Watergate: Conclusion

When Suleiman the Magnificent died in Hungary in 1566, the Grand Vizier at the time, Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, had the witnesses to the death killed in order to keep the Sultan’s passing a secret so that the successor, Selim II, would have time to take over. Many times I’ve wondered if Nixon ever secretly wished he had such extreme powers, for the Nixon Administration’s undoing ultimately came from internal witnesses.

Within a week of the break-in, the Nixon Administration had decided to hinder the FBI’s investigation into the break-in, not just to cover up the Administration’s involvement in the wiretapping of the DNC, but also to conceal the questionable uses to which campaign funds had been put.

The summer of 1972 was relatively uneventful, on the surface. Behind the headlines, John Dean was meeting with Acting FBI Directory Gray ostensibly to “cooperate”, but actually to keep abreast and ahead of the investigation. And, hush money was paid to Howard Hunt.

The Watergate burglars were indicated in September. The next day, Bob Woodward got in touch with his source, Deep Throat. This source was in fact Mark Felt at the FBI, and Felt was seeing everything the FBI had in the investigation. Felt told Woodward that campaign money had financed the Watergate operation and “other intelligence-gathering activities.” The resulting Washington Post story increased the pressure on the White House, but the firewall still held. In November, Nixon defeated George McGovern with 60% of the popular vote and a landslide in the Electoral College, 520 to 17.

The trial of the Watergate burglars began in early January. Guilty verdicts were returned January 30 1973. Sentencing was scheduled for March 23. The judge in the trial, John Sirica, wrote in his book To Set the Record Straight about his belief that the trial had not revealed everything about the break-ins.

I was far from alone in my skepticism about the facts brought out at the trial. The Senate of the United States had voted to investigate the Republican campaign tactics. The press was full of caustic comments about the trial itself and the government’s handling of it. I had been practicing law for thirty years. I had handled cased involving political scandals. I knew the Watergate case was not what the trial in January had made it seem. But by late March, with the trial over, there didn’t seem to be a lot more I could do about it.

On March 20, John Dean received word that Howard Hunt was demanding more money. Dean wrote in Blind Ambition:

O’Brien gave me a helpless look. “I don’t know, John. I asked him the same question and he [Hunt] just said ‘You tell Dean I need the money by the close of business Wednesday. And if I don’t get it, I’m going to have to reconsider my options. And I’ll have some seamy things to say about what I did for John Ehrlichman while I was at the White House.'”

The next day, March 21, Dean met with Nixon about this new threat. Dean described the growing threat with the memorable phrase, “We have a cancer within – close to the Presidency – that’s growing.” In that meeting Nixon asked how much money the indicated burglars would need. Dean tossed out a figure of a million dollars over the next two years. And according to Dean, Nixon said “We could get that.” And with that, Watergate moved into the cover-up of the cover-up phase, and ultimately to its ugly conclusion.

On March 23, Judge Sirica made public a letter he had received from James McCord a few days earlier. In the letter, McCord, the leader of the burglary team, said that political pressure had been applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent, that perjury had occurred, that others had been involved with the operation who had not been identified in the trial, and that the operation was not a CIA operation. Sirica wrote about revealing the letter in open court to make it part of the trial record,

As I worked through them, an excruciating pain began to build directly in the center of my chest. It was nearly more than I could bear, but I couldn’t quit before the end of the letter. I finally finished the letter and quickly called for a recess. As I hurried off the bench, the reporters flooded toward the double swinging doors at the back of the courtroom. The dam had broken.

Indeed it had, and everything that followed was the just the system grinding towards its inevitable conclusion.


Dean wrote about his thoughts of self-preservation in the wake of the letter as the people around the President scrambled for the lifeboats.

So. The President had decided to cut Mitchell and Magruder loose. They were now expendable because they threatened his own position. And I had a second thought: I was also expendable. Or did Haldeman think I might go before the grand jury and lie? “One thing I’ve got to tell you, Bob. If I am going to go before the grand jury I’m going to tell it exactly the way things happened.”

And by April 6, Dean was cooperating with the federal prosecutors. On April 30, Haldeman and Ehrlichman resigned, and Dean was fired.

In May 1973, the Senate Watergate Committee began its famous hearings. Archibald Cox was appointed Special Prosecutor to oversee the investigation into the White House’s involvement. In July, the Committee hearings led to the mother of all revelations. Alexander Butterfield, an assistant to Nixon, revealed the existence of a recording system in the Oval Office. Any conversation or phone call since 1971 had been recorded.

The final phase of Watergate had now begun, and it would be a lengthy fight. Prosecutors wanted the tapes and Nixon refused to provide them. It wouldn’t be until July 1974 that a unanimous Supreme Court decided the President would have to turn over the tapes. Nixon resigned August 9, 1974.

In between though, from July 1973 to August 1974, there was still a great of political upheaval to unfold. In October 1973, in the “Saturday Night Massacre”, Nixon had Special Prosecutor Cox fired. Attorney General Elliot Richardson refused to carry out the firing and resigned, as did Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus. The third ranking member in the Justice Department, Robert Bork, did carry out the firing.

Leon Jaworski was then appointed as Special Prosecutor. To illustrate just how quickly the generations can pass, Jaworski was a war crimes prosecutor in Germany following World War 2. In his own book The Right and the Power, he writes of the experience of filling Cox’s shoes,

I analyzed Haig’s dilemma. Public reaction to the Saturday Night Massacre must have been far more violent than the White House anticipated. Congressmen had to be reporting to Haig and other Administration officials that their constituents were baffled and angry. The morning paper said there was talk in Congress of creating a Special Prosecutor’s office outside the President’s control. Obviously, Haig and the President were trying to beat Congress to the punch.

It seemed reasonable that Haig and Bork, as well as William Saxbe, whom the President had designated as his choice to take over as Attorney General, had made calls around the country for someone Congress and the public might accept. Haig said my name had surface more than others.

I would never have been appointed Special Prosecutory but for the fact that the public would not have allowed the selection of someone biased in Nixon’s favor. I was not the ideal selection from Nixon’s standpoint, but someone like me had to be chosen, even at the cost of giving the new Special Prosecutory more independence than Archibald Cox.

Two weeks after Jaworski’s appointment, Nixon made his famous “I am not a crook” remark. The indictments and trials of the major figures also took place throughout 1974. Impeachment proceedings against Nixon began in May 1974.

Watergate was another body blow to the American psyche. Coming after the tumult of the 1960s with the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Vietnam, the violence in Chicago in 1968, Nixon appeared to be a steady hand on the tiller of the ship of state, but the revelations of deep corruption at the highest levels of government changed how Americans viewed their government.

There were numerous reforms in the wake of Watergate, particularly in the area of campaign finances. Also, the role of Special Prosecutor was changed to make it harder for one to be removed. The FISA court, so abused in the Left’s pursuit of Trump, arose out of this time.

The election in 1976 was the next opportunity for the American public to express their opinion about Nixon’s party, and Jimmy Carter was elected with 297 electoral votes to 240 for Ford. The next four years brought malaise the Iranian hostage crises, and that in turn led to the eight-year presidency of Ronald Reagan.

I’ll close with these thoughts from Jeb Stuart Magruder. In his book, published in 1974 at the height of the uproar over Watergate, he wrote,

I am a fairly representative member of my generation. And, looking back over my life, I think that I and many members of my generation place far too much emphasis on our personal ambitions, on achieving success, as measured in materialistic terms, and far too little emphasis on moral and humanistic values. I think that most of us who were involved in Watergate were unprepared for the pressures and temptations that await you at the highest levels of the political world. We had private morality but not a sense of public morality. Instead of applying our private morality to public affairs, we accepted the President’s standards of political behavior, and the results were tragic for him and for us.

But the reader is assured that there is a great deal of shame and sorrow. I’ve damaged my own life. I’ve hurt those I love most, and I’ve helped deal a terrible blow to the political cause I believe in. I hope that young people who are in politics, or who may enter politics, may view this book as a cautionary tale. I won’t tell them, as Gordon Strachan did, to stay away from politics. I would tell them, rather, to play the game hard but clean, and to bring to public life the same high standards they would apply in private life. I didn’t do that, and I feel that I owe an apology to the American people for having abused the position of public trust that I was given.

Now fifty years removed from Watergate, I fear that Magruder’s admonition to allow private morality to influence public morality has been forgotten. Worse, I fear too many in government have lost even their private morality. Still, for young people looking to make a difference, politics are the front lines in the ongoing culture wars. As Magruder said, there is room for honest individuals to stand in the breach. For those who accept the challenge, I say in advance “thank you for your service.”

7 thoughts on “Watergate: Conclusion

  1. Alas Jeff, the ship had sailed. The only thing swamp learned was how to use the MSM to run cover and doubled down on the crookedness. Not only is corruption at the highest level tolerated, it is celebrated, and anyone with a modicum of moral values is villainized, ostracized and ultimately cancelled.

  2. You can read the 1968 Democrat platform here: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/1968-democratic-party-platform
    And the 1968 Republican platform here: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1968

    For the life of me, I couldn’t tell which was which if you removed a few phrases that identified Democrats and Republicans. Abortion is not mentioned. Race is not mentioned. Immigration is not mentioned. There is, perhaps, slightly more emphasis in the Democrat platform on investing in under served communities in the US.
    Both parties want to strengthen the military, get an “honorable settlement” in Vietnam, fight inflation, and protect senior’s from poverty. Both parties want to be strongly confrontational with the USSR. Both parties are MAGA by today’s standards, the brag that the US has 1/20th of the world’s population and 50% of its manufacturing.

  3. ^ This is the ultimate “Apples to Oranges” scenario — the Watergate hearings were televised at a time when the “Big 3” ruled the screen and newspapers in most big cities ran 2, and sometimes 3, editions each day. The public was presented with intelligent commentary from journalists forced into balance by the Fairness Doctrine. That was then.

    Today the screen media is a granular patchwork of tens of thousands of amateur prognosticators funneled by algorithm into the giant echo chambers of YouTube, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook. No one under 50 is watching broadcast television and no one under 65 remembers Watergate. This is now.

  4. The public was presented with intelligent commentary from journalists forced into balance by the Fairness Doctrine.

    The Fairness Doctrine had nothing to do with how the broadcast networks approached the news in those days. It was a homogenous worldview that was in harmony with the editorial stances of the New York Times and the Washington Post. The only place one was likely to hear conservative commentary in that era was on public television because of Firing Line. CBS News would offer commentary from Eric Sevareid, a Murrow colleague and standard issue liberal who dispensed midcentury bromides of the Adlai Stevenson variety.

    No one under 50 is watching broadcast television and no one under 65 remembers Watergate.

    Half right — very few people who aren’t approaching retirement watch the network news these days. I will not turn 65 any time soon and I remember Watergate very well.

  5. You’re getting close — at that time there were no “alternative” news (propaganda) shows like FOX. There is a major difference not only from a media standpoint but who served on the Watergate Committee and how the hearing was conducted. You had people like Senators Sam Ervin, Dem, and Howard Baker, Republican along with Sam Dash and Fred Thompson — credible people who were not overly partisan.

    If the MAGA crowd wants to find a time when America was great, they should look to 1973 when the GOP was committed to principles rather than power, and their followers were informed by facts rather than falsehoods.

  6. Ervin was as partisan as anyone. And if you were around in 1973 you would know that. My father was politically active in that era and was friends with one of the Republican Congressmen on the Judiciary Committee who voted to impeach Nixon, Harold Froehlich, who represented the 8th Congressional District in Wisconsin. Froehlich strongly believed he did the right thing by voting to impeach, but he got no credit for being principled and was voted out of office in 1974 anyway, losing to a Norbertine priest named Fr. Robert Cornell. I was in grade school at the time and I helped Froehlich (who is still alive) with literature drops on two of his campaigns, in 1974 and 1976.

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