Nixon. Watergate. These two words conjure up an image in my mind, and a few phrases; the image is that of Nixon waving before he enters a helicopter to depart the White House for the last time; and perhaps the two most infamous Nixon quotes related to Watergate: “People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook,” and, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” Of course, as a former journalist, I also think about Woodward and Bernstein, and their source, Deep Throat. Finally, related to the latter quote, I think about the 2008 film, Frost/Nixon, I saw. Broadly speaking about Watergate, I know some burglars broke into the Democratic Party’s offices at the Watergate building in the early 1970s, Nixon still won re-election in a landslide, and eventually, just as impeachment proceedings were underway, Nixon resigned, often, as it’s mythologized, after a group of principled Republicans went to the White House to tell him to resign (they instead told him the allies he had in the Senate were down to four at best). Otherwise, I’ve never taken a deep dive into learning about what I now know to be an incredibly complex and fascinating moment in American history. Watergate and Nixon’s resignation is a consequential pivot point in American history for the presidency and the American people and still lives with us half-a-century later, but also, it was a pivot point for the way journalism operates and how stories about powerful people are covered and told.
To help me take my first deep dive into Watergate and the late Nixon years, I listened to the audiobook version of Garrett Graff’s 2022 novel, Watergate: A New History, read exceedingly well by Jacques Roy. Graff, a journalist, takes an exhaustive and comprehensive view of Watergate, replete with voluminous footnotes of even the most minor discrepancies in details among the various storytellers of Watergate. But that’s good! In my view, to tell a story is to get the details right, the smallest included, because if you’re missing the little details, then it follows you may be missing and mischaracterizing the bigger details. From that exhaustive and comprehensive view, one thing was abundantly clear to me early on: not only have an untold number of books been written about Watergate, but the players themselves, important and minor, have written memoirs about their role in Watergate, including Nixon himself. So, the question then is, what makes Graff’s latest rendering of Watergate different? It’s not that he’s doing a new round of interviews — something he said he deliberately avoided doing — but I think it goes back to it being exhaustive and comprehensive: this book acts as the story of Watergate, if you wanted to learn about Watergate. Graff said there had yet to be a one volume book that captured the complexity of the event, and he set out to do just that. Mission achieved from my perspective, as I found its contextual depth, cross-referencing, and history-table setting to be helpful as he moved us linearly along through Watergate.
If I had two major takeaways from Watergate, they would be: 1.) Watergate isn’t merely the story of a third-rate burglary and its coverup, but rather the story of an attempt to meddle with the American people’s vote for their elected president and that coverup; and 2.) as Graff outlines both at the beginning and end of the book, from the initial, surely this will blow over, to various people serving jail sentences and Nixon losing the presidency, nobody to this day has a firm idea on who ordered the break-in and what they were seeking. I find the latter to be extraordinary, but it’s also extraordinary within the context of not being necessary! Nixon won the presidency in a landslide! But he was so paranoid and cynical — everyone else must be engaging in dirty tricks and tactics; ergo, we should be, too — that he at best created an environment that led to the break-in and then from the get-go, was instrumental in its cover-up, obfuscation, and obstruction. It’s a remarkable level of self-sabotage difficult to wrap my brain around. Nixon seemed lonely and often took breaks from the White House itself, and that seems to be a theme of most presidents: they expend enormous energy, money, and time at the expense of their families and their potential reputation to gain the most powerful seat in the world, and then once they get it, they spend a considerable amount of their short tenure as far away from that seat as possible (obviously the presidency is not as literal as that, but you see what I’m saying).
In addition to Graff’s book aiming and succeeding at being exhaustive and comprehensive, I think in so doing, he also debunks and knocks-down-a-peg the mythologizing around Watergate, particularly as it regards the story of the story, i.e., the reporters, most notably, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post. Not only were they far from the only dogged reporters on the trail of Watergate, but their most notable book-turned-movie, All the President’s Men, seems to have inaccuracies and written to include such dramatic flourishes as if having a film adaptation in mind. Even so, the point is still salient that Watergate served as the breaking point between how government reporters covered Washington D.C. and the presidency in particular before Nixon and after Nixon. Before Nixon, government reporters were far too accommodating and trusting of the government and the presidency. After, it was all about uncovering the dirt and exposing the corruption at play. Such a previously righteously accommodating attitude also applied to members of Congress, who also didn’t take much of an adversarial role against the presidency, even though Congress is not only a check on the executive ideally, but for all intents and purposes, Congress has a disproportionate amount of the power. After all, Congress can impeach a president, the president can’t impeach a lowly House Representative. But impeachment was a ghastly idea to most, including the opposition party, Democrats, until the details of Watergate spent months, even more than a year, unfurling, and it took until one of the last audio recordings of Nixon and one of his men to drop implicating Nixon in the cover-up for his most strident and vocal Republican backers to stop defending him.
My thought for why reporters and politicians alike had this pre-Nixon view of the presidency is that they had yet to separate the presidency from the person acting as president, or occupying the office. That is, you can have all the respect in the world for the presidency or the office, but that doesn’t mean being obsequious to the occupier of said office. They’re all fallible men (so far). Those implicated in Watergate tried to rationalize their actions on the basis that they were protecting the presidency by protecting Nixon, but in reality, they were protecting the fallible (and corrupt) man and thus, doing harm to the integrity of the presidency.
I have no good place to interject this, but looking at my notes, wow, I did not know Nixon was so virulently anti-Semitic. I knew he was racist with respect to his views of African Americans, given his War on Drugs, but I didn’t know about all his talk on the tapes about Jewish people. And no, having Henry Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, in his administration as National Security Advisor and then the Secretary of State, does not absolve Nixon of his anti-Semitic views.
While I’m mentioning the tapes, though, therein lies another mystery of Water. Why would Nixon start taping his remarks inside the Oval Office of the White House? Again, I think it’s another action stemming from paranoia at all the leaks going on in his administration and wanting to have an accurate record of conversations, but it also feels again like such obvious self-sabotage. This Paranoia Presidency, if you will, resulted in Nixon keeping a wide-ranging enemies list of more than 200 people, too. Imagine the resources and perhaps taxpayers money devoted to such petty garbage. And yet, it’s also not merely petty, as Nixon and his people toyed with the idea, for example, of spiking Daniel Ellsberg’s (who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers) soup with LSD to discredit him. Another example is the Jeb Magruder, White House assistant, memo about using the Internal Revenue Service and the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department to go after the media (which is funny to me because, as I’ve mentioned, the media was relatively more docile prior to all of this). Magruder would go on to serve seven months in federal prison after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to wiretap, obstruct justice and defraud the United States related to Watergate.
This is all just scratching the surface, though. Nixon and his people, particularly through the unfortunate acronym, Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CRP), were dirty and corrupt, but I had no idea about the corruption of Vice President Spiro Agnew. He basically was taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes since the early 1960s and well into his time as Vice President. Unfortunately, he got off easy by essentially pleading no contest to a lesser charge and no jail time in exchange for resigning the vice presidency. His resignation is how Gerald Ford would ascend to the VP position and eventually, the presidency, becoming the one and only president never directly elected by the American people.
The story of the story Graff tells is as fascinating as the story itself. I find it flabbergasting how slow, for example, The New York Times was to take seriously its coverage of Watergate. They sent an intern to cover the initial break-in and the story ran on page 39. Then, later, the NYT receives a tip from one of their photographers who received a tip from the Secret Service that there were recordings of conversations within the Oval Office. And they ignored it! The TV news largely ignored the story, too, so much so that by the fall of 1972 — the break-in was in June of 1972 — 48 percent of Americans didn’t recognize the word “Watergate.”
One of the negatives of Watergate prevalent in modern times is Nixon’s attempt to use executive privilege to block and obfuscate handing over the tapes to the special prosecutor, judge, and Congress. While the Supreme Court unanimously ruled against Nixon on this question, they did grant that there was a “limited executive privilege in areas of military or diplomatic affairs.” Donald Trump, as a former president, still tries to evoke executive privilege. George W. Bush and Barack Obama also evoked executive privilege at different points in their administrations. For what it’s worth, my simple argument to refute the Nixon argument against releasing the recordings on the grounds that they were highly sensitive national security conversations … why were they recklessly secretly recording them, then?!
The other defense of Nixon, which you see with Trump now, too (and let me tell you, it’s hard not to see a lot of similarities between Nixon and Trump, both in character and personality, their presidencies, and their defenders), is that he was the “man in the dark” about the break-in and the coverup and whatever CRP was up to as well. In other words, even with that defense, that’s still an argument allowing for Nixon’s incompetency! He’s so incompetent, flagrant corruption and law-breaking occurs right under his nose!
Another similarity to Trump Graff relays is toward the end of Nixon’s presidency when resignation loomed. The Pentagon worried he would become a “berserker president” and start a Holocaust or some such with his power over nuclear weapons. It’s always worth reminding folks that the president — one person — has unilateral power to launch nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, against the chain of command and the Constitution, apparently, the Pentagon put out word that the underlings were to ignore a nuclear order of that kind from Nixon, should it come. That’s extraordinary to think about. Or even just the low-key ways toward the end when Nixon truly was disassociating from the office of the presidency and was almost symbolically president rather than actively president in terms of day-to-day duties, again similar to Trump in his “lame duck” period, particularly on and after January 6th.
If Nixon’s dirtiness, corruption, lust for power, racism, and anti-Semitism were not enough, we have to acknowledge the ugly sexism, too. I believe at some point after his resignation, Nixon, not at all regretful or remorseful for his actions, put the entire blame at the feet of … Martha Mitchell, the wife of John Mitchell, his Attorney General who also served time in prison (the highest ranking government official to ever do so). According to Nixon, John should’ve been “minding that store.” Martha, often despondent at John not being around, would leak information and juicy details to reporters such as Helen Thomas. The treatment of Mitchell, particularly the treatment she received by CRP members, was abhorrent and is a shocking story in and of itself. Yet, with Watergate, it is but one of many scandalous subplots.
Finally, I would be remiss in not declaring some 50 years after the fact, that Ford pardoning Nixon was the wrong decision. Nobody is above the law. Either that means something or it doesn’t. Platitudes about “not putting Americans” through an American president on trial and potentially in prison mean nothing against the aforementioned moral principle. And again, it’s telling, like it is with Trump (although the story is still being written), that the underlings went to prison but Nixon (and even though not related to Watergate, Agnew) didn’t and his worst “indignity” was to resign from the office of the presidency.
I’m not sure in one review I can do justice to Graff’s extensive overview and deep dive into Watergate, but I was thoroughly riveted by his book. I’m glad to have learned more about a period of time I didn’t previously know much of anything about. However, now that Graff’s opened this world to me, I’d love to keep going and learn even more.
My indelible takeaway from Watergate isn’t even so much that power corrupts, although it does and it’s why we, the American people, the American press, and politicians (including members of the president’s own party) need to be cautious about who we give power to and more importantly, the kind of power any one person possesses, but that power makes people paranoid and paranoia is a short step into cynicism (the aforementioned, everyone else is doing it; ergo) and it’s that lethal combination that often brings someone down, as I think it did with Nixon.
Milam's Musings 
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