The Wars of Watergate

by Stanley I. Kutler

  Patman understood the stakes. He suspected that “in the coming weeks and months, there will be some who will attempt to distort the record, [to] misconstrue events and to cloud the real issues.” Watergate had been a “wrenching experience,” he told Rodino, but nothing would be learned if the record were incomplete or distorted. He urged that the committee secure additional White House tapes and publish them. Patman had correctly complained on other occasions that the available tape transcripts revealed nothing of White House discussions between September 15, 1972, and February 28, 1973.

  The thought of remaining in the limelight apparently was too much for Rodino. He had been a reluctant warrior from the outset. Now, with almost unseemly haste, he retreated to his familiar obscurity—and shut down the House impeachment inquiry. No one challenged him; Patman again found himself abandoned and isolated. Meanwhile, Rodino had given aid and comfort to Nixon’s embarrassed supporters, one of whom had begged Leon Jaworski to put an “immediate end” to this “mess,” and allow everyone to “quickly forget about it and go on about their business.”1

  Nixon himself was more than ready to go about the business of refurbishing his historical reputation. What he said when he resigned, and what he did after that, signaled his campaign to capture the soul of history. Gerald Ford, never known for stern judgments of his contemporaries, remarked that Nixon’s resignation-eve statement on his loss of political support dodged the real issue. Nixon, he complained, had failed to offer any note of contrition, refusing to “take that final step.” Surely, Nixon had no desire for such finality. A contentious man, so self-consciously struggling to emulate Theodore Roosevelt’s “man in the arena,” Nixon simply could not couple the shame of resignation with the obscurity that public penance might bring. Wright Patman could but ponder the future implications of Rodino’s decision to bow out. What, indeed, would history say?

  Before and after his resignation, Nixon and his supporters either minimized Watergate or ignored it altogether. In May 1974 Nixon told Rabbi Baruch Korff that Watergate was the “thinnest scandal” in American history. Although embattled by that scandal near the end of his tenure, Nixon suggested to Alexander Haig that a failure to respond to a North Korean attack on an American reconnaissance plane in 1969 “was the most serious misjudgment of my Presidency, including Watergate.” He assured his fallen aide, Charles Colson, that Colson’s “dedicated service” to the nation would be remembered after Watergate had “become only a footnote in history.” At an October 1973 press conference, Nixon anticipated his theme of victimization when he denounced his congressional and media opponents as spiteful enemies who sought to reverse “the mandate of 1972.” Just after the resignation, David Eisenhower, the former President’s son-in-law, said that in fifteen years, Watergate would “look pretty small.” The President, Eisenhower said, had “simply acquiesced in the non-prosecution of aides who covered up a little operation into the opposition’s political headquarters”—hardly something to be taken seriously. In an April 1988 television appearance, Nixon repeated the “footnote” thesis but added that his delay in bombing North Vietnam was the biggest mistake of his presidency.

  If he could not reduce Watergate to banality, to something commonplace, Nixon’s fallback position always was to insist that no wrong had occurred. “When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal,” he told television interviewer David Frost in May 1977, in the first of many self-orchestrated “comebacks.” He referred to the “political” (not criminal) activities that led to his resignation. Following the broadcast of the Frost interviews, a Gallup poll found that 44 percent of those who watched were more sympathetic toward Nixon than they had been, while 28 percent felt less so. Yet Nixon’s early venture into revisionism and vindication failed dismally. Nearly three-quarters of the viewing audience believed he had been guilty of an obstruction of justice, and nearly as many thought he had lied during the Frost interviews themselves.2

  Fifteen years after the Watergate break-in, Nixon loyalists faithfully echoed their leader’s interpretation. At a 1987 conference, H. R. Haldeman resurrected the “third-rate burglary” pronouncement of June 1972, calling it the work of “stupid” Nixon supporters. If the problem had been “handled within the White House staff structure from the outset,” he said, the matter would have been contained—as if John Dean had ever worked for someone other than H. R. Haldeman. In a televised 1984 memoir, one which Nixon and his staff carefully controlled, the former President called the break-in a “botched” job, a “misdemeanor” that his enemies had turned into the “crime of the century.” In 1988, Patrick Buchanan dismissed the Watergate events as “Mickey Mouse misdemeanors,” evidently forgetting that felonies, as well as stupidity, followed the Watergate break-in. “A child of ten would have been able to figure out that it wasn’t a sensible thing for [Nixon] to do, to try that cover-up,” observed Richard Helms, no stranger to clan-destine affairs. It was “one of the stupidest things that anybody could have done.”

  Those who would minimize or dismiss Watergate focused on the break-in of Democratic headquarters, an event of which the President and his closest staff members pled total ignorance, and at the same time avoided any discussion of the abuses of power that preceded the burglary and the obstruction of justice that followed it. Those acts, which are part of the Watergate story, run like a seamless web throughout the Nixon presidency, and while they constituted the focus of the impeachment proceedings, they were ignored in the interpretation imposed by the former President. William Ruckelshaus, a victim of the Saturday Night Massacre, had a different stake in the interpretation of Watergate, but one more in accord with the facts: “[T]he break-in was trivial but what happened afterwards was not trivial. It was profound.” And Leon Jaworski, who perhaps understood Nixon’s stonewalling better than anyone, brusquely noted: “To deny impeachable acts and criminal wrongdoing is untruthful.… They cannot be erased by the belated efforts of the man who created them.”3 Jaworski had enthusiastically supported Nixon’s re-election bid in 1972; his later judgment gave the lie to Nixon’s bald claim that he had been undone by political enemies.

  * * *

  Revisionism perhaps is as inevitable as death and taxes, and the Watergate affair deserves some, to be sure. Contemporary commentator Nicholas von Hoffman, for example, shrewdly warned of the dangers of history written only from the perspective of the winners. The uncritical fascination with Judge John Sirica and his transformation into a neo-folk idol; the press’s excessive claims for its role; the lynch-mob mentality of what von Hoffman called the “monotone” media; and some questionable prosecutorial tactics suggest topics that deserve more critical scrutiny. But that kind of revisionism is quite different from one that proceeds from the premise that “everyone” had engaged in abuses of power, that obstruction of justice was a matter of “national security,” and that Nixon’s actions pale into insignificance against the achievements of his Administration. Such attitudes come close to validating Voltaire’s dictum that history is a pack of tricks the living play upon the dead.4

  How shall we remember Richard Nixon?

  The movie is Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973); the scene is set in the year 2073; several people, apparently anthropologists, are watching old videotapes of Richard Nixon:

  DOCTOR: Some of us have a theory that he might once have been President of the United States, but that he did something horrendous. So that all records—everything was wiped out about him. There is nothing in the history books, there are no pictures on stamps, on money.…

  MILES MONROE: He actually was President of the United States but I know whenever he used to leave the White House, the Secret Service would count the silverware.

  That, of course, was at the height of the Watergate affair. In the years that followed, Nixon regularly presented himself as an elder statesman and as a knowing political handicapper; still, for many, he remained a comic figure, a butt of derision, constantly forced back into private retreat as the barbs and jok
es resonated. But the Sleeper lines about forgetting have a ring of painful reality. We are, to some extent, in danger of forgetting—not forgetting Richard Nixon, but forgetting what he did and what he symbolized to his contemporaries. History, after all, is not just what the present wishes to make of the past for its own purposes; present-mindedness has its own alphabet of sins. Historians are entitled to weigh the past by the measure of the evidence of long-term consequences, and they must weigh by the standards of that past, not those of their own time. Yet as Leon Jaworski cautioned, they must not uncritically accept the judgments of the actors themselves.

  Memories proved short in some cases. The upper echelon of the so-called media “lynch mob,” the American Society of Newspaper Editors, who had heard Nixon proclaim “I am not a crook” in 1973, welcomed him to their annual meeting in 1984 with a standing ovation. The former President expressed surprise that he had been asked so few Watergate questions. Two years later, Newsweek reported that when asked what he considered Watergate’s greatest lesson, Nixon replied: “Just destroy all the tapes.” Yet two weeks afterward, the same periodical proclaimed Nixon “rehabilitated,” and featured him on its cover over the caption, “He’s back.” One scholar argued that Nixon might be the greatest domestic president of the twentieth century—a notion first advanced by John Ehrlichman—and described Watergate as only a “dim and distant curiosity” which eventually would be seen as “a relatively insignificant event.” Worse yet, treatment of Watergate ran the danger of trivialization, as when the Today television show interviewed Gordon Liddy for his views on the Soviet Union or when Jeb Magruder was selected to chair an ethics commission. Typically, media fascination with personality rather than with substance served to keep “the slippery former president” alive as a public figure, political writer David Broder noted, “when he ought to be living out his life in private and in disgrace.”

  The Nixon revisionism attempted to inflict a collective national amnesia on historians, the media, and our political leadership regarding Watergate. Watergate at times seemed lost in the mists of history, an odd fate for an event that consumed and convulsed the nation and tested the constitutional and political system as it had not been tested since the Civil War. But, in truth, once out of the White House, Richard Nixon commanded attention precisely because of his indissoluble links to Watergate, a connection indelibly engraved on our history. When asked in 1968 how he envisioned the first line of his New York Times obituary, Nixon replied: “ ‘He made a great contribution to the peace of the world.’ ” Twenty years later, he told reporters: “History will treat me fairly. Historians probably won’t[,] because most historians are on the left, and I understand that”—resorting to a familiar refrain and technique. Then he asked that he be remembered most for his China initiative.

  Nixon certainly will be remembered for his role in world affairs. He will receive heavy measures of both praise and criticism, and historians of both the Right and the Left probably will cross sides in unpredictable ways. It might never have occurred to Richard Nixon that so-called leftist historians helped rehabilitate Herbert Hoover. Whatever historians do, however, no “fair” history of the Nixon era can overlook the centrality of Watergate. Textbooks a century from now will inevitably speak of Richard Nixon as the first president to resign because of scandals. His achievements will get their due, as different generations weigh them, favorably or unfavorably, but they probably will not rival Watergate for historical attention.5

  Henry Kissinger contemptuously dismissed the political and media assault on the Nixon Administration as an “American extravaganza,” something profoundly distasteful to him as a longtime admirer of the ordered past of nineteenth-century Europe. “Extravaganza,” indeed; not every president has stood in danger of impeachment. Neither Nixon nor we can escape Watergate. Its history demands our serious attention; it was neither trivial nor insignificant. It raised important, painful questions about American political behavior and the American political system, questions that speak to the traditions and structure of American life. Whether the actors in the drama of Watergate confronted those questions successfully or unsuccessfully, directly or passively, honestly or conveniently, will be the subject for history. That is the significant, inescapable importance of Watergate.

  The wars of Watergate are rooted in the lifelong political personality of Richard Nixon. His well-documented record of political paranoia, his determination to wreak vengeance on his enemies, and his overweening concern with winning his own elections, rather than with the fortunes of his colleagues or with the substance of policy, animated the thoughts and actions of his aides, who fulfilled his wishes.

  The period is also bounded by much more than a burglary in 1972 and a resignation in 1974. The fall of Richard Nixon was the last act in a decade-long political melodrama that haunted the American stage, beginning with the civil rights movement and John F. Kennedy’s assassination. War and unprecedented social protest about the war and other complex problems in American life followed and eventually culminated in Watergate. To that extent, Richard Nixon was the last casualty.

  Richard Nixon cannot be separated from Watergate, however valiant his efforts. In time, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Colson, Dean, Butterfield, Haig, and the other supporting players in the Watergate drama will fade into the same well-deserved obscurity as have their counterparts in other historical scandals. Ultimately, we leave behind the spear carriers, what the poet Coleridge called the Ancient Mariner’s “strange and ghastly crew.” But Nixon himself will remain as the one indisputably unforgettable and responsable actor.

  President Nixon and his defenders have claimed that in the Watergate affair he behaved no differently from other presidents. Watergate emerged “exactly how the other side would have played it,” Nixon said in 1977. It was all “politics pure and simple.” With even less plausibility, he justified the crimes of Watergate as an outgrowth of the “end-justifies-the-means mentality of the 1960s.” The long answer to all that is that not everyone did it. The short answer is that others’ behavior is beside the point. Sam Ervin impatiently dismissed Nixon’s plea: “Murder and theft have been committed since the earliest history of mankind, but that fact has not made murder meritorious or larceny legal.”6 The Nixon rationalization rested on a claim that he was an unfortunate victim of time and place and deserves to be considered entirely apart from Watergate. Still, there is no dodging the fact that Watergate happened and he was found culpable.

  Egil Krogh, who engineered an illegal break-in on Nixon’s behalf, confessed that his work, “as official Government action,… struck at the heart of what the Government was established to protect, which is the … rights of each individual.” His mission had not been designed to protect national security but to gain material to discredit Daniel Ellsburg. Charles Colson similarly later admitted that “the official threats” to individual rights were wrong and had to be stopped. Yet the President himself repeatedly had initiated and encouraged those threats, and then had sacrificed his closest political subordinates to conceal his own involvement in their abuses of power and obstructions of justice. “I abdicated my moral judgments and turned them over to someone else,” Ehrlichman confessed to Judge Sirica. Watergate gives us cause to ponder anew Alexander Hamilton’s query in Federalist 1 whether in this nation, men would establish “good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions, on accident and force.”

  Richard Nixon discovered that the nation would tolerate an imperial president, but not an imperious one. Centuries of British and American constitutional experience have dictated limitations on executive power. However necessarily powerful the presidency may be in a fragile, dangerous world, however indispensable presidential action may seem for the nation’s security and well-being, the practiced traditions of constitutionalism and the rule of law still count for much.

  The Watergate wars offered eloquent testimony that the nation had a seriou
s commitment to the rule of law. Our tradition has been that of a nation of laws, not of men only; a nation of orderly means and processes, not of burglars or imperious executives and their compliant servants. That tradition is the essence of American constitutionalism. John Ehrlichman—and Richard Nixon—suffered irreparable damage when Erhlichman so cavalierly brushed aside Senator Herman Talmadge’s concern for the security of home and person. Men are not angels, Madison said, and we wisely have fenced them in with constitutional prescriptions for the restraint of power. The legal order, as Alexander Bickel wrote at the time of Watergate, required “not a presumed, theoretical consent, but a continuous actual one, born of continuous responsibility.” Rulers cannot legitimately impose a rule of law on the ruled unless they themselves will submit to it.7

  “[L]et us begin by committing ourselves to the truth, to see it like it is and tell it like it is, to find the truth, to speak the truth and to live the truth. That’s what we will do,” Richard Nixon told his fellow Republicans when they nominated him for the presidency in 1968. “Truth will become the hallmark of the Nixon Administration,” Herbert Klein told reporters several weeks after the election. But lies became the quicksand that engulfed Nixon, estranged him from his natural political allies, and eventually snapped the fragile bond of trust between leaders and led that binds government and the people. Nixon’s lies brought him to the dock and cost him his presidency. “I have impeached myself,” he confessed in 1977.8

  Political language can conceal the truth, as George Orwell and others have noted. Often truth is concealed with a knowing wink between the political leader and his audience, and much of it is concealed in the language of symbolic politics. Richard Whalen, a one-time Nixon adviser and speechwriter, described how Nixon confined his conservative instincts to private company, while publicly positioning himself to the left—where, he believed, the votes were. “You don’t know how to lie,” Nixon told an early political associate. “If you can’t lie, you’ll never go anywhere.” But for Nixon, lies led ultimately to a disgraceful resignation. At Republican leadership meetings throughout 1973 and 1974, Nixon’s allies pleaded with him to “get it all out on the table.” Nixon would say there was no more. But with repeated new disclosures, even those most steadfast among his supporters reached the point where, Congressman Barber Conable recalled, “you didn’t believe anything.” And still Nixon would insist, “it’s all out there.” The President informed Republican National Chairman George Bush, “George, I’m telling the truth.” But the tape revelations reportedly devastated Bush; lying, a friend said, just was “not in George Bush’s book.”9