixon's refusal to release them, Cox pursued a subpoena to get the tapes for his investigation. When Cox refused a Nixon compromise that would give him transcripts but no access to the actual recordings, Nixon had had enough.

On Saturday evening, October 20, 1973, Nixon called Attorney General Elliot Richardson, Kleindienst's successor, and ordered him to fire Cox. Richardson, citing his promise to the Congressional oversight committee not to interfere with the Special Prosecutor, refused.  When Nixon continued to press him, he resigned. Nixon then called the Deputy Attorney General, William Ruckelshaus, who had made the same pledge, and ordered him to fire Cox. Ruckelshaus also resigned.

The third in command of the Justice Department was Solicitor General Robert Bork (later a notorious failed Supreme Court nominee), who had not been part of the process and who had therefore not made the same pledge. Although Bork claimed to believe that Nixon had the right to fire Cox, he says he also considered resigning so he wouldn't be "perceived as a man who did the President's bidding to save my job." Elliot Richardson says he persuaded Bork not to resign, on the grounds that the Justice Department needed some continuity of leadership.

Nixon had Bork brought to the White House by limousine, swore him in as Acting Attorney General, and had Bork write the letter on the spot firing Cox.

This incident became known as the "Saturday Night Massacre," and it was a major tipping point in the scandal. Congress was infuriated, the public outraged. After the Massacre, a plurality of Americans for the first time supported impeachment: 44% for, 43% against, 13% undecided. Several resolutions of impeachment were introduced in the House. Nixon was forced to allow Bork to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski. There was some concern Jaworski, as the President's approved choice, would limit the investigation to the burglary alone, but as it turned out, Jaworski also looked at the broader implications of the growing scandal.

In November 1973, a Federal district judge ruled that Cox's firing was illegal under the regulation establishing the special prosecutors office, which required a finding of "extraordinary impropriety." However, the situation had moved far too quickly to allow Cox to resume his position. The battle of the tapes would continue well into the following year.

Nixon Resigns (Watergate Part 8)

“People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got.”

— Richard M. Nixon, November 17, 1973

For previous installments of my irregular series tracing the history of the Watergate scandal, click here.  This week, Richard Nixon resigns the Presidency.

In our last thrilling installment, former Presidential assistant Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of the heretofore secret White House taping system to the Senate Watergate Committee and to the world. In many ways, this revelation was the tipping point that inexorably led to the first — and so far only — resignation of a United States President.

Up until the tape revelation, much of the Watergate scandal had devolved into a “he said, she said” argument. There was no question that operatives associated with the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP to its supporters, CREEP to its enemies) had broken into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office complex, but it was less clear how high up the scandal might reach. After all, the idea that low-level staff members might take it into their own heads to do something the boss would not approve is hardly unprecedented.

The initial connection between the Watergate burglary and the Nixon campaign was James McCord, a former CIA operative who worked as a security coordinator for CRP. From there, it was a fairly short jump to reach McCord’s bosses. E. Howard Hunt, another former CIA agent, was also a modestly successful writer of spy thrillers. G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent, had also been a prosecutor in Dutchess County, New York, where he famously busted 60s icon Timothy Leary. Both men were leaders of the White House Plumbers Unit.

Initially, a lot of people believed that the “two-bit burglary” itself was simply a rogue staff operation, and that the cover-up was primarily designed to protect the Plumbers operation. Although parts of the story remain murky to this day, it now appears that the burglary itself originated at high levels of the Administration, and may have been ordered by Nixon himself, concerned about potential negative information possessed by DNC chairman Larry O’Brien.

Slowly, the chain of Watergate responsibility crept up the ladder, moving from CRP to the White House itself, but the “smoking gun” that would implicate the President personally remained elusive. Senate Watergate Committee chairman Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina pushed the essential question: “What did the President know and when did he know it?”

Although former White House counsel John Dean’s explosive testimony had in fact implicated Nixon, it was still a matter of his word against that of the President of the United States. The revelation of the White House taping system changed all that. The tapes themselves were capable of revealing once and for all what the President knew and when he knew it.

As revealed in our last installment, Butterfield revealed the existence of the White House tapes in a preliminary interview on Friday, July 13, 1973. The following Monday, June 16, he testified before the live, televised Senate Watergate Committee hearings and the tapes became public knowledge. Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox immediately asked District Court Judge “Maximum” John Sirica to subpoena eight relevant tapes that would confirm or contradict John Dean’s testimony.

Nixon, as noted, argued against the subpoena for two reasons. The first was executive privilege, a claim based on the separation of powers and checks and balances enshrined in the U. S. Constitution. The second was a claim that the privacy of the tapes was vital to national security. Nixon offered a compromise in which Mississippi Senator John Stennis would listen to the tapes and summarize them. When Cox refused, Nixon ordered what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre on October 19, 1973, and appointed a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, on November 1, 1973.

The battle of the tapes continued to rage. In April 1974, the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the tapes for 42 additional White House conversations. Nixon released edited transcriptions, still citing executive privilege and national security. Jaworsky, about the same time, subpoenaed 64 tapes to support his criminal prosecutions of various Nixon administration officials. In late July 1974, the Supreme Court weighed in with an 8-0 decision in United States v. Nixon: the subpoena was valid. Nixon had to release the tapes.

In his column “On Language,” William Safire described Watergate as the Golden Age of Political Coinage. He wrote, “The Watergate era coined or popularized Saturday night massacre, stonewalling, cover-up, dirty tricks, straight arrow, expletive deleted, third-rate burglary, plumbers, Deep Throat, Big Enchilada, enemies list and twisting slowly in the wind.”

The term “smoking gun,” according to Safire, apparently first appears in the Sherlock Holmes story “The Gloria Scott,” but it gained its current meaning in the Watergate scandal. Roger Wilkins in the New York Times first used the term. “The big question asked over the last few weeks in and around the House Judiciary Committee's hearing room by committee members who were uncertain about how they felt about impeachment was ‘Where's the smoking gun?’”

On August 5, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee released what instantly became known as the “smoking gun tape.” It was a recording of a meeting that had taken place on June 23, 1972, six days after the original burglary, in which H. R. Haldeman, White House Chief of Staff, asked Nixon if he should ask Richard Helms, CIA director, to approach FBI chief L. Patrick Gray about halting his investigation on national security grounds. This, the special prosecutor and the Judiciary Committee agreed, constituted a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice.

Here’s the relevant text:

HALDEMAN: …the Democratic break-in thing, we're back to the–in the, the problem area because the FBI is not under control, because Gray doesn't exactly know how to control them, and they have… their investigation is now leading into some productive areas […] and it goes in some directions we don't want it to go. […] [T]he way to handle this now is for us to have Walters [CIA] call Pat Gray [FBI] and just say, ‘Stay the hell out of this …this is ah, business here we don't want you to go any further on it.’”  

NIXON: All right, fine, I understand it all. We won't second-guess Mitchell and the rest. […] You call [the CIA] in. Good. Good deal. Play it tough. That's the way they play it and that's the way we are going to play it.”

Until that point, the ten Republican members on the House Judiciary Committee had voted against impeachment, but now they unanimously agreed that they would support an impeachment vote once the case reached the House floor.

In the American system, the impeachment of a President requires a simple majority vote of the House of Representatives, but removal from office requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate. In essence, this means that any removal of a President from office requires a substantial number of votes from the President’s own party. Impeachment can be a purely partisan act (see Clinton, Bill), but removal from office must necessarily be bipartisan.

It was therefore a delegation of Republican senators who informed President Nixon that there were only about 14 votes to keep him in office, far short of the 34 votes he needed. With the handwriting on the wall, Nixon took the only path available. In a nationally televised Oval Office address on the evening of August 8, 1974, Nixon resigned, saying:

In all the decisions I have made in my public life, I have always tried to do what was best for the Nation. Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate, I have felt it was my duty to persevere, to make every possible effort to complete the term of office to which you elected me. In the past few days, however, it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort. As long as there was such a base, I felt strongly that it was necessary to see the constitutional process through to its conclusion, that to do otherwise would be unfaithful to the spirit of that deliberately difficult process and a dangerously destabilizing precedent for the future…. 

I would have preferred to carry through to the finish whatever the personal agony it would have involved, and my family unanimously urged me to do so. But the interest of the Nation must always come before any personal considerations. From the discussions I have had with Congressional and other leaders, I have concluded that because of the Watergate matter I might not have the support of the Congress that I would consider necessary to back the very difficult decisions and carry out the duties of this office in the way the interests of the Nation would require. 

I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interest of America first. America needs a full-time President and a full-time Congress, particularly at this time with problems we face at home and abroad. To continue to fight through the months ahead for my personal vindication would almost totally absorb the time and attention of both the President and the Congress in a period when our entire focus should be on the great issues of peace abroad and prosperity without inflation at home. Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office.

The next morning, the President and his wife said goodbye to the White House staff and boarded a helicopter to Andrews Air Force Base, where Air Force One waited to fly them to his California home in San Clemente. He wrote later of his thoughts. “As the helicopter moved on to Andrews, I found myself thinking not of the past, but of the future. What could I do now?”

President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon on September 8, 1974, saying, “[Watergate] is an American tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must.”

Nixon continued to proclaim his innocence until his death on April 22, 1994.

Let's Go to the Tape, Johnny! (Watergate Part 7)

Nixon secretary Rose Mary Woods demonstrates how she might have erased 18-1/2 minutes of a key Watergate tape.

For previous installments of my irregular series tracing the history of the Watergate scandal, click here. This week, the revelation of the White House taping system.

On July 16, 1973, as we learned in our last thrilling episode, former White House deputy assistant Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of a heretofore secret White House taping system to the Senate Watergate Committee, more formally known as the Senate Select Committee to Investigate Campaign Practices. Two days later, on July 18, 1973, Nixon ordered the tape recorders turned off.

Unlike previous Presidential taping systems, the Nixon system was automatically activated by voice. Previously, the President had to manually activate the taping system by flipping a switch. Of course, no sensible president would voluntarily tape himself talking about potentially criminal actions, but in the case of Nixon, the automated nature of the tapes suggested that if he had indeed made self-incriminating statements, they would be on the tapes.

The previous month, former White House counsel John Dean had famously testified before the Watergate Committee. Although Dean himself had managed a large portion of the cover-up, he had increasingly suspected that he was being groomed as the scapegoat for the entire affair. As a result, he began providing information to the Special Prosecutor, and subsequently appeared before the Senate committee, implicating numerous senior administration officials including Attorney General John Mitchell and Richard Nixon himself.

The obvious flaw in Dean’s testimony was that it was his word against the President of the United States. But if the tapes confirmed what Dean was saying, it would substantiate his testimony. Accordingly, Archibald Cox, the Watergate Special Prosecutor, subpoenaed eight tapes.

Nixon initially refused to release the tapes, on the Constitutional grounds of executive privilege and the separation of powers, then added another claim that the tapes were vital to national security. In October 1973, under increasing political pressure, Nixon offered a compromise in which he would allow Mississippi Democratic Senator John Stennis to review and summarize the tapes, and report his findings to the Special Prosecutor.

When Cox refused the compromise, as chronicled in our last installment, Nixon ordered what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. The pressure didn’t go away, and a few weeks later on November 1, Nixon appointed a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski. A few days later, on November 17, Nixon famously announced, “I am not a crook.”

As 1974 began, bad news for the Nixon Administration began to mount, and in April of that year, Nixon decided to release typed transcripts of the relevant tapes, from which the infamous phrase “expletive deleted” originated.

(As an aside, a friend of mine, the daughter of columnist Jack Anderson, told me how Anderson’s newspaper column got the transcripts before the Senate did. It seems that Anderson had a White House janitor on his payroll, who fished the single-use carbon paper out of the trashcans and delivered it to Anderson. The daughter, Laurie, taped the carbons to a lampshade and typed up the contents for her father.)

Meanwhile, the court case made its way to the Supreme Court. On July 24, 1974, in the case United States v. Nixon, ruled unanimously (with justice William Rehnquist recused because he had formerly worked for Nixon’s Justice Department) that the tapes should be released. Six days later, on July 30, Nixon complied. The transcripts confirmed Dean’s testimony.

The damage was already done. The House Judiciary Committee had passed two articles of impeachment already, with the third passed on the same day the tapes were released. To avoid a trial in the Senate that he would surely lose, Nixon resigned the presidency on August 8, 1974.

Tape Worm (Watergate Part 6)

For previous installments of my irregular series tracing the history of the Watergate scandal, click here. This week, the revelation of the White House taping system.

Alexander Butterfield never planned to be part of a White House conspiracy, but by accident turned into one of the key figures in the scandal. A former Air Force pilot (he commanded reconnaissance aircraft during Vietnam), he retired from the USAF at the urging of college pal H. R. Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, and became Deputy Assistant to the President, responsible for the daily business of the White House ranging from visitor tours to overseeing Nixon's schedule.

In addition, Butterfield was responsible for maintaining Nixon's historical records, and in that role he oversaw a secret taping system that Nixon had installed in the White House. (Nixon, of course, was not the first president to do so. I've read transcripts of secret tapes made by FDR, and have downloaded for my iPod the JFK tapes covering the Cuban Missile Crisis. Eisenhower and Johnson also taped Oval Office conversations, but I haven't heard any of them personally.)

After Nixon's reelection in 1972, Butterfield became administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration. In July 1973, members of Sam Ervin's Senate investigation team interviewed Butterfield about his time in the White House. Previously, John Dean had mentioned that he suspected White House conversations were being taped, and so the committee staff routinely asked witnesses whether they knew it was true. Although Butterfield avoided revealing the taping system voluntarily, he had decided to tell the truth if asked directly. Ironically, it was the minority Republican counsel, Donald Sanders, who put the direct question to Butterfield, who replied that "everything was taped ... as long as the President was in attendance. There was not so much as a hint that something should not be taped."

The significance of this was obvious, so the committee quickly scheduled Butterfield to appear before the full Senate committee on July 16, 1973, where chief minority counsel Fred Thompson (later part of the Law and Order television cast) asked the fatal question, "Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president?"

There was, of course, no suggestion that Butterfield was part of the cover-up. He remained as FAA administrator until 1975. Butterfield, interestingly, was one of the few who guessed the real identity of "Deep Throat," telling the Hartford Courant in 1995, "I think it was a guy named Mark Felt."

Only about 200 hours of the 3,500 hours of conversation recorded on the Nixon tapes even mention Watergate, but eight of the tapes were subpoenaed by Special Watergate Counsel Archibald Cox. Citing executive privilege, Nixon refused. When Cox did not back off, Nixon ordered his attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to fire him. Richardson refused and resigned, as did his deputy William Ruckelshaus. It fell to the Solicitor General, Robert Bork, to fire him.

That was hardly the end of the taping problems. Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, made a "terrible mistake" and erased five minutes of the June 20, 1972, recording. Strangely, the gap grew from five minutes to 18-1/2 minutes. Woods denied she had anything do to with the additional 13 minutes. While only the participants know for sure what was discussed in those missing 18-1/2 minutes, H. R. Haldeman's notes say that in that particular meeting, Nixon and Haldeman spoke about the arrests at the Watergate that had taken place three days previously.

Although various attempts were made to explain away the gap, the President's attorneys eventually decided that there was "no innocent explanation" they could offer for the problem.

In any event, it wasn't the 18-1/2 minute gap from June 20 that was the problem, but rather the "smoking gun" tape of June 23, six days after the break-in. On that tape, Nixon agreed to pressure the CIA to ask the FBI to halt its investigation of the break-in on the grounds that it was a national security matter. That, according to the Watergate special prosecutor, constituted a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice, a Federal — and impeachable — offense. That tape was released in late July 1974; Nixon resigned in early August.

Duct Tape and Watergate (Watergate Part 5)

For previous installments of my irregular series tracing the history of the Watergate scandal, click here. This week, the actual break-in, and the sad story of the man who discovered it.

On June 17, 1972, security guard Frank Wills apprehended Bernard Barker, Vergilio Gonzales, Eugenio Martinez, Frank Sturgis, and James McCord inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building, a combination office, condominium, and hotel complex near the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. The men were arrested and locked up until a preliminary hearing the next morning.

At the hearing, the judge asked each of the men their names, homes, and where they worked. James McCord mumbled his answer when it got to where he worked. The judge told him to speak up. “Where do you work?” the judge asked again.

 “I work for the Committee to Re-Elect the President,” McCord said. And with those words, the Watergate scandal officially began. As we’ve noted in previous installments of this story, a lot had already happened by this time — the Enemies List, the raid on the office of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, and Operation GEMSTONE. The infamous “two-bit burglary” was the incident that unraveled the entire web.

The June 17 burglary, interestingly, was not the first. During the previous Memorial Day weekend, the Watergate team tried not one, but twice, and failed on both attempts, one because they couldn’t get to the staff elevator before the night alarm got turned on, and the second because Gonzales, a locksmith, failed to pick the lock to the DNC headquarters office door.

On the night of May 28, a third attempt succeeded. The burglars installed a wiretap and room mike in the office of DNC chairman Larry O’Brien, and photographed as many documents as they could. Across the street from the Watergate, in Room 419 of the Howard Johnson’s (now a George Washington University dorm), Hunt and the other mission commander, G. Gordon Liddy, monitored the bugs, but evidently they didn’t work that well. By June 5, they gave McCord new instructions: fixing the room monitoring bug and fixing a problem with one of the phone taps.

On June 17, the team went back in, using the door between the garage and the stairwell. To make sure it didn’t lock, they put duct tape over the latch bolt. Security guard Frank Wills, working the midnight to 7 am shift, spotted the tape on a routine patrol of the building, and removed it. He didn’t think anything else about it, and kept going.

But when he came back on his next round, he found that the tape had been replaced! And so he called the police.

Frank’s story didn’t turn out well. When the Watergate complex didn’t give him a raise for discovering the burglary, he quit. His fifteen minutes of fame lasted a year or so, and after that he wasn’t able to hold a steady job. In 1983 he was convicted of shoplifting. By 1993, he was so broke that he was washing his clothes in a bucket. He died in 2000 of a brain tumor.

Watergate Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones (Watergate Part 4)

An expanded version of this article is part of my book Watergate Considered as an Organization Chart of Semi-Precious Stones, available in paperback and ebook versions.

This is the fourth installment of my irregular series tracing the history of the Watergate scandal. Part 1, “Watergate and Me,” appeared last July. Part 2, “The Enemies List,” appeared in August. Part 3, “Hunt/Liddy Special Project 1” appeared in September. Some of the material in this installment is adapted from my book The Six Dimensions of Project Management (with Heidi Feickert)

These three installments covered some of the origins of Watergate: the founding of the Plumbers Unit, the establishment of the Enemies List, and the beginnings of covert operations. None of these had any direct bearing on the eventual Watergate break-in that began the official scandal, but because they involved many of the same cast of characters and the same resources, the unraveling of one led inexorably to the unraveling of the others.

The original “Plumbers Unit” was established to stop the leaking of classified information (most notably the Pentagon Papers) to the news media, but beginning some time after October 1971 (sources conflict on the exact date), G. Gordon Liddy was asked to move from the Plumbers operation to Nixon’s campaign organization, the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP, but often abbreviated by its enemies as CREEP), with responsibility for establishing an intelligence operation for the campaign. He moved to his new offices in December, and shortly thereafter was being introduced as the man in charge of “dirty tricks.”

By January, Liddy was ready to present his plan, known as Operation GEMSTONE. Budgeted at $1 million (in 1972 dollars), it was quite extensive. Each element of the operation had its own gem subtitle:

• DIAMOND — Counterdemonstration activities
• GARNET — Recruit unpopular groups to put on pro-Democratic demonstrations
• RUBY — Infiltrate spies into the organizations of Democratic contenders
• SAPPHIRE — Establish a houseboat filled with prostitutes as a “honey trap” during the Democratic convention
• COAL — Funnel money to the campaign of African-American candidate Shirley Chisholm
• TURQUOISE — Commando raid to destroy the air conditioning for the Democratic convention
• QUARTZ — Microwave interception of Democratic telephone traffic
• EMERALD — Chase plane to eavesdrop on Democratic candidate aircraft
• CRYSTAL — Electronic surveillance of the Democratic convention
• OPAL — Clandestine entries to plant telephone bugs in the offices of Muskie, McGovern, and the DNC
• TOPAZ — Photograph documents during clandestine entries
• BRICK — Funding operation

Attorney General (and CRP chairman) John Mitchell rejected the plan as excessive, and sent Liddy back to the drawing boards. Liddy burned the charts, and prepared a second plan, this one capped at $500,000. He cut EMERALD (chase plane), QUARTZ (microwave interception), and COAL (funding Shirley Chisholm — Mitchell told Liddy that Nelson Rockefeller had already taken care of that.) SAPPHIRE lost the houseboat, but kept the prostitutes.

This too was rejected for cost, and Liddy tried a third time. He kept the four OPAL break-ins, the two RUBY agents, and two of the SAPPHIRE prostitutes, along with some of the DIAMOND capabilities. Mitchell and his team approved the smaller operation just before new campaign finance rules would make it harder to fund the program.

Interestingly, the actual Watergate break-in, although eventually part of the OPAL operation, was nowhere to be seen in the original plans.

Next week: the Break In.

Hunt/Liddy Special Project 1 (Watergate Part 3)

Here’s the third part of my occasional series tracing the 40th anniversary of the Watergate scandal.

As noted previously, a big motive in the Watergate cover-up had nothing to do with the actual burglary, but rather with the previous activities of the White House Plumbers Unit. Their first operation, “Hunt/Liddy Special Project 1,” was part of the Nixon Administration’s response to the leaking of the Pentagon Papers by one of its contributors, Daniel Ellsberg, Ph.D. (Ellsberg has appeared in this blog before, in our discussion of the ambiguity aversion effect, better known as the Ellsberg paradox.)

Ellsberg, a former military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation, was one of 36 members of the Vietnam Study Task Force, established by then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to produce an “encyclopedic history of the Vietnam War.” The report “United States—Vietnam Relations: 1945-1967,” was so secret that it was kept from President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and National Security Advisor Walt Rostow. The final report contained 3,000 pages of historical analysis and 4,000 pages of original government documents published in 47 volumes. It was classified “Top Secret — Sensitive,” meaning that the reason for its classification was that the publication of the study would be embarrassing. The print run was 15 copies.

In October 1969, Ellsberg, who had grown to oppose the Vietnam War, along with Anthony Russo, photocopied the study and showed it to Henry Kissinger, William Fulbright, George McGovern, and others. None was interested. It was not until February 1971 that Ellsberg first discussed the report with New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan. In March, Ellsberg gave Sheehan 43 of the 47 volumes, and the Times began publishing excerpts from the study starting in June 1971. At that time, the nickname “Pentagon Papers” first came into use.

The reaction was much the same as that which followed the WikiLeaks disclosure of State Department cables. While numerous claims of damage to US military and intelligence operations gained headlines, the reality was that the Papers talked about events that had happened years before. Nixon Solicitor General Erwin N. Griswold later called the Papers an example of "massive overclassification" with "no trace of a threat to the national security.”

The Papers effectively became public knowledge when Senator Mike Gravel (D-AK) entered 4,100 pages from the report in the Congressional Record. Richard Nixon originally wasn’t interested in prosecuting Ellsberg or the Times, because the study only embarrassed the Johnson and Kennedy administrations, but Henry Kissinger argued that this would set a negative precedent, and Ellsberg and Russo were prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917.

In order to come up with more evidence to discredit Ellsberg, the Plumbers received their first mission, which took place on September 3, 1971. It was a burglary operation, targeting the office of Daniel Ellsberg's Los Angeles psychiatrist, Lewis J. Fielding. The break-in team reported they couldn’t find Ellsberg’s file, but Fielding himself later said that not only was the Ellsberg file in his office, but he had also found it on the floor the morning after the burglary. Someone had clearly gone through it.

John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, reported to Nixon, saying (on tape), “We had one little operation. It’s been aborted out in Los Angeles which, I think, is better that you don’t know about.” Later, when the whole story came, out, the case against Ellsberg turned into a mistrial because of government misconduct, and all charges were dismissed.

What’s fascinating to me in all this is how unsuccessful the Plumbers Unit actually was. Far from achieving its goal of discrediting Ellsberg, the burglary (and related wiretapping) actually contributed to the dismissal of the case.

You can download the complete Pentagon Papers (including the parts Ellsberg didn't release) from the US National Archives here.

For more on the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, stay tuned.

The Enemies List (Watergate, Part 2)

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Watergate and Me

“As President Nixon says, presidents can do almost anything, and President Nixon has done many things that nobody would have thought of doing.”

- Golda Meir

Forty years ago last Friday, July 1, 1971, White House staffers David Young and Egil Krogh wrote a memo suggesting the establishment of a secret White House investigations unit in response to Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers. This organization was first named ODESSA, for “Organization Directed to Eliminate the Subversion of the Secrets of the Administration,” by G. Gordon Liddy, but it eventually became better known as the White House Plumbers, from their office location in the basement.

The great obsession of my adult life has been figuring out how people and organizations work. I write business books and military novels because nothing fascinates me more than people struggling with impossible situations, especially when of their own making. Believe me, I know what it's like to screw up, and so when I look at the Watergate cast of characters, I don't see the politics, I see the people, and I feel their pain.

July 1 begins the 40th anniversary of the Watergate scandal, and from time to time I’ll be offering a little commentary along the timeline. I’m a big fan. I followed every minute of the Watergate hearings, and devoured every book by a Watergate player, no matter how obscure. No, I didn't figure out who Deep Throat really was, but I wasn't interested in the detective story that much.

Oh, I admire Woodward and Bernstein and all that, but my heart goes out to John Dean, looking down on the waters of the Potomac with his trunk packed with boxes of potentially incriminating evidence, realizing in his heart that he had become a criminal.

I marvel at G. Gordon Liddy, the closest thing to a real-life James Bond imaginable, presenting, in those pre-PowerPoint days, a complete project management plan on poster board for schemes worthy of Dr. Evil himself. His plan would cost -- finger on pursed lip and a drumroll – two million dollars! (They bargained him down to a mere half-million – as long as Jeb McGruder could check out the houseboat full of hookers personally.)

And, of course, I am enthralled by the man himself -- Richard Milhouse Nixon, forever typecast as King John to JFK's Richard Lionheart, the dark heart of the American soul.

In the movie You've Got Mail, Tom Hanks memorably observed to Meg Ryan that all the lessons of life for contained in the Godfather movies. I had been using a similar line for years, and with no disrespect intended to the great saga, for me the touchstone remains the richly and densely textured the Watergate scandal. In it you can find echoes of any life lesson you choose, for Watergate is the very stuff of life.

I was so into Watergate that when I auditioned for a job as a comic book writer at Marvel in the late 1970s, I submitted a Spider-Man story titled "J. Jonah Jameson goes to Washington," a very thinly disguised story of the scandal with an even more thinly disguised G. Gordon Liddy as a first-rate super villain, if I do say so myself.

Marvel rejected it, saying, “It doesn’t seem aimed at our target demographic.”

More to come...