Watergate, page 1
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To my editor Jack Limpert, who was right about Watergate and who later opened Washington, D.C., up to me
and
to Jack Shafer, who taught me the lore and mythology of the D.C. press corps
Honesty is always the best policy in the end.
—Gerald R. Ford, remarks upon taking the oath of office, August 9, 1974
Introduction
Tears welled up in Mark Felt’s eyes as he worked his way through the crowd alongside his wife, Audrey. More than seven hundred current and former FBI agents spread across the plaza outside the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., some from as far away as field offices in Florida, Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Three buses of agents had left Manhattan at 3 a.m. to arrive in time for the court hearing. Now, as Felt arrived, they all applauded.
It was an unprecedented gathering for an unprecedented day: the April 20, 1978, arraignment of Felt, the bureau’s former number two official, alongside former FBI acting director L. Patrick Gray III and a third bureau leader, Edward S. Miller, on felony charges that they “did unlawfully, willfully and knowingly combine, conspire, confederate and agree together to injure and oppress citizens of the United States” by authorizing FBI agents to conduct illegal break-ins and surveillance. Seventy other FBI agents now also faced disciplinary proceedings.
Felt, Gray, and Miller all planned to issue not guilty pleas—they believed their actions had been in keeping with the best interests of the national security of the United States. They hadn’t hurt the country, they’d protected it. The agents who now surrounded Felt agreed. “When these men acted, they were doing exactly what Attorney General [Richard] Kleindienst, the White House, the Congress, and the American public wanted and needed to have done at that time,” the head of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI said after the indictment.
At the courthouse entrance, Felt and his wife paused to hear two agents, one current, one former, read out statements of support. Felt looked out at the men who embodied the bureau to which he’d dedicated his life, the men he’d once hoped to lead himself as Hoover’s handpicked successor as director, an opportunity he had been robbed of.
In the moment there on the courthouse steps, overcome by the support and the spectacle, all Felt could find the energy to say was a simple “God bless you all.” Then he and Audrey turned and entered the courthouse.
The scene marked a final and dramatic exclamation point on six years in the life of the FBI and the nation—a period that had seen the death of Hoover and scandal inside the FBI, the Pentagon Papers and a national loss of faith in its government and its leader, the landslide reelection and then stunning downfall of Richard Nixon, and dozens upon dozens of sprawling court cases that spun out of the related political scandals summed up simply as “Watergate”—and unbeknownst to everyone on the plaza that day, Felt had played a far larger role than anyone imagined. It was a secret that he would hold long after his court case would conclude and he was eventually pardoned by President Ronald Reagan, well into the next century and his tenth decade.
He, William Mark Felt, Sr., of Twin Falls, Idaho, son of a carpenter, also went by one of the most famous names in American politics.
He was Deep Throat.
* * *
Richard Nixon was one of the most consequential political figures of the twentieth century. Judged on paper and résumé alone, Nixon should stand among the giants who occupied the White House through the American Century.
As a young congressman, he helped fuel the Red Scare and give life to McCarthyism, turning “Communist” into a career-ending slur. From 1952 to 1972, he was on the Republican Party’s national ticket five times; when he finally ascended to the presidency, he shaped, escalated, prolonged, and eventually wound down the Vietnam War as it roiled the nation; he signed the Clean Air Act and created the Environmental Protection Agency, signed the Occupation Safety and Health Act, transformed the Post Office into a quasi-private government enterprise, hiked Social Security payments, declared war on cancer, signed Title IX to give women opportunities in academia and on athletic playing fields, transformed the military by ending the draft and creating an all-volunteer force, and helped push forward civil rights. He tried to position his government at the forefront of equal opportunity—hiring a presidential staff assistant focused solely on bringing more qualified women into government, tripling the number of women in policy-making roles, recruiting one thousand women into previously male middle-management roles, and bringing the first-ever female military aides into the White House. He even wrestled momentarily with the idea of providing a conservative-style universal basic income to lift Americans from poverty. He averted a larger war in the Middle East amid the conflagration of the Yom Kippur War; he calmed the Cold War and signed arms control treaties with the Soviet Union; and he reopened diplomatic relations with China. He was the first president to visit a Communist country, the first to visit Peking, the first to stand in Moscow.
“The Nixon presidency was an intense one—hardworking, determined, wide-ranging, organized, and creative,” concluded his close advisor and onetime cabinet secretary Maurice Stans. “I don’t believe any man could have been more determined to do the best possible job as president.”
In an era when the newsweeklies dominated American life, Nixon filled the cover of TIME a total of fifty-five times—more than a year’s worth of magazines over the course of his political career, more than any other figure in history. He was, as would become clear, the hinge upon which the entire American Century turned, the figure who ushered out the expansive liberal consensus of the New Deal and the Great Society and brought to the mainstream a darker, racialized, nativist, fearmongering strain of the Republican Party and American politics that would a half century later find its natural conclusion in Donald Trump.
Yet all of that would be overshadowed by a one-word scandal that would ultimately lead to the first congressional impeachment hearings in a century and would force him ignominiously from office. In the fifty years since the June night five burglars entered a then new and trendy hotel and office complex on the banks of the Potomac River, “Watergate” has become the scandal that has defined all other scandals, “gate” the suffix of choice to denote a scandal of epic proportions.I It fundamentally upended Americans’ relationship with their government and revealed a cynical abuse of power that fueled a decade-long epic loss of trust and faith in the institutions that had long led American life. “To view Watergate in perspective it is essential to remember that it occurred when presidential power was great—the weakening from Vietnam was still incipient. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson had been very powerful, dynamic executives. Richard M. Nixon’s first term in office vastly consolidated power in the White House,” recalls Donald Sanders, a Watergate senate investigator. “There was a very different aura about the infallibility and inaccessibility of the White House. The balloon had yet to be punctured.”
It is also, in many ways, the dividing line between “old” Washington and “new,” capturing a sea change in power, institutional dynamics, and politics. Watergate stands simultaneously as the last event of an old era—when segregationists ruled Capitol Hill and World War I veterans walked its halls, and the city’s rhythms were driven by print newspaper deadlines—and the introduction of a new generation of political action, sweeping up some of the biggest names in our twenty-first-century culture, from future actor and senator Fred Thompson to journalist Diane Sawyer to a young, bespectacled Hillary Rodham to a young Roger Stone, who got his first taste of dirty tricks on the national scale amid Nixon’s Watergate. It ushered into Washington in 1974 the more than fifty new Democratic lawmakers, the class of “Watergate Babies,” who would shape public policy well into this next century; set in motion a world-shaping shift in the Republican Party that elevated Ronald Reagan and the Bush family and a particular breed of cynical partisanship that would continue well into the twenty-first century; and inspired a generation of investigative journalists longing to emulate Woodward and Bernstein.
* * *
At its simplest, Watergate is the story of two separate criminal conspiracies: the Nixon world’s “dirty tricks” that led to the burglary on June 17, 1972, and then the subsequent wider cover-up. The first conspiracy was deliberate, a sloppy and shambolic but nonetheless developed plan to subvert the 1972 election; the second was reactive, almost instinctive—it seems to have happened simply because no one said no. The popular-history version we now tell about Watergate—the DNC break-in, Woodward, Bernstein, Deep Throat, the Ervin Committee hearings, yada, yada, yada, Nixon resigns—represents just a sliver of the full story, which is not only bigger but oh ever so much weirder. The drama encompassed in those two conspiracies is in fact much darker than the rosy Technicolor version produced by Robert Redford—there’s the alcoholism of Martha Mitchell and Nixon’s own spiral of depression during the Yom Kippur War, as well as criminality of an unprecedented and sad breadth—and also tells a more human story, one filled not with giants, villains, and heroes, but with flawed everyday peopl e worried about their families, their careers, and their legacies.
Watergate represents much more than an individual moment, decision, event, or target. It has so many parts that there is no single motive or story to tell, no single thread that makes all the pieces come together—even the break-in that triggered the whole public unraveling seems possibly to have been committed by burglars with two or even three distinct and separate motives. “Watergate” was less an event than a way of life for the Nixon administration—a mindset that evolved into a multiyear, multifaceted corruption and erosion of ethics within the office of the president.
“Watergate,” wrote Tad Szulc, one of the New York Times reporters who covered it, “was not born in a vacuum. The men who planned, ordered, and executed the Watergate crimes were neither the product of nor a sudden aberration in American history. Both Watergate and those associated with it were, instead, the result of a strange American historical process with roots in the early years of the Cold War.” What would be later summarized as “dirty tricks” really was the story of how Nixon’s team, ironically blinded by the desire for law and order and national security, violated the constitutional rights of politicians, journalists, and American citizens.
Understanding the story as a whole involves not just the bugging operation and burglary at the Democratic campaign offices but a broader umbrella of nearly a dozen other distinct but related scandals: the Chennault Affair, the Huston Plan, the Kissinger wiretaps and the illegal bombing of Cambodia, the Pentagon Papers, ITT and the Dita Beard memo, the Vesco donation, milk price fixing, campaign “rat-fucking,” Spiro Agnew’s bribery case, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations, plus a little bit of presidential tax fraud. (In fact, Nixon’s most famous line in history, “I am not a crook,” came not because of the Watergate scandal but because of an associated and concurrent tax investigation.)II Some of these other associated scandals would be monumental in their own right; the still-opaque Chennault Affair represents one of the only instances of credible treason allegations in U.S. history, and the first-ever resignation of a vice president, Spiro Agnew, came amid a scandal that under normal circumstances would have been more serious than almost any that has touched the White House in 240 years—yet they are largely forgotten or overlooked. Each event, though—unfolding before, during, and after the bugging operation—influenced the mindset of the Nixon world and shaped public opinion and Washington’s atmosphere as the post-burglary investigations unfolded.
As time would make clear, the actions around the Watergate scandal were certainly criminal, and there was without a doubt a conspiracy, but labeling it all a “criminal conspiracy” implies a level of forethought, planning, and precise execution that isn’t actually evident at any stage of the debacle. Instead, the key players slipped, fumbled, and stumbled their way from the White House to prison, often without ever seeming to make a conscious decision to join the cover-up. Ultimately, multiple cabinet officials would face criminal charges, an FBI director would resign and face prosecution, a congressman would commit suicide, and a CIA director would plead guilty to misleading Congress. There were secret hush money payoffs, threats of blackmail, layer upon layer of betrayal, an alleged kidnapping, and even a suspicious plane crash. There were rumors of high-priced call girls, allegations of the CIA and the Pentagon spying on the Nixon White House itself, and accusations of illegal donations from the Greek military junta. All told, sixty-nine people would be indicted on charges stemming from the related investigations—including New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner—and companies from Goodyear Tire and Gulf Oil to American Airlines and 3M found themselves pleading guilty to illegally financing Nixon’s reelection. Nixon’s attorney general and commerce secretary were put on trial together, a case then dubbed the “trial of the century,” despite the fact that it would be all but forgotten in the future. The careers of three consecutive attorneys general were upended.
We have come to understand many facets of this larger story only with time, and subsequent revelations make clear how little of it many understood as it unfolded. Thanks to the pop heroism of that iconic movie and book All the President’s Men, we’ve long seen the Washington Post as a—perhaps the—central figure of Watergate, crediting the paper’s Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Ben Bradlee, and Katharine Graham with courageously cracking open the case. In fact, there were a half-dozen reporters who played key roles—including columnist Jack Anderson and a team from the Los Angeles Times—who rightly deserve pride of place in the Watergate story alongside Woodward and Bernstein. And with the added insight of Deep Throat’s identity (Mark Felt came forward only in 2005) the story shifts to include a pitched battle for control of the Justice Department and a fight over the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover, played out inside the FBI itself and within the executive branch more broadly.
* * *
Answering the questions—How could they!? What were they thinking?!—lies in the mystique of power unique to the presidency and the capital, and the arrogance and blindness that accompany those who serve the nation’s chief executive. While we often think of Watergate as a “Nixon” story, it’s better understood as a “Washington” story. Jack Limpert, my former editor and predecessor at Washingtonian magazine, was the first person to zero in on Mark Felt as Deep Throat, back in June 1974, and to him the Watergate story was always about more than just the players. “It tells you an awful lot more about how things happen in Washington,” he wrote then. It is the greatest story ever told about power—the need and hunger for it, the drive to protect it, how it is challenged, and how it flows month to month in a city governed by both well-calibrated checks and balances and all manner of official and unofficial traditions. “Power is Washington’s main marketable product,” wrote Jack Anderson in 1973 in the midst of Watergate. “Power is the driving force that brings together people of different philosophies and varying interests in the constantly evolving battle for control.”
Watergate also explains the deeper functions and purpose of government and the interplays of the Constitution—how the checks and balances of Articles I, II, and III combine and interlock with the Bill of Rights and other constitutional amendments to enable a smooth, functioning nation—a success story of how government worked in a moment of grave crisis when America was at the peak of its power in the twentieth century. “I had thrown down a gauntlet to Congress, the bureaucracy, the media, and the Washington establishment and challenged them to engage in epic battle,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs. Watergate didn’t just rewrite the rules, it set new ones.
At the same time, the fall of Richard Nixon was less inevitable than we usually remember. Handled differently, the scandal might have just been a blip on the political radar, an almost forgotten headline on his triumphant march to a second term and a successful next four years in the White House. Perhaps Watergate would have ended up in history only a fun bar-trivia answer, akin to the 1974 scandal where stripper Fanne Foxe jumped into D.C.’s Tidal Basin after being caught with the powerful chair of the House Ways and Means Committee Wilbur Mills. Instead, the White House’s own bad instincts and the most classic characteristic of Washington—ambition—are what ultimately caused the unraveling of Nixon’s world.
* * *
An irony of Watergate is that the once secret plot to subvert American democracy now stands as one of the most documented and covered stories in American history; anyone seeking to understand the story of Richard Nixon’s secrecy and subterfuge drowns in information. There are more than thirty memoirs by key participants alone—two of which, Nixon’s and Kissinger’s, top 1,100 and 2,800 pages, respectively—plus scores more journalistic and scholarly books, thousands of pages of oral histories, tens of thousands of news articles, and hundreds of thousands of pages of investigation and documentation in government archives around the country.III The transcripts of relevant Nixon tapes stretch to 650 pages in one volume and 740 pages in another; the Senate’s Ervin Committee investigation encompasses thirty volumes, totaling 16,091 pages. Two major libel lawsuits in the 1990s added thousands more pages of documentation, testimony, and evidence. More files have been made accessible only in recent years; many recently declassified FBI documents, like those pertaining to George Steinbrenner, have only become available after the subjects’ deaths.
