Watergate Scandal

11 Key excerpts on "Watergate Scandal"

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  Investigative Journalism in Changing Times

  Australian and Anglo-American Reporting

  • Caryn Coatney, Caryn Coatney(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  10 From Watergate to Trump world — the declining power of scandals David Smith and Rodney Tiffen

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003279808-10

  Watergate

  Richard Nixon resigned the presidency on 8 August 1974, and so Watergate, which brought his downfall, occupies a unique place in the history of American scandals, the only one to result in a presidential resignation. This, the most dramatic outcome, was preceded by 18 months of unique legal and judicial proceedings.

  The press played an important and widely celebrated role. ‘At its broadest, the myth of journalism in Watergate asserts that two young Washington Post reporters brought down the president of the United States. This is a myth of David and Goliath’ (Schudson 1993 , 104), of the investigative reporting by unknown reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, against all odds, bringing down the might of the Nixon White House, and so of truth triumphing over power.

  The initial investigative reporting was the key to the scandal’s further development, but its impact was far from immediately decisive. Rather, media coverage interacted with legal and political factors, and the process was protracted, complex and uncertain.

  On 17 June 1972, five burglars were arrested at the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate hotel and office complex in Washington, DC. They included James McCord, the security director for the Committee for the Re-election of the President (CREEP). In September, these five were indicted for the burglary, as were E. Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, both former CIA officials whose ties to the operation were immediately established.

  Watergate’s public career began as a minor court hearing, albeit with peculiar aspects, as the head of the operation, McCord, described himself as a security consultant, recently retired from the CIA. Nevertheless, without the investigative work by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, it probably would have remained a passing curiosity, a third-rate burglary attempt in the words of White House press secretary Ron Ziegler. This dismissive public stance was in direct contrast to the frantic action inside the administration to contain the damage, seeking to arrange ‘hush money’ for the defendants and limit the investigation. Nixon, his two closest aides H. R. Haldeman and John Erlichman and presidential appointees John Dean and Charles Colson were immediately involved in orchestrating a cover-up. Despite the obviously suspicious links of the defendants, White House and Republican officials denied any connections to the robbery. On 29 August, Nixon declared that no-one in his administration was involved in Watergate (Williams 1998

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  The Watergate Crisis

  A Reference Guide

  • Michael A. Genovese(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  After Nixon’s death in 1994, several government officials and Nixon friends and family members argued that Richard Nixon should be remembered for the totality of his life and career, not simply on the basis of the Watergate Scandal. Sound advice, yet as much as one might wish otherwise, the overwhelming weight of Watergate will always overshadow the successes of the Nixon administration. Opening doors to China, ending the Vietnam War, negotiating détente with the Soviet Union—all successes that added to Nixon’s reputation as a skilled foreign policy leader—are washed away by Watergate.

  Watergate spawned a “politics of scandal” that has even to this day deeply infected the American body politic. Coming as it did in the wake of the contentious war in Vietnam that split the nation apart and did much to deepen American’s distrust in government and discontent in the nation, Watergate profoundly shook an already shell-shocked country. Political scientist Paul Quirk views the “politics of scandal” as

  Richard Nixon boards a helicopter after resigning the presidency on August 9, 1974. (National Archives)

  American politicians, journalists, and citizens devote extraordinary time and energy to controversies about matters of moral and legal propriety. To some degree, these controversies are the inevitable consequence of maintaining and enforcing strict standards of proper conduct. Nevertheless, the preoccupation with scandal has reached a point of pathological excess. Scandals destroy or threaten to destroy useful political careers, striking evenhandedly Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, elected and appointed officials. They distract attention and disrupt government, potentially distorting public policy or undermining the ability to deal with crises. They promote cynicism and alienation among citizens.12

  Post-Watergate, the politics of scandal has inaugurated an age of “politics by other means” in which electoral losers attack opponents on ethics grounds, regardless of the basis of the charges.13 It has become good, and common, politics, to level charges of ethical violations against one’s opponents, and the cable media circus is happy, even anxious to accommodate and encourage such.14

  In the aftermath of Vietnam, the United States sat on a precipice. It could have reunited or split apart. And given the pressures on unity that the rise of several social movements (civil rights, youth counterculture, environmental, and women’s movements) that were already threatening to further fracture a divided nation placed upon the system, what we really needed was a leader to, as Richard Nixon promised, “bring us together.”

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  Political Scandal

  Power and Visability in the Media Age

  • John B. Thompson(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  It is partly because power scandals are the purest form of political scandal that they have come to assume such significance within the political field. What we see in power scandals is not the illicit intrusion of extraneous factors – sex, money – into the field of political power, but rather the illicit use of political power itself. This phenomenon is particularly troubling in liberal democratic societies, precisely because these are societies in which the exercise of political power is based on the rule of law; hence the flouting of these rules can be seen or portrayed as an activity which undermines the very foundations of legitimate power. This helps to explain why one of the greatest scandals of the modern period – Watergate – has acquired a kind of paradigmatic status, becoming the reference point (exemplified by the widespread use of the suffix ‘-gate’) for many subsequent scandals. Watergate stands out as an emblem of modern political scandals because what was at stake in this affair was whether the highest officer of the state – the President – had secretly flouted the rules, laws and procedures governing the legitimate exercise of power. But Watergate was also significant because it highlighted the fact that, behind the public settings in which political power is visibly exercised, there were hidden forms of power and decision-making which were unaccountable and which could, on occasion, involve illicit or even criminal action.

  In this chapter I shall focus on power scandals and examine some of their features. I shall begin by analysing in more detail the nature of power scandals in relation to the political systems in which they occur. Then I shall look at some examples, but in this chapter I shall proceed a little differently from the previous two. Given the significance of Watergate as a power scandal, I shall begin by analysing this event and its aftermath; I shall also examine the most important American power scandal of the post-Watergate age, the Iran-Contra affair. I shall then turn to Britain and retrace the rise of a particular genre of power scandal – what I shall call ‘security scandals’ – which, for various reasons, have featured prominently in Britain since the late nineteenth century. The final section will focus on one area of the British political system which has proved to be a particularly fertile source of power scandals in recent years: the blurred boundary between the political and military domains.

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  The President as Leader

  • Michael Eric Siegel(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  88 A third of the Republican members joined a unanimous Democratic majority in approving the articles of impeachment. The Supreme Court, with four sitting members appointed by Nixon, voted 8–0 that President Nixon was obligated by law to turn over all of the subpoenaed tape recordings. Days later the president’s attorney revealed a tape recording from June 23, 1972, capturing a communication between Nixon and his aides in which the president asked them to use the CIA to disturb the FBI’s investigation of Watergate. This became known as the “smoking gun tape,” and shortly after its release, all members of the House Judiciary Committee – including Nixon’s most zealous supporters – declared they were now pursuing impeachment. Knowing that he had little support left in the U.S. Senate, two months later, on August 9, 1974, President Nixon resigned.

  The meaning of Watergate will be debated for years to come,89 but there is no debate that it caused a very strong reaction in the American political system. The late Washington Post editor, Katherine Graham, summarized the meaning of Watergate as follows:

  Even today, some people think that the whole thing was a minor peccadillo, the sort of thing engaged in by lots of politicians. I believe Watergate was an unprecedented effort to subvert the political process. It was a pervasive, indiscriminate use of power and authority from an administration with a passion for secrecy and deception and an astounding lack of regard for the normal constraints of democratic politics. To my mind, the whole thing was a very real perversion of the democratic system—from firing people who were good Republicans but who might have disagreed with Nixon in the slightest, to the wiretappings, to the breaking and entering of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, to the myriad dirty tricks, to the attempts to discredit and curb the media. As I said in a speech at the time, “It was a conspiracy not of greed but of arrogance and fear by men who came to equate their own political well-being with the nation’s very survival and security.”90

  And for the particular focus of this book—the presidency—Watergate had a profound effect. According to historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.:

  Watergate’s importance was not simply in itself. Its importance was in the way it brought to the surface, symbolized and made politically accessible the great question posed by the Nixon Administration in every sector—the question of presidential power. The unwarranted and unprecedented expansion of presidential power, because it ran through the whole Nixon system, was bound, if repressed at one point, to break out at another. This, not Watergate, was the central issue.91

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  Modern America: A Documentary History of the Nation Since 1945

  A Documentary History of the Nation Since 1945

  • Robert H Donaldson(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The testimonies of Dean and Magruder before the Senate Watergate committee linked Nixon to the cover-up from the beginning, but Nixon continued to insist that there had been no cover-up. Then on July 16, 1973, ex-presidential aide Alexander Butterfield testified that recording equipment had been installed in the Oval Office. Special Prosecutor Cox requested segments of the tapes, but Nixon, citing separation of powers and the confidentiality of the presidency, refused to release the tapes. When Cox protested that Nixon was in violation of a court ruling to turn over the tapes, Nixon fired Cox. Two top officials in the Justice Department quit in protest. Finally, in April 1974 Nixon agreed to hand over transcripts of the tapes; and then under further pressure he released edited segments of the tapes. Those tapes released, however, contained sizable gaps, erasures, and obvious omissions. A new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, indicted forty-one people in the case, and named the president as an “unindicted co-conspirator.”

  In the House of Representatives, twenty-four Democrats and fourteen Republicans worked together on articles of impeachment. On July 24, the Supreme Court ordered the White House to turn over sixty-four tapes dealing with the events of the summer of 1972. On that same day, the House Judiciary Committee began a televised debate on impeachment. On August 5 Nixon released the tapes. The tape of a conversation on June 23, 1972 (Nixon’s first day back in the White House after the Watergate break-ins), showed that Nixon had been involved in the cover-up from nearly the beginning.

  Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee switched their votes in favor of impeachment. Several leading Republican senators, including Barry Goldwater, visited the White House and encouraged Nixon to resign, insisting that he would be removed from office if the impeachment proceedings were allowed to play out. On August 9, 1974, President Richard Nixon became the first president to resign from office. A month later, on September 8, President Gerald R. Ford decided it would be best to put the agony of Watergate behind the nation and issued a presidential pardon to Nixon.

  Watergate was the most serious political scandal in American history. Government power had been used to subvert the political process, and then to initiate a cover-up at the highest levels of the administration. Many tied the Watergate Scandal to the rise of the “imperial presidency,” a trend toward presidential supremacy that had developed since the end of World War II. It was also rooted in a cold war mentality that justified any activity to overcome an enemy, especially one that had the strategic advantage of not having to answer to its people.

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  Something Happened

  A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies

  • Edward Berkowitz(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  1 Nixon, Watergate, and Presidential Scandal

  During the seventies, America devoured its presidents in what journalist Max Lerner described as fits of “tribal cannibalism.”1 Richard Nixon, the first of the era’s presidents, sent the institution on a downward spiral. The Watergate Scandal that resulted from his misuse of power became one of the era’s signature events. It altered the course of electoral politics after 1973, enabled the legislative branch of government to gain power at the expense of the executive branch, increased the level of scrutiny of a president’s private behavior, and made Americans more cynical about the government’s ability to improve their well-being. Watergate also changed the career paths of politicians who aspired to the presidency. Beginning in 1976, governors, rather than senators, became president.

  THE LIFE OF RICHARD NIXON

  Richard Nixon, an intensely private man, lived one of the most public lives in American history. He was perhaps the last of the twentieth century politicians whose life spooled like a newsreel across the public imagination. Born in 1913, he spent his entire political career in the postwar, rather than the New Deal, era. The southern California of his youth resembled the pages of a John Steinbeck novel more than it reflected the glamour of nearby Hollywood. Still, Nixon found the means to attend college, a fact that set him apart from most people his age. Graduating in 1934 from Whittier College, a Quaker school located near his hometown, he earned a scholarship to the newly established Duke Law School, finishing third in his class in 1937. At Duke he lived in such humble surroundings that he showered in the school gym. His situation reinforced his view of life as a struggle. He practiced law in Whittier before the war brought him briefly to Washington, D.C., for a job at the Office of Price Administration. In the Navy, he served as a transport officer in the South Pacific. Discharged in 1946, he returned home to run for Congress in the California district that included Whittier. Like John F. Kennedy, another Navy veteran and another distinguished postwar politician, he became a member of the Eightieth Congress, part of the insurgency that produced a Republican majority in both houses. It would happen only once more in Nixon’s political career.2

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  The Making of the President, 1972

  • Theodore H. White(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • HarperCollins e-books

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE WATERGATE AFFAIR

  N O simple logic yet embraces what is known as the Watergate affair. In the word “Watergate” are contained a family of events, a condition of morality and a system of acts, charges, allegations which, until those accused have had their chance to speak in court and be judged by law, defy final judgment.

  Yet the story of Richard Nixon’s re-election cannot be told without it. That election was not a traditional party contest between Republicans and Democrats. As presented to the people, it was an election of ideas—sharp-set, harshly contrasted—and of two personalities who spoke clearly of their directions. But underneath their claims it was a clash of cultures breaking away from the old common culture of comity and civil peace that had once bound Americans together. Watergate was born of two new cultures which saw Americans as enemies of each other. And since the Committee for the Re-Election of the President struck the decisive blow against the old common culture, it is the Committee to Re-Elect that concerns us here.

  The Committee to Re-Elect was born of legitimate purpose, but was entrusted not only to men ignorant of American politics, but to amateurs who were among the most stupid and criminal operators in electoral history. Though after midsummer of 1972, under Clark MacGregor, it became one of the most efficient vote-management organizations in recent history, its direction at genesis begins in yet unanswered riddles:

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  Reacting to the Past™

  • John M. Parrish(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  Seen from this wider perspective—that the Watergate burglary might be a by-product of a larger campaign of covert Republican interference in the Democratic primary process—the seemingly mysterious motivelessness of the Watergate caper began to make more sense. For while at the time of the June break-in Nixon looked like a prohibitive favorite to win the election with a 61 percent approval rating, as recently as the previous winter, when the newly reported espionage and sabotage activities began, Nixon’s approval had stood at just 49 percent and the president had consistently trailed then front-runner Muskie in polls. The GOP’s dirty tricks began, then, at a time when Nixon very much had something to fear from the Democrats—especially from the Democrats who, in part thanks to the Republican sabotage efforts, had since been sidelined by the much less formidable nominee, George McGovern. 53 The Conspiracy Unravels Nevertheless, the Watergate story failed to gain significant traction in mainstream press coverage throughout 1972. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, who oversaw the FBI, said publicly on August 28 that the bureau’s efforts had constituted “the most extensive, thorough, and comprehensive investigation since the assassination of President Kennedy.” Throughout the fall, Nixon repeatedly denied, directly and through subordinates, any connection to the burglary. (See core texts “Richard Nixon, The President’s News Conference [June 22, 1972]” ; “Richard Nixon, The President’s News Conference [August 29, 1972]” ; and “Richard Nixon, The President’s News Conference [October 5, 1972].”) Even the entry of the highly regarded Walter Cronkite and CBS News into the fray in October, devoting a nearly unprecedented fourteen minutes of his half-hour broadcast to Watergate, had no discernible effect on public opinion

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  SUNY series in American Constitutionalism

  • Daniel P. Franklin, Stanley M. Caress, Robert M. Sanders, Cole D. Taratoot(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  Some of the same factors present in the Johnson impeachment resurfaced during Nixon’s tenure. Both Nixon and Johnson served during intensely emotional times when extreme governmental actions seemed justifiable. The Vietnam War’s level of carnage was devastating, and even though the number of Americans killed in it never approached that of the Civil War, Vietnam divided the country more than any other conflict in over a century. During Nixon’s years in office, the country was still shaken by the assassinations of President John Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., just as the country was in mourning for Abraham Lincoln during Johnson’s presidency. And, most critically, both Nixon and Johnson were confronted by a Congress in which the overwhelming number of members were from the opposite party. This was up to this time not the norm in American politics. These and other factors suggest that a thorough analysis will help us understand why presidential impeachment so abruptly reappeared during Nixon’s presidency.

  Why Impeachment Resurfaced

  In 1973, after Richard Nixon’s impressive reelection triumph, the mere thought of a presidential impeachment seemed inconceivable. Gradually, as revelations unfolded related to what became known as the Watergate Affair, momentum built that led to the first serious attempt to remove a president from office in over a hundred years. The proximate cause of the Nixon impeachment emerged from a seemingly unrelated burglary of a Democratic Party office. The break-in attempt of the national Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington, DC, during the 1972 election eventually evolved into a national scandal.1

  While the Watergate break-in was initially treated as an ordinary criminal case, it led to an inquiry by the FBI and a Senate committee that uncovered startling information about the possible involvement in a cover-up of the burglary by the president’s Committee for the Re-election of the President (CRP). Over the course of the next few months an investigation by a special prosecutor (and a couple of intrepid reporters at the Washington Post

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  The American Century

  A History of the United States Since the 1890s

  • Walter LaFeber, Richard Polenberg, Nancy Woloch(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Watergate not only weakened Nixon's standing with Congress, but also destroyed his ability to lead the Republican Party. By 1974 even those who had stood by Nixon were shocked by each fresh disclosure. One senator said that it was like waiting for the other shoe to drop, except "I don't know how many shoes there are to fall. I feel like I've been dealing with a centipede this past year." One poll found that only 24 percent of the voters classified themselves as Republicans, the smallest percentage identified with any major party in the twentieth century. The Democrats virtually swept the 1974 congressional elections, including such traditional Republican seats as one in Michigan that the Democrats had not held since 1932.

  Watergate altered the American political landscape and undermined presidential power. In the late 1960s a majority of Americans had identified the groups dangerous to society as atheists, black militants, student demonstrators, prostitutes, and homosexuals. But by late 1973, none of these groups was considered harmful by a majority of people. Instead, the groups considered dangerous were people who hired political spies, generals who conducted secret bombing raids, politicians who engaged in wiretapping, business executives who made illegal campaign contributions, and politicians who attempted to use federal investigatory agencies for partisan purposes.

  The Loss of Civil Liberties

  While the Watergate Scandal was unfolding, the American people learned that, for more than a decade, the federal government had been systematically violating their constitutional rights. First exposed by the New York Times in 1974 and then confirmed over the next two years by the reports of a House committee chaired by Democrat Otis Pike from New York, a Senate committee headed by Democrat Frank Church from Idaho, and a special committee under Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, those violations had begun even before the United States entered the war in Vietnam. But that war, and especially the turmoil and dissent accompanying it, had led the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and other agencies to mount aggressive campaigns against civil liberties and to conceal their actions from Congress, the courts, and the people.

  Nothing better illustrated the government's behavior than the CIA program known as Operation CHAOS. Although the CIA was prohibited by law from spying on American citizens, the agency had begun to do so in the 1950s. In the summer of 1967, with antiwar demonstrations reaching a crescendo and President Johnson convinced that the demonstrators were being funded by foreign powers, the CIA stepped up its activities. Although it discovered no foreign involvement, the agency nevertheless accelerated its campaign at President Nixon's behest in 1969. By 1974 the CIA had compiled dossiers on 7,200 American citizens, stored the names of 300,000 individuals and groups in a computerized index file, opened 215,000 first-class letters, placed wiretaps on telephones, installed bugging devices in people's homes, and burglarized the offices of dissident groups. Speaking of the mail-opening program, one CIA official admitted, "This thing is illegal as hell." Not to be outdone by the CIA, the FBI remodeled its own counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, and began to shift its attention to black militants, the New Left, and the antiwar movement. A House committee summarized some of the results of the FBI program: "Careers were ruined, friendships severed, reputations sullied, businesses bankrupted and, in some cases, lives endangered."

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  A Good Life

  • Ben Bradlee(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Simon & Schuster

    (Publisher)

  Senators, on and off the Ervin Committee, were looking for high ground. Spiro Agnew announced that he was “appalled” by Watergate. Richard Kleindienst, the new Attorney General, about to be forced to resign himself, was the first to mention publicly the dreaded “I” word (Impeachment).

  Nixon explained himself so many times, it was hard not to be confused. My own favorite rationale came on April 30 when the president tried one more time to con the American people in a latter-day Checkers speech: “The easiest course would be for me to blame those to whom I had delegated the responsibility to run the campaign, but that would be the cowardly thing to do.” This from the man who ten days earlier, it turns out, had told his assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division to “stay out of” the break-in to Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office because “that is a national security matter.” An awesome lie.

  It seemed as if reporters were just bringing their buckets to work, sure that they would be filled with the latest sleazy revelations without any great work on their part. No reporter had ever seen anything like this before.

  And most remarkable of all, no one yet knew the complete story. The existence of the White House tapes, with their vivid and detailed self-incrimination, was still unknown to us—or to any investigator. At the Post, where reporters and editors knew more than almost anyone else, we were still trying to fit each new piece of information into the puzzle. We grew increasingly confident that this was the greatest political scandal of our time, and we still didn’t know the half of it.

  In the middle of all this, I got a call from my old friend Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, the founding editor of the French weekly, L’Express, with a startling invitation. He wanted to put me on the cover of L ’Express’s

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