Being Nixon: A Man Divided

by Evan Thomas

That same evening, some five thousand miles away, in the Continental Room of the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., Hunt and Liddy were hosting a banquet to celebrate an impending burglary. There were snifters of brandy and cigars after dinner, and then they went to work. Hunt and one of the Cubans from the Ellsberg breakin, Virgilio Gonzalez, remained after dinner, hidden in a closet. They intended to break into the Democratic National Committee, only a corridor and elevator ride away. But the alarm on a door was unexpectedly armed, and the duo spent the night trapped in the banquet room. The next night, a different group of burglars, lacking the proper tools to pick the locks, failed as well. On the third try, the burglars got into the Watergate and placed bugs on the phone of DNC chairman Larry O’Brien and another official. One of the bugs didn’t work. The Plumbers broke into the DNC’s Watergate offices again on the night of June 16, but one of the burglars taped the door’s locks horizontally, instead of vertically, allowing the tape to show. A security guard saw the telltale sign and called the police. The burglars were arrested in the early hours of June 17. In their rush to flee the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge, where they were monitoring the operation from across the street, Hunt and Liddy left behind some consecutively numbered hundred-dollar bills, a notebook with Hunt’s name and White House telephone number, and a $6.36 check to Hunt’s country club. Thus did amat...