"Watergate at 50": How Nixon Started the Destruction of U.S. Democracy and Trump Will Finish It

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 I watched the CBS-TV news special on the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in – these shows have been something of a tradition ever since they did the 20th anniversary one in 1992, from which this show took a lot of film clips to represent people who are no longer alive, including former U.S. Senator and Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) and former Nixon staffer Chuck Colson. “Watergate” became a catch-all term for a series of crimes and “dirty tricks” in which the Nixon campaign indulged to ensure not only that he would win re-election in 1972 but he would win by such an overwhelming and convincing margin there would be no more lingering doubts about his legitimacy. Nixon was well aware that he had won in the first place in 1968 by a narrow margini (similar to that with which he had lost in 1960), and he was obsessed first with establishing Republican control of the United States Senate in 1970 and then, when that didn’t happen, ensuring that he would so totally destroy the reputation of the Democrats who had led the campaign against him in 1970 – particularly U.S. Senator Ed Muskie (D-Maine), who had been Hubert Humphrey’s running mate in 1968 and whose pivotal role in the 1970 Senate campaign had made him the Democratic front-runner in 1972.

Nixon was particularly afraid of Muskie for the same reasons Donald Trump was afraid of Joe Biden, to the point where he sought out the aid of Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky to get (or manufacture) “dirt” on Biden and his scapegrace son Hunter: he thought Muskie was a nonthreatening centrist and the most likely candidate to beat him in 1972. So the infamous Donald Segretti not only forged the infamous “Canuck letter” that led to Muskie publicly crying over its insult to his wife (which destroyed Muskie’s political career virtually overnight), he also stole official Muskie campaign stationery and used it to forge official-looking press releases attacking other Democratic candidates, including Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-Washington). The objective was to sow so much mistrust among all the Democratic candidates for President that whoever got the nomination against Nixon would be unable to hold the party together. One key to the strategy was to ensure that the Democrats would nominate Senator George McGovern (D-South Dakota – and it’s an indication of how far our politics have shifted Rightward since 1972 that today it’s inconceivable that South Dakota would ever elect a Democrat to the Senate), the farthest Left of the major Democratic Presidential candidates and for that reason the easiest for Nixon to beat. (As an 18-year-old newly eligible to vote for the first time, I was a McGovern diehard and was too politically naïve to realize that by pushing McGovern we were basically handing Nixon the overwhelming win he wanted and ultimately got.)

During the middle of a campaign that looked like an unstoppable Nixon juggernaut came the weird piece of news that five people had been arrested for attempting to break in to the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate hotel complex in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, June 17, 1972. I remember when I first heard the news: I overheard it on a radio as I was making my way home from a free concert by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band in San Francisco’s Stern Grove, and as I was waiting on the streetcorner for the bus to take me home to Marin County I heard a broadcast with the news and thought, “I wonder if the Republicans had anything to do with this.” It turned out the Republicans had a great deal to do with it, and that this wasn’t even the first attempt to break into the DNC offices and plant listening devices on the DNC chair’s and treasurer’s phones. The first had taken place three weeks previously, and the bing on the DNC chair’s phone had malfunctioned while the one on the treasurer’s phone had worked but mostly recorded him calling various potential girlfriends for dates. So on the morning if June 17 James McCord, security director for Nixon’s official campaign, the Committee to Re-Elect the President (which as the scandal broke almost inevitably got nicknamed CREEP), and four Cuban exiles who had participated in the CIA’s unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba in 1961 broke into the Watergate again – and were caught by an unusually alert African-American security guard, Frank Wills, who noticed the tape they had put across the office door so it wouldn’t close behind them and lock them in. Nixon and his top aides – including chief of staff H. Robert Haldeman, domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell, former Attorney General who had quit that post to run CREEP – instituted a cover-up.

They had a lot more to worry about than just Watergate, including a whole elaborate plan by former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy to sabotage the Democratic convention and hire prostitutes to lure promiennt Democrats into compromising positions so they could be photographed and blackmailed, as well as slipping LSD into the water brought by protesters and kidnapping people and holding them on barges off the Florida coast during both the Republican and Democratic conventions. (One would-be protester asked John Mitchell during a break in the 1974 Watergate cover-up trial what would have happened to them on the barges if they had been kidnapped and taken there. “How should I know?” Mitchell testily responded. “It was Liddy’s plan, not mine.”) The Watergate cover-up probably began three days after the break-in and certainly had started six days later, when on June 23, 1972 Nixon had a meeting in the Oval Office with Bob Haldeman and others and Nixon said he was going to ask the CIA to ask the FBI to curtail their investigation into Watergate because they might uncover national security secrets, when Nixon and his men knew full well they wouldn’t. Alas, it would be over two years before the tape of this meeting surfaced and doomed Nixon’s Presidency.

In the meantime the nation lived through the constant drip-drip-drip of national scandal, including the unraveling of the first phase of the cover-up when John Sirica, the judge who drew the first assignment to try the Watergate burglars (the five who were actually arrested on site plus G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt) and became convinced there was more to the story than just what he was hearing in court; the dogged work of reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post and Lesley Stahl of CBS – all of whom are still alive and were interviewed for this show – and ultimately the hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, as it was formally called even though it was known as the “Senate Watergate Committee.” One thing about this committee that seems inconceivable today is that, while its members included four Democrats and three Republicans, only one of the Republicans – Edward Gurney of Florida – aggressively took up the cudgels of defending Nixon. Howard Baker of Tennessee, the committee’s ranking Republican member and vice-chair, asked his famous question, “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” Though a number of Left-wing commentators said Baker had cunningly phrased his question to let the White House off the hook – it’s like asking a bank robber, “What did the head of your gang know, and when did he know it?” And Lowell Weickier of Connecticut was so strong an anti-Nixon voice and so much a member of the now-extinct breed of “liberal Republicans” that in 1988 he lost the Republican primary for re-election to the Senate, though he ultimately ran for and won the governorship of Connecticut as a non-partisan candidate in 1990. (Ironically, the unusually liberal Republican Weicker was defeated in his Senate bid and the seat ultimately went to Joe Lieberman, an unusually Right-wing Democrat.)

The CBS-TV special followed the historical trajectory of Watergate familiar to those of us who were alive and politically aware during the period – though the ins and outs might be confusing to people who just know this as history. Nixon was able to ride the scandal long enough to win the landslide re-election he craved, but then the drip-drip-drip of the scandal emerged and ultimately the Senate Watergate committee’s hearings became must-see TV for millions of Americans (up to 80 million people watched the hearing where former White House counsel John Dean laid out the case against Nixon, compared to just 20 million who watched the recent first hearing of the House Select Committee on the January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol riot). The CBS special showcased Dean’s testimony and also the revelation from Alexander P. Butterfield that on Nixon’s orders he had installed a tape recording system in the White House so that every conversation that took place in the Oval Office or the President’s office in the Executive Office Building was automatically recorded. The idea that there might be recordings that would either confirm or deny John Dean’s explosive revelations about the cover-up and Nixon’s direct role in it. One of ther people interviewed for the show was former assistant special prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, whose memoir Stonewall (written with another former Watergate deputy special prosecutor, George Frampton) is probably the best book ever written about prosecuting Watergate.

In his book Ben-Veniste and Frampton recalled the thrill that went through the office when, after a legal battle during which the first special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, had been fired by Nixon and his two top officials at the Justice Department, Attorney General Elliott Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, both resigned rather than carry out the order, the special prosecutor’s office finally received the tapes and they heard the crucial March 21, 1973 meeting in which Dean had told Nixon Watergate was “a cancer on the Presidency.” Listening to it in light of the statement Nixon had just made publicly in which he had famously declared, “I am not a crook,” Ben-Veniste and Frampton recalled thinking that “he was a crook, and we had the evidence to prove it.” The so-called “Saturday Night Massacre,” in which Nixon had to work his way down the hierarchy of the Justice Department to find the third in line, Solicitor General Robert Bork, willing to fire Cox, led to the start of an official impeachment inquiry, the hearings before the House Judiciary Committee that in those pre-C-SPAN days were the first glimpses most Americans had had about how Congressional committees actually function. Meanwhile,replacement special prosecutor Leon Jaworski and Cox’s old team continued their battle to get their hands on the White House tapes.

Nixon famously released his own selective and heavily edited transcripts of some of the recordings, hoping this would put an end to the legal battle over the tapes. His gesture backfired big-time: not only did the special prosecutor’s office continue their battle for the actual tapes (at least in part under the so-called “best evidence” doctrine, in which in order to be admissible as evidence something has to be as close to the original as possible – so transcripts of tapes did not count as long as the tapes themselves still existed), which led to an 8-0 U.S. Supreme Court decision forcing him to release them, but the transcripts were so damning that a lot of Americans thought, “If this is the stuff Nixon thought it was O.K. to release, imagine what there is in the tapes that got left out of these transcripts.” The revelation of the tapes – particularly the three from June 23, 1972 that preserved Nixon’s voice in so many words ordering the CIA to join the cover-up by telling the FBI to back off their investigation – led to the evaporation of Nixon’s support in Congress.

When Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott and Senator Barry Goldwater went to meet Nixon, Nixon was convinced that he still had the support of 40 Republican Senators, enough to escape conviction and removal from office in an impeachment trial. Goldwater famously told him, “No, you don’t have 40. You have four, and you don’t have mine.” That was when Nixon got the message that he would have to resign the Presidency to avoid being thrown out of it in an impeachment trial, which he did on August 8, 1974. The last 20 minutes or so of the CBS-TV special went off the rails as far as I’m concerned – they tried to portray Nixon’s resignation as a tragedy and his bizarre farewell speech to the White House staff the morning of the day his resignation went into effect as a moment of self-revelation, especially when he said, “People will hate you, but it only hurts you of you hate them back.” This runs counter to a statement Nixon had made in one of his recorded conversations, in which he had sounded positively Trumpian when he said, “Remember, the press is the enemy. The Establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy.”

The show also presented Nixonj’s successor Gerald Ford’s awful blanket pardon of Nixon for all crimes he may have committed during his Presidency as a noble gesture of national healing in which Ford sacrificed his own chances to win a Presidential election for the sake of binding the nation’s wounds. Bullshit: the pardon angers me now for the same reasons it did then – it established the tradition in the U.S. that former Presidents will not be held legally accountable for any crimes they commit in office, no matter how heinous or how destructive of the ideal of American self-governance. The show also touched on the similarities and the differences between Richard Nixon and Donald Trump, including the one I’ve noted before that Nixon was essentially a Presidential version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Jekyll Nixon signed the major environmental bills into law – the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and the bill establishing the Environmental Protection Agency (all things Trump tried his damnedest to gut during his four years in office), opened the door to détente with the Soviet Union and America’s long-delayed recognition of the Communist regime in China, finally brought an end to the war in Viet Nam (albeit after ordering a last round of bombings of North Viet Nam for no apparent reason), and made serious proposals for universal national health care (a considerably more liberal plan than the one that eventually got passed under President Obama) and seriously supposed a guaranteed annual income (an idea both of America’s major parties consider politically radioactive today).

Meanwhile, the Hyde Nixon either ordered or condoned not only the Watergate break-in itself but a wide range of extra-legal activities to ensure his own re-election, including the burglary of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in hopes of getting damaging information and offering the directorship of the FBI to the judge in Ellsberg’s trial. Whereas Nixon was Jekyll and Hyde, Trump is just Hyde, a pure sociopath with no redeeming personal or political qualities, who clearly sought the Presidency (and is seeking to regain it, with a very good chance of succeeding) just to feed the two obsessions that rule his life, his ego and his bankroll. One of the most sensational revelations of the January 6 committee hearings is that Trump’s claim that “voter fraud” stole his re-election from him led him to release a series of fundraising e-mails to his supporters, sometimes as many as 25 ini a day, pleading for donations to something called the “Official Election Defense Fund” which turned out not to exist at all. Nonetheless, Trump raised $250 million – that’s a quarter of a billion dollars – including $100 million just in the first week, for this nonexistent “fund” – a pot of money with which Trump can do whatever he likes, including handing it off to his loyal supporters.

One article posted on the CBS Web site (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/watergate-at-50-the-political-scandal-that-changed-washington/), includes æn interview with Garrett Graff, who has just published a new history of Watergate and was asked the difference between then and now, between Nixon and Trump. "Two things: Fox News, and members of Congress who acted as Republicans first and members of Congress second. That's it," Graff replied. "I think if you had Fox News in the 1970’s, Richard Nixon would have stepped down from office in January 1977 totally unscathed." The transition Graff is allouding to was actually a gradual one initiated when President Ronald Reagan’s appointees to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) undid the so-called “Fairness Doctrine,” which from 1949 to 1987 had decreed that broadcast stations that aired political coverage at all had to maintain a rough balance between various views. With the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, and the end of music on AM radio as music stations switched to the better-sounding FM band, AM radio essentially became a continuous transmission belt for Right-wing propaganda. The advent of Fox News in 1996 brought this sort of programming to TV, and the subsequent rise of the Internet and social media have made it possible for millions of Americans to live in communications bubbles, listening only to programming that already reflects their point of view and never hearing the thoughts or ideas of anyone else.

And contrary to the assertions on this program that Nixon’s actions in Watergate were a threat to the American republic on a scale not seen again until Trump, that’s simply not true. Under Reagan you had the Iran-contra scandal and a President so determined to put in place a policy Congress had specifically disapproved that Congress was treated as a minor inconvenience. Under George W. Bush, a compliant Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attacks passed the USA PATRIOT Act, another step forward in the American Right’s long-term goal to displace democracy and substitute an authoritarian government. Bush even said once, “I don’t see anything wrong with a dictatorship, as long as I’m the dictator,” and his principal aide, Karl Rove, said it was his goal to give the Republican Party “full-spectrum dominance” over American politics. At present, the Republicans are only two elections away from achieving just that. They are expected to win a landslide sweep of the 2022 midterms, as voters pissed off about inflation in general and high gas and grocery prices in particular get ready to punish the Democrats big-time even though there’s surprisingly little the President or Congress can do to stop inflation. This will move Republicans one step closer to total political dominance, and either the re-election of Donald Trump to the Presidency in 2024 or the election of a Trump acolyte like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis or Texas Governor Greg Abbott will complete the process and give the Republican Party, already armed with extensive tools of voter suppression and sabotage the U.S. Supreme Court gave them by gutting the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and the current nominal Democratic majority in the Senate refused to reverse, complete, total and likely permanent control of American politics.