The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down (8 page)

Ervin Committee
:
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The Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, chaired by Sam Ervin of North Carolina, was really a continuation of an investigation originated some six months before by Senator Edward Kennedy. A partisan undertaking that employed Kennedy’s lead investigator, the Ervin Committee conducted a legislative trial of the Watergate defendants, leaking adverse information with abandon and ending any hope of seating untainted juries for the eventual trials. Half of the Senate’s Republicans declined to support the creation of the committee, which was established by a vote of seventy-seven to nothing, because of earlier votes giving Democrats a clear majority of members, thereby assuring a partisan investigation, and limiting the inquiry to the 1972 presidential election, thereby precluding the investigation of extensive Democratic abuses in previous campaigns.

Watergate Special Prosecution Force
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Even more partisan than the Ervin Committee, the WSPF included no active Republicans at all. Exempted from normal departmental hiring procedures, its staff numbered about one hundred and were hand-picked for their prior service in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations (seven of the eight top officers had all worked together in the Kennedy-Johnson Department of Justice) or for their Eastern establishment, liberal bias. The prosecutors themselves admitted that “On paper, Cox’s army was predominantly Eastern-oriented and heavily Ivy League.”
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Calling on their “old boy network,” they hired only people already known to them, usually friends or former students.

Five task forces were soon created, each designed to target specific Nixon administration officials. Without the burden of other crimes to investigate or other laws to enforce and freed from effective restraints on their budget, the prosecutors could be single-minded in the pursuit of their quarry, calling upon three grand juries and much of the FBI and IRS for assistance. Operating with total independence from the Department of Justice, they reported, if at all, only to the Democratic majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Proving once again that power corrupts, the WSPF launched investigations far afield from the Watergate cover-up itself, the collapse
of which had been triggered by McCord’s letter to Judge Sirica. The prosecutors postponed the key Watergate indictments for ten months while they investigated twenty-five agency and department decisions without finding any hint that regulatory decisions had been influenced by campaign contributions (later characterized as “pay to play.”) They sent IRS and FBI agents to interview some 150 substantial contributors to the 1970 mid-term election campaigns (having nothing to do with Watergate but certainly scaring off future GOP contributions). They launched extensive investigations, entirely unrelated to Watergate, into likely Republican candidates for the 1976 presidential election, including President Gerald Ford, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, the vice presidential candidate Senator Robert Dole, former Secretary of the Treasury John Connally, and even California Governor Ronald Reagan. It is an astonishing record of abuses of prosecutorial discretion.

House Judiciary Committee
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In establishing the checks and balances of three separate but equal branches, the framers of the Constitution envisioned that the House would conduct its own investigations of impeachable offenses. But the HJC undertook virtually no independent investigation at all. Instead, it relied on grand jury information and faulty prosecutorial representations secretly transmitted through the connivance of Watergate prosecutors and Judge Sirica. Further, the HJC effectively denied the Republican minority any representation through the adoption of a unified staff (the nominal Republican leader of which dramatically switched sides and agreed to recommend impeachment as the committee prepared to vote). The committee did institute a study led by the Yale historian C. Vann Woodward but suppressed the findings, which showed that the accusations of abuse of power lodged against Nixon were not much different from accusations lodged against prior presidents going all the way back to Thomas Jefferson.
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Renata Adler, one of HJC’s key staff members, has even suggested that the committee was more successful at covering up past government wrongdoing than at producing a defensible case against President Nixon:

          
In view of the Church Committee’s accounts of the conduct of previous administrations, including violations of law and abuses of power since at least 1936, the first two Articles [of Impeachment] seemed to dissolve; as to [the third Article], there had been a disagreement about it from the start. The problem with all three Articles, and with their accompanying Summary of Information and Final Report, and with the thirty-odd volumes of Statements of Information . . . is that . . . all those volumes never quite made their case or any case.
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The Media
: The news media acted as irresponsibly as they customarily do in national scandals, breathlessly reporting rumors as established fact and inflaming the public with rank speculation. It’s great sport as long as you’re not the target, but it is hardly the proper role for an independent press that is accorded such special status by the First Amendment.

For many years one of the most famous Watergate figures was, paradoxically, unknown—Bob Woodward’s secret inside source known as “Deep Throat.” While the public was encouraged to believe that “Deep Throat” was a member of Nixon’s White House staff who was appalled at the wrongdoing of his colleagues, we learned in 2007 that he was really Mark Felt (1913–2008), the ambitious associate director of the FBI, who was angling for the top job.
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Now we can better appreciate prosecutor Earl Silbert’s assertion that nothing in Woodward’s and Bernstein’s stories was helpful in building their case: What Felt was leaking was already known to federal prosecutors. One might ask whether merely reporting what prosecutors already know and are actively pursuing really constitutes the sort of ground-breaking investigative reporting for which Woodward and Bernstein have received national acclaim. More troubling, it was revealed in 2013 that this duo had, in fact, successfully interviewed at least one Watergate grand juror, seemingly more than once—a flagrant breach of law that they had piously denied for decades.
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The Courts
: As we shall see, judges too were caught up in the partisan excitement of the process. The conduct of the trial judge was exceptionally egregious. Sirica became so enthralled by attention from the adoring media that playing to the galleries became more important than assuring that trials were fairly conducted.

A Crippling Legacy for Divided Governments
: Perhaps the most disturbing result of Watergate is the pattern of devastating scandals whenever a lame duck president has faced a Congress in which both houses are controlled by the opposing party, scandals made all the worse by special prosecutors.
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President Nixon was forced to resign by prosecutors Cox and Jaworski. President Reagan was humbled by prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, who investigated the Iran-Contra affair (and whose indictment of Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger the week before the 1992 election probably contributed to President Bush’s loss to Bill Clinton). President Clinton was impeached as a result of investigations by prosecutor Kenneth Starr, who exposed the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky affairs. That experience convinced Democrats to allow the Independent Prosecutor statute to expire, but departmentally appointed special prosecutors can still do great political harm. Most recently, George W. Bush’s presidency was crippled by the special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigations of the outing of Valerie Plame and the politically motivated firings of eight U.S. attorneys. One can only wonder what lies ahead, given the outcome of the 2014 mid-term elections.

This pattern suggests an institutional weakness—exacerbated by the twenty-four-hour news cycle—in a constitutional system in which the executive’s term does not end when the opposing party gains control of Congress. In a parliamentary form of government, as in the United Kingdom, the executive cannot govern without the support of the legislature. Under our system, however, the president is expected to finish out his term surrounded by the opposition. This constitutional weakness was responsible for the only other presidential impeachment, that of Andrew Johnson, a Southern Democrat who ran on a national-unity ticket with Lincoln late in the Civil War and who faced a hostile Republican Congress. The same weakness was exploited a hundred years later to reverse Nixon’s re-election, but the phenomenon has grown more disturbing with each subsequent recurrence.

JOHN DEAN’S RECENT DISCLOSURES

The most recent disturbing revelations about the Watergate prosecutions have come, surprisingly enough, in John Dean’s book
The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It
(2014). The book has been said to pound the final nails into Nixon’s Watergate coffin, but a careful reading reveals some startling admissions by the president’s principal accuser that call into question certain conclusions about Nixon’s involvement in the scandal.

For example, Dean clearly agrees that no one on the White House staff had any advance knowledge of the Watergate break-in.
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He also believes that, contrary to Magruder’s testimony, Gordon Strachan never received information from wiretaps and therefore could not have passed such information along to Haldeman or to Nixon.
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He repeatedly affirms that there was no express intent by President Nixon or his advisors to break the law
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and that Nixon had little idea of Watergate’s implications prior to their meeting of March 21, 1973.
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In fact, Dean asserts that members of the president’s staff did not inform one another or Nixon of their own involvement or of what had happened as the scandal unfolded.
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Dean even portrays Nixon as constantly alluding to his experience in the Alger Hiss case as the reason for his belief that any cover-up would be worse than the actual facts:

          
“But the worst thing a guy can do, there are two things, each is bad: One is to lie, and the other is to cover up.” Ehrlichman agreed, and Nixon continued, “If you cover up, you’re going to get caught. And if you lie, you’re going to be guilty of perjury. Now, basically, that was the whole story of the Hiss case.”
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It is important to understand that Nixon did not see the Hiss case as merely exposing a Soviet spy in the State Department. He remembered it as a devastating scandal for President Truman, whose administration had made the scandal much worse by trying to cover it up. There are some two dozen references to Hiss on tape segments that Dean cites. It is clear that if the president had been asked directly, he would have responded with the advice not to lie or cover up because the truth will come out in any event.

Dean also denies that Watergate was part of a larger espionage or sabotage operation, as Deep Throat had so dramatically asserted in one of his meetings with Woodward:

          
Woodward and Bernstein had been focused on who was responsible for the break-in and on portraying it as part of a larger espionage and sabotage effort. If that operation existed in any organized fashion, I did not (and do not) know who was behind it, and even four decades later I have never found evidence for its existence; it seems, instead, to have been a fantasy scenario apparently advanced by their Deep Throat source, Mark Felt.
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A critique by the journalist Max Holland of the Nixon Library’s oral history project shows why this statement of Dean’s is important. Referring to an interview with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein by the library’s former director Tim Naftali, Holland writes:

          
One of the critical questions that should have been put to them, as any Watergate scholar would know, has to do with the
Post
’s centerpiece story of 10 October 1972. Occupying the prestigious upper-right quadrant of the front page, it was boldly headlined “FBI Finds Nixon Aides Sabotaged Democrats.” The story was and still is regarded as the “centerpiece” of the newspaper’s pre-election coverage. It seemingly tied together the scandal’s disparate strands and
tried to put the break-in into a context, as one element in a far-flung program to subvert the Democrats if not the democratic process—which included greasing the way so that Nixon faced the one candidate he wanted to run against the most, George McGovern.
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Without this “centerpiece,” Watergate is nothing more than a case of excessive zeal that crossed the line into criminality, not part of a larger coordinated attempt to subvert the democratic process.