Never forget, the press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy. Write that on the blackboard and never forget it.
—RICHARD M. NIXON
MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT NIXON AND WATERgate. We will point out highlights of Nixon’s egregious assaults on the rule of law, and how Congress responded by opening an impeachment inquiry and voting on articles of impeachment before he resigned the presidency in August of 1974.
Richard Nixon made his political career with McCarthyism. In 1946, Nixon, a former navy officer, ran for the House of Representatives against incumbent Jerry Voorhis, a liberal Democrat who had supported Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Nixon’s campaign stressed that Voorhis, a staunch anti-communist, had “radical left-wing views.” Voorhis accused the Nixon campaign of making anonymous phone calls to voters alleging that he was a communist. Nixon won by 15,000 votes.
Nixon joined the House Un-American Activities Committee, and he gained notoriety going after a state department official named Alger Hiss. Intelligence experts and historians to this day dispute whether Hiss was a Russian spy. What we do know is that the Hiss case propelled Richard Nixon to the front ranks of politics.
In 1950 Nixon ran against Democratic candidate Helen Douglas to become one of California’s US senators. It was a dirty race filled with nasty name-calling and character assassination. Nixon referred to her “communist sympathies”; questioned the loyalty of her Jewish husband, actor Melvyn Douglas; and printed her votes in Congress on a pink sheet.
When Douglas appeared at USC, members of the Skull and Dagger fraternity doused her with water and threw hay at her (some members of this same fraternity—Donald Segretti, Gordon Strachan, Dwight Chapin, and Herb Kalmbach—were later part of the team of “dirty tricksters” who helped Nixon with his presidential campaigns).
The Nixon campaign made 500,000 phone calls calling Douglas a communist.
Douglas referred to Nixon as “Tricky Dick,” a nickname that stuck for the rest of his political career. During a campaign speech, Douglas called Nixon “a young man with a dark shirt,” a sly reference to the Nazis.
Nixon’s response: “I’ll castrate her.”
In subsequent rallies Nixon repeated that Douglas was “pink right down to her underwear.” Through the final days of the campaign, Nixon continually accused her of being soft on communism.
Nixon defeated Douglas by 59 percent to 41 percent.
Nixon was President Eisenhower’s vice president from 1953 to 1961 and won the Republican nomination to run for president in 1960. Nixon narrowly lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960. After Kennedy was assassinated and Lyndon Johnson became president, Nixon had a second chance at the presidency when Johnson announced he would not run for a second term because of the criticism he was getting over Vietnam.
By 1968 the war had been going strong for four years, and the backlash was growing. Johnson decided to open up peace talks.
Nixon knew that if Johnson ended the war before the election, Democratic candidate Vice President Hubert Humphrey would probably win. Nixon set out to make sure that didn’t happen.
He told the American public he had a “secret plan to win the war,” and then through a fund-raiser named Anna Chennault, he sent a message to South Vietnam president Nguyen Van Thieu. If Thieu waited until after the election, he, Nixon, could get Thieu a better deal for South Vietnam.
Thieu, who figured he could make a deal with either candidate, at the last minute backed out of the peace talks.
President Johnson was alerted by NSA wiretaps of Nixon’s enticement to Thieu, but he didn’t want Thieu to know the NSA had been listening in to his conversations, so he didn’t call him on it. Johnson told Humphrey what Nixon had done, but Humphrey was so certain he’d win the election that he saw no need to accuse Nixon of violating the Logan Act during the campaign. The Logan Act prohibits a private citizen without authorization from conducting diplomacy on behalf of the United States.
At the same time Nixon was criticizing Johnson for not making more progress with peace negotiations.
After winning the election, Nixon revealed that his plan to win the war was to escalate bombing in the north and expand the war into Laos and Cambodia.
This extension resulted in the deaths of over 22,000 additional Americans and more than a million Vietnamese.
Johnson’s national security team had written a classified dossier about Nixon’s actions. Walt Rostow, Johnson’s national security aide, was ordered to hide the dossier. When Nixon found out about the document from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, he ordered White House chief of staff H. R. “Bob” Haldeman and Henry Kissinger to find it. They were unsuccessful, and the possibility that one day the public might find out about the trick weighed on his mind when, in June 1971, the New York Times published the first installment of the Pentagon Papers.
These papers had originated with President Johnson’s secretary of defense Bob McNamara, who requested that a team working for the Department of Defense put together a highly classified analysis of the American political and military involvement in wars from the end of World War II to 1969.
The study was completed in 1969 and was bound in forty-seven volumes. Three thousand pages of material showed beyond a doubt that the military brass had been lying to the public about the Vietnam War since the beginning.
One of the men who worked on the report was Daniel Ellsberg, a Marine Corps officer employed by the RAND Corporation and the Department of Defense. By 1969 Ellsberg, knowing the truth, felt the war was unwinnable. He decided he would show the American people why it was unwinnable, and after he secretly photocopied large swaths of the report, he approached several members of Congress, who brushed him off. Frustrated, he gave parts of it to Neil Sheehan, a New York Times reporter.
Starting on June 13, 1969, the Times published these excerpts on the front page. After the third article ran, the Justice Department got a restraining order to stop further publication. The Washington Post joined the Times, arguing that under the First Amendment they had every right to publish the information. The Supreme Court voted six to three in their favor.
Americans were horrified to see how much they had been misled about the conflict in Vietnam in the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. However, no president had wanted the information from the Pentagon Papers quashed more than Richard Nixon, because in those papers was the story of how Nixon had sabotaged a peace summit just so he could be elected president.
One of Nixon’s aides believed the dossier was hidden in a safe at the Brookings Institution, a center-left think tank in Washington. Nixon ordered a break-in at the institute to find that dossier.
And Nixon went after Ellsberg.
“Get Colson in,” Nixon instructed his chief of staff in a taped meeting in the Oval Office on June 17, 1971. “He’s the best. It’s the Colson type of man that you need.”
To assist him in “nailing” Ellsberg, Charles Colson, a top Nixon aide, recruited a retired CIA operative and novelist named E. Howard Hunt. Hunt teamed up with former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy and a group of right-wing Cuban émigrés to burglarize the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist Lewis Fielding and gain information about the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers.
To make sure no one found the dossier, they planned to firebomb the Brookings Institution. John Dean, the White House counsel, said he heard Nixon “literally pounding on his desk, saying, ‘I want that break-in at the Brookings [Institution].’” Colson suggested that while firefighters tried to douse the fire caused by a bomb, operatives could rush in and seize the papers.
John Ehrlichman, White House domestic affairs advisor, told John Dean, “Chuck Colson wants me to firebomb the Brookings [Institution].”
Replied Dean, “John, this is absolute insanity. People could die. This is absurd.”
The firebombing was scrubbed, but the dossier has still never been found.
When it came time, Nixon vowed he would do anything to make sure his reelection would be a runaway. The Nixon campaign earmarked hundreds of thousands of dollars for an extensive undercover campaign to hurt the reputations of the more centrist—and electable—Democratic candidates including Edmund Muskie. The best example of the sabotage was a letter to the editor of the New Hampshire Union Leader saying that Muskie condoned the use of the word “Canucks,” a racial slur on French Canadians. The letter was published two weeks before the New Hampshire primary, prompting Muskie to call a press conference in front of the newspaper’s office in which he began to cry, ending his chances to be president. Later, Ken Clawson, deputy director of White House communications, admitted writing the letter. He subsequently denied it.
Nixon’s dirty tricksters sent a mass mailing to Democrats in New Hampshire urging them to write in Ted Kennedy as their presidential candidate. They also sent a mass mailing to Democratic voters in Florida claiming Muskie was for forced busing, against FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and was against the space shuttle.
Federal investigations found that at least fifty of Nixon’s men, working under assumed names as part of Nixon’s “security offensive,” followed Democratic candidates’ families and compiled dossiers of their private lives; forged letters and distributed them under the candidate’s letterhead; leaked false items to the press; seized confidential campaign files; and investigated dozens of Democratic campaign workers. They also sent provocateurs to demonstrations at both the Democratic and Republican conventions. Nixon and his White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman even discussed sending campaign contributions to Jesse Jackson, a prominent African American minister who had marched with Martin Luther King, in an attempt to get him to run for president as an independent.
All this took place even before the Watergate incident, when on June 17, 1972, security guard Frank Wills of the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC, discovered that the Democratic headquarters had been broken into. The police arrested five men recruited by E. Howard Hunt: James McCord, a former FBI and CIA agent, who was security coordinator for the Republican National Committee and the Committee to Re-elect the President; Virgilio Gonzales, a locksmith from Miami; Frank Sturgis, who had CIA connections; Eugenio Martinez, who had CIA connections; and Bernard Barker, a former CIA operative. The five men were arrested in the Watergate complex and charged with attempted burglary and attempted interception of telephone and other communications.
The FBI discovered a connection between cash found on the burglars and a slush fund used by the Committee to Re-elect the President. On September 15, 1972, the five burglars were indicted by a grand jury along with Liddy, a former FBI agent, treasury official, and counsel to the Committee to Re-elect the President, and Hunt, a former White House consultant and CIA employee.
More investigations ensued, which were largely the result of reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the Washington Post.
Congress stepped in, exercising its right and indeed duty under the Constitution to oversee activities in the executive branch. Although Congress was controlled by the Democrats, most Republicans did not try to sabotage the investigation. Many Republicans participated in the investigation, and while many of them were skeptical about claims of presidential wrongdoing, and some spoke in defense of the president, political attacks on the investigation were relatively few—and nobody dared attack the FBI.
In February 1973, the Senate established a committee to investigate the Watergate scandal. In July, evidence mounted against the president’s staff, including testimony provided by former staff members. The Senate’s investigation revealed that Nixon had a secret tape-recording system in his offices and that he had recorded his conversations.
It almost didn’t happen. The man who told the committee about the tapes, Alexander Butterfield, had ordered the Secret Service to install a voice-activated taping system in the Oval Office in February 1971. When the Senate committee published the list of people it intended to question, Butterfield’s name wasn’t on it. Butterfield had left the White House and was heading the Federal Aviation Administration, relieved that he wasn’t going to be called.
Then in July 1973 he was called for a pre-interview. A Republican, he didn’t want to tell them about the tape recorder, but he didn’t want to lie. He volunteered that he knew about the Dictaphone machine of Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s secretary.
“Were there ever any recording devices other than the Dictaphone system you mentioned?” he was asked.
“Yes,” he said.
That one word changed the course of American history.
In front of the Senate select committee on national TV, Butterfield testified that Nixon had a taping system in the Oval Office. Eight months later, he was fired from the FAA.
Archibald Cox had been appointed the special prosecutor to look into whether the president was involved in the break-in, and in July 1973 he issued a subpoena to get Nixon to turn over the secret tapes.
Nixon refused, invoking executive privilege. He was so sure he would win, that when it was suggested that Nixon burn the tapes, he refused. He wanted to use them for memoirs.
Cox went to the court of appeals, which ruled on October 12, 1973, that the president had to turn them over.
At this point, a cornered Nixon wanted Cox gone. On October 15, 1973, Nixon tried to make a deal with Cox’s boss, Attorney General Elliot Richardson. He said he would fully disclose the contents of the tapes to a federal judge. John Stennis, a Democratic senator from Mississippi, would corroborate.
Four days later Nixon appealed to the public, saying this was a reasonable compromise.
“I believe that by these actions I have taken today America will be spared the anguish of further indecision and litigation about the tapes,” Nixon wrote.
The next day, October 20, 1973, Richardson was called to a meeting at the Justice Department. Nixon had ordered him to fire Cox. He refused. He said he would resign as attorney general.
It now fell to Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox, and Ruckelshaus also refused.
Said Ruckelshaus to Alexander Haig Jr., White House chief of staff, who made the request on behalf of Nixon, “Not if I think he’s fundamentally wrong, which I do. Then my obligation is higher than just him.”
“Your commander in chief has given you an order,” said Haig.
But Ruckelshaus told himself he would fire Cox only for gross improprieties or malfeasance in office, and Cox had done neither.
Ruckelshaus wrote a letter saying his conscience would not allow him to fire Cox.
Conflicting reports questioned whether Ruckelshaus had resigned or was fired.
Ruckelshaus chose to say he had resigned.
The next in line to fire Cox was Robert Bork, the US solicitor general, and he carried out Haig’s orders. (When Bork was nominated for the Supreme Court in 1987, the Senate refused to confirm him, in part because of this involvement.)
The events of the evening would become known as “the Saturday Night Massacre.”
That night, Cox issued a statement: “Whether ours shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people.”
The issue of whether Nixon had to turn over his tapes went to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously in favor of the federal investigators. The tapes proved that Nixon had attempted to cover up his role in the break-in and foil the investigation itself.
Faced with impeachment in the House of Representatives and a conviction in the Senate, on August 9, 1974, Nixon resigned as president. A month later his successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him.
The overlooked story in the glare of the Watergate scandal was how the modern Justice Department was founded. Two idealistic men, Edward Levi and Griffin Bell, the first two attorneys general appointed after Watergate—Levi by Gerald Ford and Bell by Jimmy Carter—decided that they would change the department, making it more apolitical and independent of the executive branch.
Levi saw that Nixon, like other presidents, used his power to weaponize the Justice Department against his enemies. Bell saw how J. Edgar Hoover had used his power to go after leaders of the civil rights movement, especially Martin Luther King. Hoover had bugged King’s phone conversations and used them to try to destroy King’s marriage.
Levi and Bell wanted to keep the White House from being able to get involved in criminal prosecutions. They were largely successful, the legacy of their work lasting for over forty years.
Not until the Trump administration has a president again used the Justice Department as a weapon to protect his friends or to pursue political enemies. In a few short months in 2019, however, much of the work of Levi and Bell to depoliticize the Justice Department was undermined by Attorney General William Barr, a story that we tell in Chapter 29.
There were some other things we didn’t have to worry about in 1974. At least the corrupt politicians during the Vietnam and Watergate era were loyal enough Americans that they did not collude with hostile foreign powers. Many of them had used hostility to the USSR—and public fear of Russian schemes to undermine Western democracies—to propel themselves to the top of the political heap. We didn’t have to worry about them colluding with the Russians.
Nixon’s dirty tricksters did everything possible to sabotage Senator Edmund Muskie and other electable centrist candidates to prevent them from getting the 1972 Democratic nomination. But the president never got on the phone with a foreign leader asking for an investigation of Muskie or of anyone else. Dirty tricks were domestic tricks.
The Watergate break-in was a third-rate burglary motivated by the corrupt political operation determined to reelect President Nixon, but at least it was not a KGB break-in job.
Nixon was a crook, but at least he was our crook.