The Wars of Watergate (2 page)

And yet, though Watergate has implications that go to the heart of our political and constitutional system, Richard Nixon unquestionably stands at the center of that larger story as well. He must be acknowledged as one of a handful of dominant political figures in the United States for more than a
quarter-century, but controversy persistently followed and fueled his long public career, making him one of the most divisive personalities in our recent public life. By Nixon’s own assessment, Watergate was essentially one more episode in a series of wars and clashes with long-despised enemies. “I had thrown down a gauntlet to Congress, the bureaucracy, the media, and the Washington establishment and challenged them to engage in epic battle,” he noted in his memoirs. Nixon thrived on conflict, conflict that ineluctably resulted from a lifetime of accumulated resentments, both personal and political.

The Watergate break-in parted the veil on the Nixon Administration’s dubious tactics—the “White House horrors,” as former Attorney General John Mitchell called them. The fury of the response led eventually to the second serious attempt in our history to impeach a president. Despite the vast power and resources of his office, Nixon eventually found himself involved in an inescapable struggle, unable to turn adversity into opportunity as he had done so often throughout his career. Watergate proved fatal to his political life and undoubtedly will haunt his historical reputation. History will record a fair share of the significant achievements of Nixon’s presidency, but Watergate will be the spot that will not out.

Although Nixon is the leading actor in the Watergate drama, this book is neither a biography nor a full-length account of his presidency. He has had a generous number of biographers, and undoubtedly their interpretations will provoke as much heat and division as Nixon himself did throughout his career. His Administration’s programs and policies deserve, and they are receiving, careful attention.
The Wars of Watergate
, however, focuses on the indelible reasons for his downfall and disgrace. Watergate dominated Richard Nixon’s presidency. We cannot disentangle Nixon’s domestic and foreign activities either from his unremitting warfare against real and imagined enemies at home or from the weighty burden of self-knowledge about his role in the Watergate cover-up. These consumed him, eventually resulting in a fatal self-inflicted wound.

In the end, Nixon offered his own eerie, albeit unintended, insight into his downfall: “[N]ever be petty,” he told loyal members of his Administration as he departed the White House on August 9, 1974, and “always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.” It was just such corrosive hatred, however, that decisively shaped Nixon’s own behavior, his career, and eventually his historical standing. The net result was a wholly unprecedented testing of the American political and constitutional system, in which Richard Nixon and Watergate are forever entwined—figures and events truly unique and unforgettable.

The victory was spectacular. Richard Nixon, who had contested two of the closest elections in American presidential history, was overwhelmingly re-elected on November 7, 1972. Save for Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, Nixon swept the Electoral College vote and captured over 60 percent of the popular vote. It was to be his last electoral campaign; “[M]ake it the best,” he had told his Chief of Staff, H. R. Haldeman, in September. Nixon’s triumph rivaled Franklin D. Roosevelt’s in 1936 and Lyndon Baines Johnson’s in 1964; and like them, President Nixon would quickly discover that the electorate’s mandates were neither absolute nor irrevocable.

From the outset, the enormous victory was not quite satisfactory to Nixon or his family. The President’s daughters, Tricia and Julie, petulantly complained that Democratic candidate George McGovern had not conceded gracefully enough, describing his congratulatory message as ‘cold and arch,” presumably because he had expressed the “hope” that the President would provide peace abroad and justice at home. Nixon himself, for all his outward satisfaction, privately found his joy muted on Election Day night. His reasons ranged from the banal to the serious.

The President worried that a temporary cap on his tooth might fall off if he smiled too broadly. He fretted about having to confront another Democrat-dominated Congress and at his inability to end the Vietnam war. He felt more sadness than relief at having fought his last election campaign. Most of all, Nixon would remember, he felt “a foreboding” that dampened his enthusiasm. Perhaps, he later mused, “the marring effects of Watergate may
have played a part.” On election eve, he had noted in his diary that Watergate was the only “sour note” of the moment. “This,” he admitted, “was really stupidity on the part of a number of people.”
¹

The President’s Press Secretary had smugly labeled the incident a “third-rate burglary” after police captured five men within the national headquarters of the Democratic Party at the Watergate office complex on June 17, 1972. At the time, the event had sounded only a minor discordant theme in the campaign, barely acknowledged outside Washington. The President and several close aides nevertheless had cause for concern. They realized that an inquiry into the Watergate affair might link the White House to the burglary and its aftermath, and expose a pattern of unethical and illegal conduct condoned and encouraged by the President himself. Nixon later claimed that “when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
²
He knew better.

On election night, therefore, when celebration was in order, Nixon nursed festering grievances. His public image clashed with what he knew to be reality, and he reacted, in anger, resentment, and perhaps even fear, as he had so often done in the past. Within hours, Haldeman asked for resignations throughout the Administration, quickly dampening the joy of the President’s loyal supporters. The signs of Nixon’s overwhelming victory had been apparent for months. Yet during that time, and in the immediate aftermath of the election, the President rubbed old wounds and planned revenge on his “enemies.” Magnanimity, generosity, and tolerance simply did not exist in his political vocabulary. He spurred his chief aides to find men to direct the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Internal Revenue Service who would do his personal bidding and fill his personal political needs. On September 15, 1972, he called White House Counsel John W. Dean III to the Oval Office and told him to “remember all the trouble” the President’s foes had caused. “We’ll have a chance to get back at them one day,” Nixon promised, adding that he intended to utilize the FBI and other agencies to harass his political antagonists. Nixon also thanked his young aide for his work in containing the Watergate affair. At the time, he undoubtedly never considered that enemies and friends alike eventually would hear their conversation, which he himself had taped.
³

The re-election, then, produced nothing but contradictions. Where confidence should have abounded, confusion reigned; instead of joy, resentment surged through the White House; and whereas “peace abroad and justice at home” should have dominated the President’s concerns, the “sour note” of Watergate was to echo through the remainder of Richard Nixon’s presidency. Still, victory did, naturally enough, generate a measure of optimism, and some in the President’s entourage looked forward to four more years of achievement. As Nixon began his new term on January 20, 1973, he presented his chief aides and Cabinet members with a four-year calendar in-scribed:
“The Presidential term which begins today consists of 1,461 days—no more, no less.… [T]hey can stand out as great days for America, and great moments in the history of the world.”

The cloud of Watergate and the unknown mocked that note of optimism. On Christmas Day 1972, James McCord, indicted for his role in the Watergate burglary, ominously threatened to implicate the White House. Presidential speechwriter Patrick Buchanan had warned Nixon that Watergate was a growing problem, although he probably did not realize the extent of the President’s own involvement. Meanwhile, Leonard Garment, a White House aide and former law partner of Nixon’s, had his own sense of foreboding. Quoting José Ortega y Gasset, he wrote: “ ‘We do not know what is happening, and
that
is what is happening.’ ”
⁴

Richard Nixon knew.

The Age of Watergate witnessed the nation’s most sustained political conflict and severest constitutional crisis since the Great Depression. Attention centered first on the role of the Committee to Re-elect the President in the break-in at the Washington headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. The burglary at the Watergate complex not only raised questions about the integrity of the political process, but eventually made an issue of the President’s personal role in the event and its aftermath. And subsequent revelations uncovered what Nixon’s key political lieutenant, former Attorney General John Mitchell, characterized as the “White House horrors”—the numerous instances of officially sanctioned criminal activity and abuses of power, as well as obstruction of justice, that had preceded and followed the Watergate break-in.

These events all fall under the “generic term of ‘Watergate’,” as Congress labeled them in a 1974 law. History is disciplined by context, and the Watergate affair cannot be bounded by the flurry of events from the burglary on June 17, 1972, to the President’s resignation on August 9, 1974. Watergate involved the political behavior of the President and his men, and the critical assault on their authority, that began during Nixon’s first term. Some of that behavior, and some of that critical assault, had its roots in the tumultuous events of the 1960s.
¹
The struggles in that decade over civil rights and over the control of the cities, and above all over the war in Vietnam, brought dramatic divisions and violence to American society and resulted in the destabilization of both civil and social institutions. Furious protests
swirled initially around President Lyndon Baines Johnson, a symbol of and a scapegoat for the nation’s ills and anxieties. A tidal wave of political and media criticism eventually swept Johnson from the White House, discredited, despised, and desperately searching for historical vindication.

Richard Nixon promised the nation in 1968 that he would “bring us together.” But during his watch, the divisions persisted and even widened. He, even more than Johnson, became a focal point for the furies and frustrations that wracked American society. “Watergate” increasingly defined his Administration, and it provided the “sword,” as Nixon himself characterized it, for dissident interests to use in successfully mounting their challenge to vested power and authority. Nixon had unfortunately inherited a vastly weakened and increasingly vulnerable presidency. That institutional crisis, together with his own political past, which made him one of the most divisive figures in America, culminated in his unprecedented resignation as President.

We must also look to Nixon’s long public career to explain his conduct as President. His personality, his lengthy tenure in the political arena, and his behavior in prominent events of the previous quarter-century clearly conditioned much of his presidency. Those years were ones of preparation for his ambition; they also molded and shaped those special qualities that anticipated the disaster that befell him. With Richard Milhous Nixon’s election to the presidency in 1968, the times and the man came together—and Watergate was the result.

John F. Kennedy heralded a new public perception and involvement with the presidency, personalizing it with carefully crafted mannerisms. His vigor, wit, and candor quickly captured the imagination of the nation, despite his razor-thin margin of victory in 1960. The young President appealed to the nation’s emerging youth, forcefully identifying with their hopes and aspirations. Americans found themselves riveted to the President as the center of public life, particularly as the media emphasized the glamour and vitality of Kennedy, his wife, and his family.

The underside of the Kennedy years—the President’s extramarital affairs, his compromises with segregationists, his ineffectiveness in dealing with Congress, his Administration’s plots to assassinate foreign leaders, and the growing combat involvement in Vietnam—was either hidden or studiously ignored. Kennedy and his advisers skillfully managed to convey the impression of a leader who was at once a liberal and a conservative, a hard-line anticommunist and a statesman genuinely committed to new directions for reducing Cold War tensions.

Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in November 1963 elevated him instantly to demi-sainthood, leaving both his admirers and his enemies to vent
their wrath and frustrations on his successor. Kennedy’s death began a mystique that grew through much of the 1960s, a mystique which, however distorted, haunted Lyndon B. Johnson. There was no escape for Johnson. Beginning with his surprise selection as John F. Kennedy’s running mate in 1960 and continuing through Johnson’s sorrow-laden succession in 1963 and Robert F. Kennedy’s challenge in 1968, the Kennedys hung like a brooding omnipresence in Johnson’s sky, alternately shaping and paralyzing his presidency.

When Johnson, on assuming the presidency, said, “Let us continue,” he meant to realize the fallen Kennedy’s promise of renewed energy and purpose in government. Johnson understood the need to assuage the sense of national grief, yet he instinctively sensed as well the opportunity to capitalize on the memory of the late President to attain desirable political results and create his own memorial. Within days, Johnson revitalized his coalition-building talents and organized a new national consensus on behalf of longstanding and innovative liberal agendas. Like the creatures entering Noah’s Ark two by two, they called or came to the White House: Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, Martin Luther King, Jr., and George Wallace, Senators Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen, the heads of the AFL–CIO and the National Association of Manufacturers, and then, of course, the world leaders—all anxious to gain the new President’s ear while he, just as eagerly, worked to bring them aboard
his
ship. Kennedy’s promises had stalled on the two shoals of civil rights legislation and tax-cutting. Johnson would not just jawbone, but deliver.