Influence: Science and Practice (11 page)

Reciprocal Concessions, Perceptual Contrast, and the Watergate Mystery

We have already discussed one reason for the success of the rejection-then-retreat technique—its incorporation of the reciprocity rule. This larger-then-smaller-request strategy is effective for a pair of other reasons as well. The first concerns the perceptual contrast principle we encountered in
Chapter 1
. That principle accounted for, among other things, the tendency of a man to spend more money on a sweater
following
his purchase of a suit than before: After being exposed to the price of the larger item, he sees the price of the less expensive item as
appearing
smaller by comparison. In the same way, the larger-then-smaller request procedure uses the contrast principle to make the smaller request look even smaller by comparison with the larger one. If I want you to lend me $5, I can make the request seem smaller than it is by first asking you to lend me $10. One of the beauties of this tactic is that, by first requesting $10 and then retreating to $5, I will have simultaneously engaged the force of both the reciprocity rule and the contrast principle. Not only will my $5 request be viewed as a concession to be reciprocated, it will also look like a smaller request than if I had just asked for $5 straightaway.

In combination, the influences of reciprocity and perceptual contrast can present a fearsomely powerful force. Embodied in the rejection-then-retreat sequence, they are jointly capable of genuinely astonishing effects. It is my feeling that they provide the only really plausible explanation of one of the most baffling political actions of our time: the decision to break into the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee that led to the ruin of Richard Nixon’s presidency. One of the participants in that decision, Jeb Stuart Magruder, upon hearing that the Watergate burglars had been caught, responded with appropriate bewilderment, “How could we have been so stupid?” Indeed, how?

To understand how enormously ill-conceived an idea it was for the Nixon administration to undertake the break-in, let’s review a few facts:

The idea was that of G. Gordon Liddy, who was in charge of intelligence-gathering operations for the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP). Liddy had gained a reputation among administration higher-ups as “flaky,” and there were questions about his stability and judgment.

Liddy’s proposal was extremely costly, requiring a budget of $250,000 in un-traceable cash.

In late March, when the proposal was approved in a meeting of the CREEP director, John Mitchell, and his assistants Magruder and Frederick LaRue, the outlook for a Nixon victory in the November election could not have been brighter. Edmund Muskie, the only announced candidate the early polls had given a chance of unseating the president, had done poorly in the primaries. It looked very much as though the most defeatable candidate, George McGovern, would win the Democratic nomination. A Republican victory seemed assured.

The break-in plan itself was a highly risky operation requiring the participation and discretion of ten men.

The Democratic National Committee and its chairman, Lawrence O’Brien, whose Watergate office was to be burglarized and bugged, had no information damaging enough to defeat the incumbent president. Nor were the Democrats likely to get any, unless the administration did something
very
,
very
foolish.

Despite the obvious counsel of the previously mentioned reasons, the expensive, chancy, pointless, and potentially calamitous proposal of a man whose judgment was known to be questionable was approved. How could it be that intelligent, accomplished men such as Mitchell and Magruder would do something so
very
,
very
foolish? Perhaps the answer lies in a little-discussed fact: The $250,000 plan they approved was not Liddy’s first proposal. In fact, it represented a significant concession on his part from two earlier proposals of immense proportions. The first of these plans, made two months earlier in a meeting with Mitchell, Magruder, and John Dean, described a $1 million program that included (in addition to the bugging of the Watergate) a specially equipped communications “chase plane,” break-ins, kidnapping and mugging squads, and a yacht featuring “high-class call girls” to blackmail Democratic politicians. A second Liddy plan, presented a week later to the same group of Mitchell, Magruder, and Dean, eliminated some of the program and reduced the cost to $500,000. It was only after these initial proposals
had been rejected by Mitchell that Liddy submitted his “bare-bones” $250,000 plan, in this instance to Mitchell, Magruder, and Frederick LaRue. This time the plan, still stupid but less so than the previous ones, was approved.

Could it be that I, a longtime patsy, and John Mitchell, a hardened and canny politician, might both have been so easily maneuvered into bad deals by the same compliance tactic—I by a Boy Scout selling candy and he by a man selling political disaster?

If we examine the testimony of Jeb Magruder, considered by most Watergate investigators to provide the most faithful account of the crucial meeting at which Liddy’s plan was finally accepted, there are some instructive clues. First, Magruder (1974) reports that “no one was particularly overwhelmed with the project”; but “after starting at the grandiose sum of $1 million, we thought that probably $250,000 would be an acceptable figure. . . . We were reluctant to send him away with nothing.” Mitchell, caught up in the “feeling that we should leave Liddy a little something . . . signed off on it in the sense of saying, ‘Ok, let’s give him a quarter of a million dollars and let’s see what he can come up with.’ ” In the context of Liddy’s initial extreme requests, it seems that “a quarter of a million dollars” had come to be “a little something” to be left as a return concession. With the clarity afforded by hindsight, Magruder has recalled Liddy’s approach in as succinct an illustration of the rejection-then-retreat technique as I have ever heard. “If he had come to us at the outset and said, ‘I have a plan to burglarize and wiretap Larry O’Brien’s office,’ we might have rejected the idea out of hand. Instead he came to us with his elaborate call-girl/kidnapping/mugging/sabotage/wiretapping scheme. . . . He had asked for the whole loaf when he was quite content to settle for half or even a quarter.”

It is also instructive that, although he finally deferred to his boss’s decision, only one member of the group, Frederick LaRue, expressed any direct opposition to the proposal. Saying with obvious common sense, “I don’t think it’s worth the risk,” he must have wondered why his colleagues, Mitchell and Magruder, did not share his perspective. Of course, there could be many differences between LaRue and the other two men that may have accounted for their differing opinions regarding the advisability of Liddy’s plan. But one stands out: Of the three, only LaRue had not been present at the prior two meetings, where Liddy had outlined his much more ambitious programs. Perhaps, then, only LaRue was able to see the third proposal for the clunker that it was and to react to it objectively, uninfluenced by the reciprocity and perceptual contrast forces acting upon the others.

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t

A bit earlier we said that the rejection-then-retreat technique had, in addition to the reciprocity rule, a pair of other factors working in its favor. We have already discussed the first of those factors, the perceptual contrast principle. The additional advantage of the technique is not really a psychological principle, as in the case of the other two factors. Rather, it is more of a purely structural feature of the request
sequence. Let’s once again say that I wish to borrow $5 from you. By beginning with a request for $10, I really can’t lose. If you agree to it, I will have received from you twice the amount I would have settled for. If, on the other hand, you turn down my initial request, I can retreat to the $5 favor that I desired from the outset and, through the action of the reciprocity and contrast principles, greatly enhance my likelihood of success. Either way, I benefit; it’s a case of heads I win, tails you lose.

Given the advantages of the rejection-then-retreat technique, one might think that there could be a substantial disadvantage as well. The victims of the strategy might resent having been cornered into compliance. The resentment could show itself in a couple of ways. First, the victim might decide not to live up to the verbal agreement made with the requester. Second, the victim might come to distrust the manipulative requester, deciding never to deal with that person again. If either or both of these events occurred with any frequency, a requester would want to give serious second thought to the use of the rejection-then-retreat procedure. Research indicates, however, that these victim reactions do not occur with increased frequency when the rejection-then-retreat technique is used. Somewhat astonishingly, it appears that they actually occur
less
frequently! Before trying to understand why this should be, let’s first look at the evidence.

Here’s My Blood, and Do Call Again