Driving home from a Christmas party, I flipped over to national public radio and listened to the networks most explicit Christmas tradition – the inevitable airing of the insipid David Sedaris story about being a Santas elf at Macy’s back in the 1970s.

I listened to it, so you don’t have to. but here it is anyway.

It’s a Christmas story for people who hate Christmas. Feel free not to listen. I certainly couldn’t -. I flipped it off after about five minutes. God only knows how many times I’ve sat through the whole thing. 20? No – twice.

Anyway, it filled me with an urge to hear a Christmas story that didn’t fill me with rage.

So I thought I would switch to a different, much better Christmas story.

I’ve written about it in the space before; the dark, scary winter of 1981, when the communists shut down the Solidarity, labor movement in Poland. Poland’s ambassador, a lifelong communist atheist converted to Catholicism by his devout wife, had an attack of conscience and patriotism, just before Christmas of 1981, and defected to the United States.

One hesitates to think how the Biden administration would react.

But the president was Ronald Reagan. And his reaction was one for the ages.

I was still a couple years away from being a conservative. But I remember Reagan’s speech that night.

Since NPR will never replay it – mustn’t divert airtime from David F****ng Sedaris – I will:

Anyway, – Christmas greetings, from a time when the president was on America’s side.

20 years ago, this blog observed the Pearl Harbor anniversary by noting the annual gathering of hundreds of survivors – and the time, men in their late 70s on up – and noted the jarring statistic that at that time, the generation of World War 2 veterans was passing on at a rate of about 300 per day. This blog observed the demise of the last known World War 1 veteran – a man who’d enlisted as an ambulance driver after lying about being 14 years old – probably 3-4 years after it started, half a generation ago. .

Today, perhaps a dozen doughty, well-nigh indestructible centenarians will have made the trip to Hawaii. Today, the death rate has slowed, if only because, according to VA statistics, about 98.5% of those who served have died.

And, unconscionably, much of the knowledge that the Greatest Generation had seems to be passing with them.

War is hell.

Some things are worth fighting for.

Mankind is not inherently good, but is in fact capable of horrors beyond human comprehension that are simultaneously utterly banal and commonplace.

Some things are worse than fighting – but not many.

Sometimes, you need to get past the things that divide us to survive and prevail.

I fear our nation – really, the whole of Western Civilization – has Santayana’d itself; forgotten its history, and thus condemned itself to repeat it.

UPDATE: I’m not going to say the Millennial and Z Generations don’t have people like this.

I’m saying the zeitgeist is not favorable for creating a lot of them.

This is Paris, France. Named for the Parisii tribe which lived on the banks of the Seine at the time of the Roman Republic. Paris most likely began as a settlement on the Île de la Cité, the island in the Seine where Notre Dame now sits, a very defensible position. The ubiquitous Romans were there. They knew the place as Lutetia. (Notre Dame probably sits on the sit of a former Roman temple.)

Awhile back we had looked at Colchester and York in England and remarked how the past history of those cities could still be seen in the street patterns, especially where the city walls are or were. Looking at this overhead view though, it’s not as easy to tell where the city walls of Paris were, even though Paris saw several major wall constructions as the city grew outwards on both banks of the river. As the city expanded, the walls needed to expand with it.

The first major medieval wall was built from 1190 to 1215 during the reign of Philip II. Philip was the first to be called “King of France.” At the time this wall was being built, Notre Dame was in its reasonably early years of construction, begun in the 1160s by Bishop Maurice de Sully under the reign of Philip’s father, Louis VII.

Why isn’t it as easy as some other places to detect where the walls were? It’s because in the 19th century Paris undertook several major urban renewal projects which altered the old medieval street plans.

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.

When individuals associated with Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign were arrested in the Watergate Office Building in the early hours of June 17 1972, the men around the President spent the next several days deciding how to respond. They were in a bind. Indeed, crimes had already been committed. The five men arrested in the attempt to bug the DNC offices, and the two men who led the team, Liddy and Hunt, would be convicted on charges related to the burglary and wiretapping. One of the charges John Mitchell would be convicted of was approving the wiretapping while still the Attorney General.

There was still a chance to prevent the scandal from becoming what it eventually ballooned into. The President and the people around him could’ve taken the political hit of having people associated with the campaign committing crimes in the name of political dirty tricks. The President could’ve been insulated from the men working for him. There was never any evidence that Nixon knew about the burglary before the fact. Others could’ve fallen on their swords.

But, with the election just five months away, that was the risk the President’s men did not want to take. They also knew that the burglary wasn’t the only operation the so-called Plumbers had been involved. The previous year the Plumbers broke into the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

In An American Life, Jeb Stuart Magruder, the deputy director of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP), writes about the lack of discussion over whether to give birth to the maxim, the cover-up is worse than the crime.

My life changed that day. For the first time I realized, and I think we all realized, that we were involved in criminal activity, that if the truth became known we could all go to jail. During the spring, when Liddy was presenting his break-in plan, I should have been aware that it was illegal, but somehow it seemed acceptable, perhaps because we were discussing it in the office of the Attorney General of the United States. But at some point that Saturday morning I realized that this was not just hard-nosed politics, this was a crime that could destroy us all. The cover-up, this, was immediate and automatic; no one ever considered that there would not be a cover-up. It seemed inconceivable that with our political power we could not erase this mistake we had made.

At that point, LaRue (another deputy directory) was only marginally involved in the break-in conspiracy, in that he was aware of discussions of it, and Mardian (aide to Mitchell and counsel to CRP) was not to my knowledge involved at all. Either of them might have saved themselves great difficulty by walking away from the whole affair. That they did not was due to personal loyalty to Mitchell and political loyalty to the President. In all our discussions, there was a great deal said about “protecting the President.” We were trying to do that, certainly, but it was also true Mitchell and I hoped to save our own skins in the process. We were in so deep there seemed to be no turning back, no alternative but to plunge ahead, that is I wanted to go to the Justice Department and tell the prosecutors all I knew, I could probably walk away from the mess a free man. But that was never a serious consideration. My fellow conspirators were also my friends, and you didn’t save yourself at the expense of your friends.

The next day, Sunday, Magruder called White House Chief of Staff Haldeman, the man who had hired Magruder for the CRP. Magruder told him about the arrest.

We discussed the press statement we had drafted, but never released. McCord’s identity had by then become known, and we agree that a statement must be issued minimizing McCord’s ties with CRP. Later that day we issued a statement by Mitchell which stressed the fact that McCord was not technically and “employee” of CRP, since we contracted with his McCord Associates to handle security for CRP.

I told Haldeman of Mitchell’s plan to have Mardian return to Washington to take charge of the situation.

No, the President doesn’t trust Mardian,” Haldeman said. “You come back and take charge.”

It was a short talk. I gave him the facts and got my instructions. I spoke with the assumption that he knew about the break-in plan, and nothing he said indicated did not.

When I arrived at my office the next morning I stepped immediately into the double life I would live for the next ten months. On the one hand I spent much of the morning moving about our offices and reassuring CRP’s staff that nothing was wrong, that we had no idea what McCord had been up to, that the best thing was for everyone to get back to work.

The first person I talked to was Hugh Sloan, our treasurer. We knew by then that several thousand dollars in $100 bills had been found on the burglars. What we did not know, and I hoped Sloan could explain, was whether the money had come from CRP, and if so, is there was any way it could be traced to us. Sloan said the money found on the burglars was money he had given to Liddy, and that it could probably be traced to us.

50 years ago today, in the wee hours of that Saturday morning, Frank Wills was doing his rounds as a security guard at the Watergate Office Building when he noticed a door leading into the building from the underground parking garage had tape over the latch, preventing the lock from engaging. Wills simply removed the tape and thought nothing of it. However, some time later when Wills came around again, the tape had been put back. His suspicions now sufficiently aroused, Wills called the police, triggering the biggest political scandal in US history. When all was said and done, 48 people would be convicted, and Richard Nixon would resign as President.

Three officers responded and when searching the DNC’s offices on the sixth floor, they discovered five men: James McCord, Bernard Barker, Frank Sturgis, Virgilio Gonzalez and Eugenio Martínez. Unbeknownst at the time, watching this unfold from a hotel room across the street was Alfred Baldwin, a former FBI agent. Baldwin was the lookout but failed to notice the police arrive or that they were searching the DNC offices until it was too late.

The story that appeared in the Sunday Washington Post the next day about this seeming act of political hijinks described what they were carrying.

All wearing rubber surgical gloves, the five suspects were captured inside a small office within the committee’s headquarters suite.

Police said the men had with them at least two sophisticated devices capable of picking up and transmitting all talk, including telephone conversations. In addition, police found lock-picks and door jimmies, almost $2,300 in cash, most of it in $100 bills with the serial numbers in sequence.

The men also had with them one walkie-talkie, a short wave receiver that could pick up police calls, 40 rolls of unexposed film, two 35 millimeter cameras and three pen-sized tear gas guns.

This was actually a second break-in. The first had occurred May 28. This second attempt has made to repair some faulty equipment placed in the first break-in. The first thread to unravel was not so much what the burglars were doing in the DNC offices, but rather who they were, and who they knew.

The genesis of the break-ins was a few months earlier in January 1972 at a meeting with Liddy, Mitchell, Magruder and John Dean, the White House counsel. Liddy presented an extensive plan to gather intelligence for the campaign. Magruder had been hired by H.R. Haldeman, White House Chief of Staff. Magruder had wanted Dean at this meeting for cover from the White House.

James McCord was the security coordinator for the Committee to Re-elect the President, for my money the worst bit of political branding in history. This fundraising branch of the 1972 Nixon campaign for President became known as CREEP as the scandal unfolded. Watergate was born within the CRP, and many of its officers figurd prominently in the scandal. G. Gordon Liddy was finance counsel. Jeb Stuart Magruder was the deputy director. John Mitchell was still Attorney General at the time of this January meeting, but would retire two months later to become the director of the CRP. Other CRP names that won’t arise until later in our look back at Watergate are Herb Kalmbach, Fred LaRue, Don Segretti, Hugh Sloan and Maurice Stans.

Maybe of the people involved with Watergate wrote books about their experiences. In his book Blind Ambition, John Dean described Mitchell’s reaction to Liddy’s wild-eyed plan this way.

Liddy took his seat. The show was over. We all waited for Mitchell to react. I knew he was offended by the wilder parts of the act, but I also knew he would not say so to Liddy’s face. He disliked confronting people directly. It was a trait I had noticed in myself and felt was a weakness. Mitchell usually had other people express his blunt feelings.

Mitchell did not approve of Liddy’s plans. In his book An American Life, Magruder described Liddy’s presentation this way.

None of us were prepared for the nature of the plan that Liddy was outlining with such self-assurance. It was, as John Dean said later, mind boggling. It included mugging squads, kidnapping, sabotage, the use of prostitutes for political blackmail, break-ins to obtain and photograph documents, and various forms of electronic surveillance and wiretappings.

Yet Mitchell did not reject the entire plan, for we all felt there was a need for intelligence-gathering, and we were interested in the wiretapping aspects of the plan. Mitchell ended the meeting by telling Liddy he should come back with a less expensive plan that focused on intelligence-gathering and countering demonstrations.

Liddy worked with E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer, to put together the wiretapping operations. Hunt was a consultant for Chuck Colson, director of Nixon’s Office of Public Liaison. As others later surmised, if Hunt was involved, the White House was implicated. Hunt had been suggested to Liddy by Dick Howard, another Colson aide.

In a rather shocking breach of OpSec, Hunt’s name was in Barker and Martínez’s address books. On the 18th, Liddy called Magruder to inform him of the break-in. Magruder described the conversation this way.

‘Liddy, what the hell was McCord doing inside the Watergate?’ I demaned. ‘You were supposed to keep this operation removed from us. Have you lost your mind?’

‘I had to have somebody on the inside to handle the electrons,’ Liddy said. ‘McCord was the only one I could get. You didn’t give me enough time.’

I couldn’t believe it – Liddy was blaming his fiasco on me. But there was no point arguing with Liddy so I calmed down and asked him to give me all the facts he had. He explained that the four men arrested with McCord were Cuban freedom fighters whom Hunt had recruited in Miami. He said all five men had given false names when arrested, but we had to assume their true identities would be discovered.

Later that Saturday morning, Bob Woodward at the Washington Post got a call from the city editor about the break-in. The story linked to above was under the byline of Alfred Lewis, and in All the President’s Men, Woodward describes Lewis this way.

The first details of the story had been phoned from inside the Watergate by Alfred Lewis, a veteran of 35 years of police reporting for the Post. Lewis was something of a legend in Washington journalism – half cop, half reporter, a man who often dressed in a Metropolitan Police sweater buttoned at the bottom over a brass Star-of-David buckle.

Lewis told Woodward the men arrested were going to appear in court that afternoon at a prelimnary hearing. Woodward attended, and at the hearing McCord told Judge Belsen he worked in government for the CIA. Woodward uttered an expletive, and helped contribute to the Lewis story that appeared on the front page.

Next week we’ll take a look at other conversations that took place over the subsequent weekend, and how the scandal was seemingly contained.