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Felt had played a far larger role than anyone imagined. It was a secret that he would hold long after his court case would conclude and he was eventually pardoned by President Ronald Reagan, well into the next century and his tenth decade. He, William Mark Felt, Sr., of Twin Falls, Idaho, son of a carpenter, also went by one of the most famous names in American politics. He was Deep Throat.
Judged on paper and résumé alone, Nixon should stand among the giants who occupied the White House through the American Century. As a young congressman, he helped fuel the Red Scare and give life to McCarthyism, turning “Communist” into a career-ending slur. From 1952 to 1972, he was on the Republican Party’s national ticket five times; when he finally ascended to the presidency, he shaped, escalated, prolonged, and eventually wound down the Vietnam War as it roiled the nation; he signed the Clean Air Act and created the Environmental Protection Agency, signed the Occupation Safety and Health
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He averted a larger war in the Middle East amid the conflagration of the Yom Kippur War; he calmed the Cold War and signed arms control treaties with the Soviet Union; and he reopened diplomatic relations with China. He was the first president to visit a Communist Bloc country, the first to visit Peking, the first to stand in Moscow.
In an era when the newsweeklies dominated American life, Nixon filled the cover of TIME a total of fifty-five times—more than a year’s worth of magazines over the course of his political career, more than any other figure in history. He was, as would become clear, the hinge upon which the entire American Century turned,
brought to the mainstream a darker, racialized, nativist, fearmongering strain of the Republican Party and American politics that would a half century later find its natural conclusion in Donald Trump.
At its simplest, Watergate is the story of two separate criminal conspiracies: the Nixon world’s “dirty tricks” that led to the burglary on June 17, 1972, and then the subsequent wider cover-up. The first conspiracy was deliberate, a sloppy and shambolic but nonetheless developed plan to subvert the 1972 election; the second was reactive, almost instinctive—it seems to have happened simply because no one said no.
All told, sixty-nine people would be indicted on charges stemming from the related investigations—including New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner—and companies from Goodyear Tire and Gulf Oil to American Airlines and 3M found themselves pleading guilty to illegally financing Nixon’s reelection.
“Was Nixon paranoid? Yes,” his aide Dwight Chapin said later. “But he also had the right to be.” Haldeman separately echoed Chapin’s impression: “He had strong opinions, but opinions were based on reality:
pioneered a White House morning news summary, prepared by 7 a.m. each day by a young aide named Pat Buchanan, that became the first thing he read each day. It all but guaranteed he’d be in a grumpy mood by lunch; the news summary would be returned to his aides, its margins filled with scribbled notes, follow-ups, and diatribes. “It was eating at him,” Buchanan observed.
On the nation’s airwaves, television anchors were becoming powerful arbiters of the nation’s attention; in its magazines a “New Journalism” was emerging that prized a subjective voice, personal witnessing, and narrative detail, a style characterized by writers like Gay Talese, Joan Didion, and Hunter S. Thompson. The press was becoming not just a scribe and observer of world events, but a participant too.
The promise of prosperity for white Americans at home—of suburban houses, two-car garages, and new shiny appliances like televisions—seemed to retreat among growing economic unease in the U.S. and military pessimism abroad. “The confidence of the early sixties, the belief in an inevitable destiny, the redress of old injustice and the attainment of new heights, was being displaced by insecurity; apprehension about the future; fragmenting, often angry, sometimes violent division,” wrote historian Richard Goodwin.
The three Germans LBJ referred to were chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman, and, of course, Henry Kissinger. Reporters who covered the administration came to know the triumvirate by a variety of ethnic-slanted monikers: the German Shepherds, the Berlin Wall, the Fourth Reich, the Teutonic Trio, and All the King’s Krauts.I “Never before had so much authority with so little accountability been delegated to so few,” Rather and Gates observed.
In his first campaign for Congress in 1946, he’d accused the incumbent, New Dealer Democrat Jerry Voorhis, of “vot[ing] straight down the line of the SOCIALIZATION OF OUR COUNTRY” and called for the Republican Party to “take a stand for freedom.”
Unpublished portions of the Pentagon Papers contained references to secret U-2 surveillance flights through Chinese airspace that, while no mystery to the Chinese, would cause public embarrassment if published and torpedo further talks with the closed regime.
Judge Murray Gurfein rejected the restraining order and allowed the Times to resume publishing, writing, “The security of the Nation is not at the ramparts alone. Security also lies in the value of our free institutions. A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know.”
On June 30, a 6–3 Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in favor of the freedom of the press, holding that the government had very limited ability to exert prior restraint on the media’s ability to publish.
“We’ve got a counter-government here and we’ve got to fight it. I don’t give a damn how it is done, do whatever has to be done to stop these leaks,” Nixon told his aide Chuck Colson. “I don’t want to be told why it can’t be done. This government cannot survive, it cannot function if anyone can run out and leak.”
dangerous set of instructions to give Charles “Chuck” Colson, who represented the closest thing that existed in the White House to the President’s id. Colson, his White House colleague Herb Klein said, “was one of the meanest people I ever knew,”
“Chuck sat and listened, and wrote it down, and went out and did it,” Haldeman lamented. Nixon speechwriter Ray Price once asked John Mitchell, “Who is Colson’s constituency?” The attorney general’s answer was blunt: “The president’s worst instincts.”
Johnson explained to Russell that as far as he’d pieced together, Nixon’s plot had involved a “fellow named [John] Mitchell, who’s running his campaign” and “Mrs. [Anna] Chennault [who] is contacting [South Vietnam’s] ambassador from time to time—seems to be kind of the go-between.”
She’d grown particularly close to Republican circles, who had spent decades flaying Harry Truman and Democrats for “losing” China. In 1968, she was Nixon’s top female fundraiser. For much of that year, she’d been carefully dancing between South Vietnamese ambassador Bui Diem and Nixon, arranging two secret meetings between them that remained unknown until the 1980s.
outlined in a 1969 book by that title, authored by onetime Mitchell aide Kevin Phillips, explained in Phillips’s words how “the more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.” It was ugly and poisonous to American politics, but—like the Red Scare—remarkably effective.
On March 6, 1970, three massive explosions rocked Greenwich Village in New York; responding firefighters and police were stunned when they realized that members of the radical extremist group the Weather Underground had accidentally triggered one of their own incendiary devices while assembling bombs in a townhouse basement, killing three of the would-be bombers.
On April 30, 1970, Nixon announced that the U.S. and South Vietnam would invade Cambodia—he
On May 4, ill-trained, poorly led, and scared National Guard troops opened fire on a nonviolent protest at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four students and wounding nine others.
In New York City, construction workers angry at the lack of patriotism displayed by a nearby antiwar protest swarmed down from a skyscraper project and beat the protesters—the police refused to get involved—sparking a pro-Nixon backlash that would lead to twenty-five thousand “hard-hats” marching on City Hall and lower Manhattan. Late that May, the Weathermen issued a three-page “Declaration of a State of War,” promising that they would “attack a symbol or institution of American injustice” within two weeks.
Ray Price, Huston’s supposed supervisor at the White House, would write later, the young, “intense, cadaverous” aide was “overly obsessed with such matters as internal security and insufficiently sensitive to civil liberties.”
In 1969, he and Nixon counselor Arthur Burns had pressed the Internal Revenue Service to focus on radicals, leftist groups, and so-called ideological organizations, an effort that led to the creation of a secret team known as the “Special Services Staff,” which compiled files on 8,585 individuals and 2,873 organizations,
“What we cannot do in a courtroom via criminal prosecutions to curtail the activities of some of these groups, IRS could do by administrative action,” one White House memo explained.
The Irish Bronx native Caulfield had worked with the NYPD’s prestigious Bureau of Special Services and Investigations (BOSSI) from 1955 to 1966, overseeing the police department’s protection of dignitaries and its intelligence operations against Communists, antiwar groups, feminist activists, civil rights agitators, and other perceived radicals and troublemakers. (The controversial unit was not known for respecting civil liberties or legal niceties as it conducted its surveillance, penetration, and intelligence-gathering.)
“It doesn’t matter who you were or what ideological positions you took,” one Nixon aide explained. “You were either for us or against us, and if you were against us, we were against you. It was real confrontational politics and there were a number of men around the White House who clearly relished that sort of thing.”
“The president wants a taping system installed,” Higby told Butterfield. “And Bob wants you to take care of it.” The move was a remarkable turnabout for Nixon; in the days after his election in 1968, he’d been shown on a transition-focused tour of the White House the private taping system used by Lyndon Johnson and squirmed. He’d ordered the Army Signal Corps to rip it out once he arrived in office.
The equipment’s existence was to be of the utmost secrecy, Haldeman decreed—and that meant the military and the White House Communications Agency couldn’t be relied on to handle it.
The following weekend, while the president was off to Key Biscayne, Secret Service technicians carefully drilled five microphones up through the president’s Oval Office desk and covered them in a thin layer of varnish. Other microphones were hidden in the lights atop the fireplace mantel. Everything fed into Sony 800B tape recorders hidden in a sealed compartment in the White House basement—and all of it, Wong explained, was voice-activated.
From February 16, 1971, until July 12, 1973, the recording system would capture 3,432 hours of conversation,
As that spring of 1971 unfolded, John Dean had overseen the White House command post during the May Day Tribe protests, an action during which hundreds of thousands of protesters descended on the capital and paralyzed the city’s business; some 14,517 were arrested during the rest of the two weeks of running battles across the city from April 22 to May 6—including 7,000 in just a single day at their peak—all pushed and prodded into makeshift outdoor camps at RFK Stadium
On July 3, he ordered Haldeman, “I want a look at any sensitive areas around where Jews are involved, Bob. See the Jews are all through the government, and we have got to get in those areas,” he ordered. “The government is full of Jews.” “Most Jews are disloyal,” he continued. “Bob, generally speaking, you can’t trust the bastards. They turn on you.” The White House couldn’t stand for these betrayals. They had to destroy Ellsberg. “Don’t worry about his trial,” Nixon said. “Just get everything out. Try him in the press. Try him in the press.”
“Get it done! I want it done!” Nixon said, banging the desk. “I want the Brookings Institute safe cleaned out.”
At the start of his presidency, Nixon had sold his portfolio of stocks and bonds, to avoid any accusations of impropriety, as well as his New York apartment and invested the money instead in real estate, purchasing two vacation getaways, in Florida and California, to serve as his escapes from Washington.
Nixon spent nearly 200 days in San Clemente during his first term, another 150 in Key Biscayne—a full year away from the confines and structure of the White House.
the group would be known to history by a label given offhand by David Young’s grandmother: When she asked him what he was doing in the White House, he explained, simply, “I am helping the president stop some leaks.” She replied, proudly, “Oh, you’re a plumber!” The name stuck.
Then that weekend, Nixon assembled a dozen top officials at Camp David in complete secrecy to plot upending the monetary system that had undergirded Western markets since World War II. Sunday night, in a surprise national television address, Nixon announced that the U.S. was abandoning the “gold standard” that tied the U.S. dollar to gold reserves, and imposing a ninety-day freeze on wages and prices to arrest inflation, a step the administration believed would prevent a looming economic crisis.
Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average saw its largest gain ever, and the New York Times—that awful New York Times—praised him, writing at the top of its editorial page: “We unhesitatingly applaud the boldness with which the President has moved on all economic fronts.”
the Plumbers considered drugging Ellsberg with LSD during a gala dinner in Washington so his bizarre public behavior would discredit him—they went as far as to work out how to infiltrate Cuban waiters to serve him soup laced with LSD mid-meal.
People, polling showed, wanted to support reelecting the president—as long as they weren’t specifically reminded that man was Richard Nixon. “The poll results suggested a campaign that would say to the voter not ‘You like Nixon’ but ‘You need Nixon,’ ” Magruder wrote later. There was no warm, friendly “We Like Ike” air around Nixon’s reelection; the campaign slogan too would skip the candidate’s name: “Now More Than Ever.”
“The victory over Humphrey had been far too close for comfort,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs. “I decided that we must begin immediately keeping track of everything the leading Democrats did. Information would be our first line of defense.” As he wrote, “I vowed that I would never again enter an election at a disadvantage by being vulnerable to them—or anyone—on the level of political tactics.” In ’72, the gloves would be off.
Spiro T. Agnew blasted the press as “a tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men elected by no one and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by government.”III Agnew’s remarks catapulted his previously low profile to the front ranks of the administration, and he was instantly seen as a threat by the TV networks, whose broadcast licenses were overseen by the government.
CBS President Frank Stanton called the speech an “unprecedented attempt… to intimidate a news medium which depends for its existence on government license.”IV Agnew was thrilled by the outrage: “Gangbusters!” he told speechwriter Pat Buchanan. A few days later, they had teamed up again for Agnew to attack the Washington Post and the New York Times in a speech to an Alabama chamber of commerce.
A native of Pine Bluff, Arkansas—as her oversized drawl of a voice never let anyone forget—Martha Mitchell had grown in the first term of the Nixon administration into perhaps the first national conservative celebrity pundit, the second most requested speaker for Republican audiences, behind only the president himself. Voluble, outspoken, and full of southern pride, Mitchell lived her life confident that rules didn’t apply to her;
the months ahead, her controversial and always conservative remarks became a balm to Nixon’s “silent majority” base. She had it out for justices, educators, politicians, liberals, activists—even the nation’s hairdressers. Margaret Mead? “She caused a lot of trouble.” The Supreme Court? “Eradicate it!” Richard Nixon himself? “Sexy!” she declared. In an age where most high-ranking wives were still listed officially as mere extensions of their husbands, the idea of Martha making news under her own name was almost its own social revolution.
