I was twelve years old in 1974. The night Nixon resigned, I sat on the floor in front of the TV playing solitaire with two decks of cards.

My parents were big believers in paying attention to "history in the making," so they gathered us around the TV whenever something major was happening, like Apollo 11 landing on the moon. We watched Huntley & Brinkley or Walter Cronkite on the news every night and I can remember hearing daily casualty reports from Vietnam. My siblings and I read the papers from an early age.

So, of course we watched the Watergate hearings, and were very tuned in to what was going on that summer. I remember it vividly.

My dad detested Nixon even before the scandal broke; in 1972 our neighbors across the street put up a big Nixon sign in their yard, so Daddy put up an even bigger McGovern sign in ours. Our neighbors didn't handle the friendly ribbing too well and wouldn't speak to us for months.

Anyway, the night Nixon resigned, the general feeling at our house was that it was about time. Or, as my mother said, "Good riddance."

Thanks for the perspective, Sandra. I like the idea of your parents getting their kids together to watch historic events "live", and I enjoyed the story about the competing campaign signs.

I like that you (or this book?) point out that Nixon was surrounded by amateurs. Mr. E. Howard Hunt was at the top of the list. In Richard Helms autobiography (A Look Over my Shoulder), he recounts a meeting between top CIA officials he attended shortly after the Watergate burglary story broke. They were discussing the fact that Hunt & another former CIA operative (James McCord) had been arrested in relation to the break-in. At issue was whether or not the Watergate burglary could have been part of some operation CIA was conducting that administrators were not aware of. (CIA is heavily compartmentalized so nobody knows what anybody else is doing half the time.) During the conversation, they concluded that it wasn't a CIA operation and one of the main points they kept coming back to was that it was all so amateurish.

Helms, for those who don't know, refused to have CIA block the FBI investigation into the Watergate burglary. Helms refused, and was fired in one of the most bitter and hateful firings by a president that I've ever read about. Helms was rare in CIA directory history in that he'd been a CIA man since CIA's inception. He knew CIA. He knew how it worked. And he knew Haldeman was full of crap when Haldeman tried to tell CIA that investigating Watergate would reveal all kinds of CIA connections that they shouldn't want to go public. He also knew that they had to quickly assess whether or not the break-in had actually been a rogue CIA operation of some type.

In Helms book, he recounts part of that conversation with his top deputies shortly after the break-in. Relating to the amateurishness of the break-in, one of Helms top men (who remains unidentified in A Look Over my Shoulder) says:

"The entry team had no cover for being in the building and no cover story for resisting interrogation. Their clothing hadn't been sanitized - Hunt's check, his White House telephone number, and Lord knows what else were in various pockets. They all knew one another's real names, and everybody knew where everybody else really worked. What's more, McCord actually went along with the entry team. It's unbelievable. No intelligence service worth the name would run an operation like this."

Basically, the whole break-in was destined for failure by weight of its own stupidity. It goes without saying that the staff that hired the "plumbers" were probably equally as amateurish as they men they hired.

Helms, known as "the man who kept the secrets", was never one for revealing classified information or gabbing. He actually took a perjury charge at one point for refusing to reveal classified information during his confirmation hearings as an ambassador. But he sure gabs a lot about Nixon in his book. I read it hoping for CIA history, and there's plenty of that, but by coincidence it played into my love of reading about Nixon.

Helms makes it quite plain that he thinks Nixon was surrounded by corrupt, nasty, vindictive and most importantly inept people. He also says he has no doubt that the root of the corruption was Richard Nixon. In the first chapter, he says he's come to believe, in the time since Watergate, that Nixon was controlling events all along. A surprising portion of the book is devoted to how repugnant Helms found Nixon and how criminally inept he thought Nixon's staff was.

Nixon surrounded himself with people he wanted to control, or people he felt the need to control. Kissinger was a fluke in Nixon's administration, in that he was someone who functioned somewhat without direct supervision from Nixon and was allowed to do his job. Most people didn't breathe without Nixon's approval. To be surrounded by people like that, you're bound to wind up surrounded by incompetent, careerist yes-men. That's what Nixon's administration was in a lot of ways. One giant amateur hour.

Anyway, sorry for the rant. I got caught up by Patrick's description of the amateurishness of it all.

That said, recent administrations can be brought up as examples of how being surrounded by "experienced" people may not be so great, either...

NC

Nathan,

Thanks for the extensive comment! You captured a lot of what i wanted to include in my review but had to cut due to space limitations. Plus, sincer you are more familiar with the CIA background to this, you shed more light on the point I wanted to make.

I recall picking up the Woodwrd and Bernstein book ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN back in the mid 80's, when I would have been in my early high school years, and reading Woodward's account of how he witnessed, in court the day after the Watergate burglars were busted for the failed break-in, one of the arrested men state that he had an affiliation with the CIA.

Though I knew nothing at the time about the world of the intelligence services, I couldn't believe what I was reading. How could anyone who worked for a covert agency ever state that they worked for that agency in a public forum such as a court of law? And then to find that the money in the slush fund could be traced so easily back to the White House by these fairly inexperienced reporters...well, at that point I started to underestimate the severity of what Watergate was all about, since it didn't seem to me that people who dealt with the most critical issues of the nation could allow themselves to be associated with such a farce.

Nowadays, my views have changed as to how significant Watergate and Nixon were in the context of the constitutional crisis created by this situation. However, I still find the entire Watergate episode mindboggling in how easily the series of events that brought down Nixon could have been avoided, had his people hired more professional people to conduct his dirty tricks operations for him.

Nathan, thanks for the background on Helms...he is a guy I have kind of curious about, along with Casey from the Reagan days. I'll keep an eye out for the Helms bio. Most accounts that I've read of the events that followed the Watergate break-in, especially the Woodward and Bernstein book,imply that the CIA was this malevolent force in the Nixon Administration, though what exact role they played is only hinted at, while the FBI are implied to be the good guys trying to minimize the damage being caused by borderline illegal orders from the White House and the new director, Spalding Gray. It didn't surprise me much that "Deep Throat" turned out to be an FBI higher up.