Watergate

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.

17 thoughts on “Watergate

  1. Watergate saw a great president brought low by a fatal weakness for paranoia and a disastrous liking for student-prank-style cloak and dagger operations, from the comical plot to firebomb the Brookings Institute to the fatally botched Watergate burglary.

    Like the clever lawyer he was, Nixon held out as long as possible to get the best deal and got away with a full presidential pardon which left a big stink behind that probably cost Ford the presidency in ’76.

    Karl Marx famously observed that history repeats itself, first time as tragedy, second time as farce. Is there a more perfect illustration of this phenomenon than Nixon and Trump?

  2. Trump is golfing on his own course today, and will be sleeping with a smoking hot woman tonight, rAT.

    And there you are, in your crappy little shack.

  3. There is a big difference in dynamic between Watergate and Trump. As more was revealed about Nixon, the more that moderate Republicans and ultimately even loyalists moved away from Nixon. The opposite occurs with Trump. The more that is revealed about Trump, the more the Republicans coalesce around Trump and solidify their support. The political vectors move in opposite directions between the two situations.

    The Republicans of the 1970s saw themselves as guardians of the American order. The Republicans today see themselves as guardians of an ethno-nationalist bloc that has to be protected from the constitutional order by extraordinary means if necessary. It is a contest between equality and privilege. The southern states in particular do not want to be regulated by federally imposed, federally interpreted constitutional principles—this goes back to the country’s founding and before.

  4. First the troll posts:

    Karl Marx famously observed that history repeats itself, first time as tragedy, second time as farce. Is there a more perfect illustration of this phenomenon than Nixon and Trump?

    Then, two posts later, self-negation:

    There is a big difference in dynamic between Watergate and Trump.

    Do you get paid by the word? Or are you just retailing boilerplate from different wholesalers?

  5. I was a middling teenager when Nixon resigned. I hadn’t any feelings, pro or anti Nixon, because I was, well, a middling teenager.
    But what I do recall is the insane hatred of Nixon by young people. You couldn’t talk to a person their late teens or early 20s without getting a foul-mouthed explosion of Nixon hatred. People I knew that were maybe 19 0r 20 years old told me that Nixon had robbed the national archives of the Nazi uniforms so he could strut around the oval office wearing them. Nixon was held responsible for the hated Vietnam War, which was begun by Democrats Kennedy and Johnson.
    I have to go back in time a little bit here with my memories, but in the mid 1970s the popular left divided the world between the “hard hats” (blue collar workers) and the hippies (who were all college students or college grads). I could write a thesis on this social-class war. The conflict was encapsulated in the popular culture by the dynamic between Archie Bunker and Meathead. Bunker was a working class guy, a WW2 vet. Meathead was a long-hair, an eternal college student.
    And about long hair . . . it became popular in the 1960s because you notoriously had to have short hair, and a shaved face, if you had any attachment at all to the military. So long hair and a beard or mustache became an icon of the anti-Vietnam War, anti-establishment Left. When I attended a public elementary school in Fridley in the 1960s, if you were a boy and your hang hung below the top of your ears, you would be sent home. No jeans for boys, and no pants for girls. This began to change in the early 1970s.
    Both Nixon and Trump were opposed by an elitist social class who just did not like them, and so did what they could to destroy them.

  6. Nixon had to deal with leftists undermining US foreign policy.

    Biden has to deal with loyal “Patriots” that are stupid enough to listen to his propaganda, go off to fight for child trafficking and buttsex, and end up neck deep in shit.

    “Claiming disorganization and incompetence in Ukrainian military, the two US veterans have told fellow foreigners to stay at home”

    “ The two veterans – Drueke served two tours with the US Army in Iraq while Huynh worked in logistics for the Marine Corps in Okinawa, Japan – were captured just hours after being sent to the front lines near Kharkov last week.”

    “ Drueke, who left the US military in 2014, initially set out for Ukraine without a clear plan. Flying to Poland with the intention of doing humanitarian work, he nevertheless brought military gear and said that he was prepared to fight, even if military service “was not the be-all and end-all.” He said that while he was distrustful of American news coverage, he believed that Ukraine’s struggle was being portrayed in a way that “would appeal to veterans like myself.

    https://www.rt.com/news/557340-us-fighters-captured-ukraine/

    Many such cases.

  7. Pingback: In The Mailbox: 06.17.22 : The Other McCain

  8. Nixon and Trump were about as far apart as possible perhaps only in their divisiveness (for quite different reasons) is there any similarity. Once in power, Nixon went out of his way to govern in a consensus and inclusive manner but could never overcome the embedded hostility of the Liberal establishment, which unlike today was still a power to reckon with. They never forgave Nixon for various betrayals and provocations over the decades, starting with the destruction of Alger Hiss a pillar of the Ivy League elite. Trump by contrast goes out of his way to provoke and incite his opponents. Nixon’s WH was one of the most efficiently and professionally managed in history with two of the most outstanding and loyal staffers in Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Trump’s WH was a circus and not even a very good one. Some have called it an adult-day care center.

  9. Nixon imposed wage and price controls, took us off the gold standard, escalated foreign adventurism in Vietnam, whereas Trump kept us out of overseas Wars and presided over an era of unprecedented prosperity. No wonder liberals love Nixon. He governed nothing near as conservative as Trump did.

  10. You forget, JD, former, especially former and now dead Republican presidents, even those as bad as Nixon, are always beloved. Regardless of how nasty Democrats treated them when they were actually presidents.

  11. ^ Important in understanding Watergate was the context, especially Vietnam, but also the Kennedy assassination, 1968, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and King. Nixon, the liberal establishment’s hate figure since Alger Hiss, became a lightning rod for years of frustration and disillusion and a belief that America’s best generation had been taken from them by powerful hidden forces. Those who went after Nixon were looking for a scapegoat for the disillusion that followed the optimism of the Kennedy years. Ironically, The Pentagon Papers, which ultimately triggered Watergate and put Nixon’s paranoia over the edge, was largely an expose of wrongdoing, incompetence and deceit about Vietnam during the Kennedy and Johnson years.

    In the pursuit of Watergate, the media were acting as much out of a sense of guilt and shame at not probing the JFK assassination more deeply at the time, or questioning the slide into war in Vietnam under Johnson. If anything, most of the liberal media had been cheerleaders of the war until very late on. In the end, Nixon was persecuted and hounded as much for the sins and failings of his Democrat predecessors as for his own.

  12. ^^Wrong, as usual.
    The media hated Nixon because he was fierce anti-communist and had exposed Alger Hiss as a commie spy.

  13. JD wrote: “Nixon imposed wage and price controls, took us off the gold standard,]…

    What’s forgotten and not even mentioned here is that the reason the US couldn’t maintain the dollar’s value on the gold standard was due to the ballooning costs of the Vietnam war and the escalation of the Cold War and militarization of the US economy under Kennedy and Johnson in the 1960s, which sucked consumer imports into the US economy, especially from its former WWII enemies, Japan and Germany. These countries effectively became satellite workshops of the US economy, which outsourced the manufacture of goods that were too expensive to make itself and lacked the capacity, while also raising the value of the Yen and DM vis-a-vis the USD that eventually fueled Japan’s disastrous asset bubble in the late 80s, from which it never recovered.

    The influence of the Cold War on the post-war global economy and its legacy to this day is to my knowledge a largely unwritten and unknown story. It’s why Japan and Germany remain heavily export-oriented economies (not entirely for their own good) simply because the US has always been a welcoming home for their high-quality products especially when much of its own industrial capacity was busy supplying the US military machine and many US companies became lazy and fat on US government and military contracts (and still are), including Boeing. Much of the US’s lead in tech is also a legacy of the Cold War. Not least the creation of the internet from the US military project ARPANET and the impact of thousands of tech workers being laid off by military contractors at the end of the Cold War and entering the US jobs market in the early 90s.

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