Watergate

The Presidential Scandal That Shook America With a New Afterword by Max Holland

Keith W. Olson

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780700623587
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A new afterword by Max Holland details developments since the original 2003 publication, including the revelation of Mark Felt as the infamous "Deep Throat, " the media's role in the scandal, both during and afterwards, including Bob Woodward's Second Man. Arguably the greatest political scandal of twentieth-century America, the Watergate affair rocked an already divided nation to its very core, severely challenged our cherished notions about democracy, and further eroded public trust in its political leaders. The 1972 break-in at Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel—by five men acting under the direction of a Republican president's closest aides and his staff—created a constitutional crisis second only to the Civil War and ultimately toppled the Nixon presidency. With its sordid trail of illegal wiretapping, illicit fundraising, orchestrated cover-up, and destruction of evidence, it was the scandal that made every subsequent national political scandal a "gate" as well. A disturbing tale made famous by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in All the President's Men, the Watergate scandal has been extensively dissected and vigorously debated. Keith Olson, however, offers for the first time a "layman's guide to Watergate, " a concise and readable one-volume history that highlights the key actors, events, and implications in this dark drama. John Dean, John Ehrlichman, H. R. Haldeman, G. Gordon Liddy, John Mitchell, Judge John Sirica, Senator Sam Ervin, Archibald Cox, and the ghostly "Deep Throat" reappear here—in a volume designed especially for a new generation of readers who know of Watergate only by name and for teachers looking for a straightforward summary for the classroom. Olson first recaps the events and attitudes that precipitated the break-in itself. He then analyzes the unmasking of the cover-up from both the president's and the public's perspective, showing how the skepticism of politicians and media alike gradually intensified into a full-blown challenge to Nixon's increasingly suspicious actions and explanations. Olson fully documents for the first time the key role played by Republicans in this unmasking, putting to rest charges that the "liberal establishment" drove Nixon from the White House. He also chronicles the snowballing public outcry (even among Nixon's supporters) for the president's removal. In a remarkable display of nonpartisan unity, leading public and private voices in Congress and the media demanded the president's resignation or impeachment. In a final chapter, Olson explores the Cold War contexts that encouraged an American president to convince himself that the pursuit of "national security" trumped even the Constitution. As America approaches the thirtieth anniversary of the infamous Watergate hearings and the overreach of presidential power is again at issue, Olson's book offers a quick course on the scandal itself, a sobering reminder of the dangers of presidential arrogance, and a tribute to the ultimate triumph of government by the people.

CHAPTER ONE

Patterns from the Beginning

The climate of fear and suspicion . . . had grown up in the White House, an atmosphere that started with the President himself and reached us through Haldeman and Colson and others.

—Jeb Stuart Magruder, An American Life: One Man’s Road to Watergate, 1974

We had set in motion forces that would sooner or later make Watergate or something like it, inevitable.

—Charles Colson, Born Again, 1976

My reaction to the Watergate break-in was completely pragmatic. If it was also cynical, it was a cynicism born of experience. I had been in politics too long, and seen everything from dirty tricks to vote fraud. I could not muster much moral outrage over a political bugging.

—Richard M. Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, 1978

Richard M. Nixon intended to shape national policies according to his political agenda and his personal likes and dislikes. To reach the White House, a politician survives a grueling process that requires endurance, ability, good luck, and an incredible desire for power. Almost by definition a president has a strong personality, and with the office comes tremendous power, direct and indirect. In many ways, therefore, an administration is a reflection of the president, his policies, his priorities, and his personality. The historian Paul K. Conklin, for example, opened his influential book The New Deal with his basic conclusion: “The New Deal was an exceedingly personal enterprise. Its disparate programs were unified only by the personality of Franklin D. Roosevelt.”¹ “I Like Ike” buttons embodied the spirit of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1952 presidential campaign, and for eight years in office Eisenhower maintained his popularity, based on a perceived public belief in his honesty and decency. After John F. Kennedy’s assassination, a federal secretary unwittingly captured the strong feeling of action and enthusiasm that ran through Kennedy’s administration when she lamented that she still did the same things every day but that the fun was gone.

Immediately and distinctly, Richard M. Nixon, like his predecessors, shaped his own presidency, even beyond the aides he selected to serve him in the White House and the politicians he asked to sit in his cabinet. From day one he demanded a daily “news summary” that reported commentary about him and his administration as well as national and world events. Some of the summaries reached fifty pages in length, with information drawn from perhaps forty magazines and fifty newspapers, television news, and even talk shows. Nixon then ordered his staff to remove eight of the nine television sets that his predecessor Lyndon B. Johnson constantly relied upon for news. Nixon did not like television newscasters and preferred his news in more detailed, written form. Following, but expanding, a practice from President Dwight Eisenhower, under whom he had served as vice president, Nixon directed Alexander P. Butterfield, his deputy assistant, to maintain a file of reports describing the substance, importance, and mood of every meeting and discussion in which the president participated, stipulating the exception only of Nixon’s conversations with his top-level staff. Butterfield assigned White House staff members to attend presidential meetings according to the individual’s primary area of responsibility and interest. James Keogh handled cabinet meetings, for example, and Patrick J. Buchanan Jr. summarized Nixon’s meetings with legislative leaders. Butterfield explained to the note takers that Nixon wanted a detailed, written record that “should serve the purpose of triggering the President’s memory, at a later date.”

Nixon stamped his imprint in other ways. Often he categorically referred to the press as “the enemy.” His biographer Stephen E. Ambrose has pointed out that “Nixon was obsessed with his image at least as much as Johnson” and that he “hated leaks. But he loved to leak himself, and to threaten.”² Such strong feelings translated into a general White House atmosphere that aides absorbed, nurtured, and acted upon.

Nixon’s attitudes and administrative procedures usually remained removed from public awareness although sometimes they became obvious during his public appearances and in the press coverage of his activities. Most Americans already had formed opinions of Nixon during his career as a member of the House of Representatives and of the Senate, as vice president, and during his two presidential campaigns. During his successful 1968 presidential campaign, moreover, Nixon had expressed positions, some more specific than others, on such issues as Vietnam, law and order, school busing, and federal appointment of judges.

By the time of the June 17, 1972, burglary of the Democratic Party’s National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office building in Washington, D.C., Nixon had been in office almost three and a half years. Americans knew his public views and actions regarding major issues and recognized characteristics of his administration such as its relationship with the press and with Congress. Nixon, again like his predecessors, kept some actions removed from public scrutiny. By necessity certain aspects in the conduct of foreign relations logically fell under this category. Surveillance and information gathering also took place under secrecy, at times bending or breaking the law. Often, congressional oversight existed more in name than in reality. The June 17 burglary and subsequent cover-up took place within the broad context of the Nixon administration and its record of surveillance, information gathering, illegal actions, and cover-ups. That context is fundamental to understanding the entire Watergate affair.

During his first six months in office Nixon indicated a special interest in gathering information about his critics. To pursue this interest, he found at his service an impressive group of federal intelligence agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Nixon, however, believed these agencies often responded too slowly to his presidential orders, periodically leaked information to the press, and most important, sometimes refused to conduct illegal activities.

Nixon also knew that his predecessors placed a high value on intelligence gathering and that they often directed federal agencies to exceed the legal limits of their charters. As a candidate early in 1968, Nixon had hired John Ragan, a former FBI electronics expert, to inspect his law office, his hotel rooms, and his headquarters trailer at the Republican National Convention, as well as the rooms of his key aides, to guarantee that he and his aides were free of telephone taps and electronic receivers. During the presidential campaign later that year, Ragan performed similar services for Nixon.

Nixon’s concern about intelligence information emanated from his understanding of politics. The week following his election, for example, while on his way from Key Biscayne, Florida, to New York City, the president-elect stopped at the White House to discuss the transition of administrations. As part of the orientation, one of President Johnson’s assistants routinely showed Nixon and his staff the Johnson taping system and demonstrated how it worked. The system recorded conversations in the Oval Office and in the cabinet room. On the trip between Washington and New York, Nixon remarked to Robert Finch, his longtime friend and adviser, that he disliked the idea of a secret taping system in the president’s office and intended to have it removed. After settling into office, Nixon ordered the Army Signal Corps to remove the system, an assignment carried out less than a month after inauguration day.

Once in office, the new president learned, if he did not already know, about the numerous instances of transgressions by the intelligence agencies. The FBI, for example, in 1956 initiated a counterintelligence program, cointelpro, under which its agents perjured documents, planted false stories in the press, and encouraged violence during protest rallies. In 1967 the CIA, despite its constitutional limit to overseas operations, instituted a domestic spying program, Operation chaos, under which CIA agents burglarized offices, tapped telephone lines, opened mail, and bugged rooms. Founded on the subterfuge that it needed to learn if foreign governments supported antiwar groups, the CIA fed 300,000 names into its computer and established dossiers on more than 7,000 Americans without their knowledge. Soon after the 1968 election, furthermore, the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover told Nixon that a few weeks earlier President Johnson had had the FBI investigate Nixon and vice presidential nominee Spiro T. Agnew. Many Washington journalists and politicians knew that recent presidents and Hoover had used FBI information to discredit persons with whom they disagreed. Hoover, for instance, repeatedly tried to get newspapers to publish information that the FBI had obtained from its electronic bugging of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.’s extramarital affairs.

Hoover and the CIA director Richard Helms, however, both had limits to how often and for what reasons they would break the law. The limits stemmed not from principles but from fear of the reaction if the public learned of the lawlessness. Once Hoover passed the federally mandated retirement age and continued in office by special presidential dispensation, he felt especially vulnerable and became more cautious regarding illegal activities. He realized that only public exposure of wrongdoing could drive him from office. Because of his popularity and because of his private files on indiscretions of presidents, members of Congress, and prominent persons who opposed him or his policies, Hoover operated the FBI much as he pleased, even in defiance of the attorney general, his nominal superior, and of the president.

Within Nixon’s first month in office, Helms made known his fear of public disclosure of the CIA’s illegal conduct. In sending a report to Nixon’s national security adviser Henry Kissinger, Helms admitted, “This is an area not within the charter of this Agency, so I need not emphasize how extremely sensitive this makes the paper. Should anyone learn of is existence,” he continued, “it would prove most embarrassing for all concerned.”³

Nixon viewed Hoover and Helms as problems. The former operated beyond the president’s control, and the latter just personally annoyed him. Educated in Switzerland, Helms earned a Phi Beta Kappa key from Williams College and had been involved with intelligence since World War II. To Nixon, Helms had too much of a patrician manner and ran the CIA with too much of an old-school-tie atmosphere. The new president also judged the CIA less than competent because the agency could not prove the antiwar movement received support from foreign communists. Early in 1969, moreover, the CIA refused to place surveillance on Donald Nixon, whose supposed susceptibility to criminal influence might embarrass his brother, the president.

By March 1969, Nixon, disappointed with Hoover and Helms, wanted a small intelligence organization immediately responsive to his orders and outside the federal bureaucracy. He turned over the assignment to John D. Ehrlichman, his personal counsel and reliable aide. Ehrlichman remembered the New York City police detective John J. Caulfield, who had served as that city’s police liaison to Nixon’s 1968 campaign headquarters and whom Attorney General John Mitchell considered, but rejected, for appointment as chief marshall of the United States. Caulfield declined Ehrlichman’s suggestion of setting up a private agency that would contract to carry out special investigations for the White House. Instead, he wanted to join the White House staff. Ehrlichman agreed and gave him the job description of liaison officer with the federal law enforcement agencies. In reality, Caulfield would conduct investigations as Ehrlichman directed.

Caulfield assumed his duties on April 8, 1969. The next month he gained an assistant. Upon Caulfield’s advice, Ehrlichman flew to New York City and interviewed and hired Anthony T. Ulasewicz, a former Caulfield colleague. But whereas Caulfield’s name appeared on the federal employees payroll roster, Ehrlichman arranged private, political funds to pay Ulasewicz’s salary. The money came from surplus 1968 campaign contributions under the control of the president’s private lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach. Ulasewicz immediately learned he would take orders from Caulfield and would not meet Ehrlichman again. When he reported to Caulfield, moreover, he would do so only verbally.⁴

Irritating as Nixon may have found some of the attitudes of the FBI and CIA directors, the agencies certainly were not one of his major concerns during the first months of his administration. Nixon’s top priority went to foreign affairs, a field that had long commanded his foremost attention. Throughout early 1969 the new president worked to develop and launch his new diplomacy. His objectives included peace in Vietnam, eased tensions with the Soviet Union and China, limitations on nuclear arms, and stability in the Middle East. Much of the diplomatic groundwork for such major foreign policy initiatives required p...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Patterns from the Beginning
• 2 Context of the Break-in: Motives and Primaries
• 3 The Cover-up
• 4 Disclosures
• 5 The Senate Committee, Testimonies, and Butterfield Disclosure
• 6 The Struggle for the Tapes: From Disclosure to the Saturday Night Massacre
• 7 From the Saturday Night Massacre to the Tape Transcripts: November 1973 to May 1974
• 8 The Consensus and the Resignation
• 9 Ends and Means: Watergate and the Cold War
• Afterword by Max Holland
• Chronology
• Notes
• Bibliographical Essay
• Index
• Photo Gallery
• Back Cover