The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down
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Authors: Geoff Shepard
THE REAL WATERGATE SCANDAL
Copyright © 2015 by Geoff Shepard
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, website, or broadcast.
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First e-book edition 2015: 978-1-62157-386-9
Originally published in hardcover, 2015: 978-1-62157-328-9
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Shepard, Geoffrey Carroll, 1944-
The real Watergate scandal : collusion, conspiracy, and the plot that brought Nixon down / Geoff Shepard.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-62157-328-9
1. Watergate Affair, 1972-1974. 2. Nixon, Richard M. (Richard Milhous), 1913-1994. 3. United States--Politics and government--1969-1974. 4. Conspiracies--United States--History--20th century. I. Title.
E860.S529 2015
973.924--dc23
2015012716
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To the outstanding group of men and women who served honorably and with distinction in the Nixon administration
Prud’hon’s
Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime
CONTENTS
PART I: A BASIC WATERGATE BACKGROUND
CHAPTER
1
Identifying the Real Wrongdoing
CHAPTER
2
Understanding Watergate
CHAPTER
4
The Secret Meetings between Judges and Watergate Prosecutors
PART III: GETTING NIXON “AT ALL COST”
CHAPTER
5
Staffing the Nixon Impeachment
PART IV: DENYING DUE PROCESS TO THE WATERGATE DEFENDANTS
CHAPTER
6
A Fair and Impartial Trial Judge
CHAPTER
7
Evenhanded, Nonpartisan Prosecutors
CHAPTER
8
An Untainted and Unbiased Jury
CHAPTER
9
The Automatic Right to an Appeal
Appendix B
Woodward’s Notes from Jaworski Interview of 12/5/74
Appendix C
Jaworski Letter to Sirica of 12/27/73
Appendix D
Lacovara Memo to Jaworski of 1/27/74
Appendix E
Jaworski Memo to Confidential Watergate File of 2/12/74
Appendix F
Wilson Letter to Sirica of 3/12/74
Appendix G
Ruth Memo to Jaworski of 2/19/74
Appendix H
Jaworski Memo to Confidential Watergate File of 3/1/74
Appendix I
Lacovara Memo to Jaworski of 1/7/74
Appendix J
Jaworski Draft Memo to Ruth of 1/21/74
Appendix K
Kennedy/Johnson DOJ Chart
Appendix L
Rient Memo to Ben-Veniste of 2/6/74
Appendix M
Final Decisions Memo of 2/20/74
Appendix N
Lacovara Memo to Jaworski of 2/22/74
Appendix O
Denny/Rient Memo to Files of 11/15/73
Appendix P
Denny Notes of Meeting of 10/10/73
Appendix Q
List of Watergate-Related Appeals
MY ROLE
I was there, in the room, at the very moment Richard Nixon’s Watergate defense collapsed. It was a Monday afternoon, July 26, 1974, just hours after the Supreme Court had upheld the special prosecutor’s subpoena for sixty-four more White House tape recordings. Fred Buzhardt, special counsel to the president and Nixon’s principal defense lawyer, had been directed to review one conversation in particular. It had taken place on June 23, 1972, just six days after the Watergate burglary arrests. Soon known as the “smoking gun,” it revealed Nixon concurring with his staff’s recommendation that they get the CIA to tell the FBI to limit its Watergate investigation. Nixon could not explain the tape, and Buzhardt had no reason to think it was anything other than confirmation that the president himself had authorized an obstruction of justice within a week of the Watergate arrests.
On that Monday afternoon, Buzhardt telephoned Nixon and his chief of staff, Alexander Haig, and told them what he had heard on the June 23 tape. With no explanation forthcoming and bound by the Court’s ruling, the president’s lawyers quickly concluded they could no longer support his efforts to avoid impeachment. Left alone and defenseless, the Nixon presidency quickly collapsed.
I was in Buzhardt’s office during that conversation and remember it as vividly as if it were yesterday. As soon as it ended, I became the third person to hear that key tape. I was the one who prepared its official transcript and the one who named it the “smoking gun.”
One of Watergate’s great ironies is that we all misinterpreted that recorded conversation. John Dean, President Nixon’s principal accuser, has recently acknowledged that the president and his defense team were totally mistaken about that tape and its significance. If we had known the context in which that conversation had taken place, the president would not have had to resign and, in Dean’s own words, “could have lived to fight another day.”
But resign he did, just four days following the tape’s public release. I was in the East Room of the White House when he bid his staff adieu and on the South Lawn when his helicopter lifted off for the last time. It was the saddest day of my life, but my association with Richard Nixon neither started nor ended with Watergate.
It is as though I have been living in Nixon’s shadow since I came of age, and happily so. Readers deserve to know this background, so they can properly appreciate the analysis and disclosures that follow.
I was Nixon’s junior by some thirty years. Like him, I was born and raised in Southern California. I know what it is like to have grown up far from the liberal Eastern establishment in what was then the cultural backwater of greater Los Angeles. I first heard Nixon speak in 1960, when he was running for president, at something called the Iowa Picnic in Long Beach. So many people from the Hawkeye state had moved to the area in the 1930s and ’40s that it was known as “Iowa by the Sea,”
and their annual picnic was a huge social affair. A junior at Woodrow Wilson High School, I’d been assigned to write a paper on Nixon’s speech. I don’t remember much of what he said, but I do recall my disappointment that he talked more about his family’s Iowa connections than about the weighty issues of the day. It made it tough to write my report.
Our paths crossed again five years later at a scholarship luncheon given by the Republican Women’s Club of Whittier, California. Now a junior at Whittier College, Nixon’s alma mater, I had just been elected student body president and had won the Richard Nixon scholarship—worth $250, not an insignificant sum in those days to a struggling student. Since that speech at the Iowa Picnic, Nixon had lost the 1960 presidential race to John Kennedy and the 1962 California gubernatorial race to Pat Brown. He had decided to quit politics for good and relocated to New York City to practice law. He was loyal to Whittier College but hadn’t come all that way just to present my award. Having arranged for Bob Hope to be Whittier’s commencement speaker that year, Nixon came for the graduation ceremony. To everyone’s pleasant surprise, the former vice president also came to the ladies’ luncheon, and I was seated next to him. We talked about our respective college experiences, he gave a nice speech about how much Whittier meant to him, and we parted ways. The following week I learned that Nixon, upon returning to New York, had personally doubled my scholarship. Money was tight in those days, and even after fifty years I still consider myself indebted to him for his generosity.