Watergate: A New History

by Garrett M. Graff

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.

Richard Nixon was one of the most consequential political figures of the twentieth century. Judged on paper and résumé alone, Nixon should stand among the giants who occupied the White House through the American Century.

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 Act, transformed the Post Office into a quasi-private government enterprise, hiked Social Security payments, declared war on cancer, signed Title IX to give women opportunities in academia and on athletic playing fields, transformed the military by ending the draft and creating an all-volunteer force, and helped push forward civil rights.

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.

“Watergate” was less an event than a way of life for the Nixon administration—a mindset that evolved into a multiyear, multifaceted corruption and erosion of ethics within the office of the president.

As time would make clear, the actions around the Watergate scandal were certainly criminal, and there was without a doubt a conspiracy, but labeling it all a “criminal conspiracy” implies a level of forethought, planning, and precise execution that isn’t actually evident at any stage of the debacle. Instead, the key players slipped, fumbled, and stumbled their way from the White House to prison, often without ever seeming to make a conscious decision to join the cover-up. Ultimately, multiple cabinet officials would face criminal charges, an FBI director would resign and face prosecution, a congressman would commit suicide, and a CIA director would plead guilty to misleading Congress. There were secret hush money payoffs, threats of blackmail, layer upon layer of betrayal, an alleged kidnapping, and even a suspicious plane crash. There were rumors of high-priced call girls, allegations of the CIA and the Pentagon spying on the Nixon White House itself, and accusations of illegal donations from the Greek military junta. 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. Nixon’s attorney general and commerce secretary were put on trial together, a case then dubbed the “trial of the century,” despite the fact that it would be all but forgotten in the future. The careers of three consecutive attorneys general were upended.

We have come to understand many facets of this larger story only with time, and subsequent revelations make clear how little of it many understood as it unfolded. Thanks to the pop heroism of that iconic movie and book All the President’s Men, we’ve long seen the Washington Post as a—perhaps the—central figure of Watergate, crediting the paper’s Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Ben Bradlee, and Katharine Graham with courageously cracking open the case. In fact, there were a half-dozen reporters who played key roles—including columnist Jac...

And with the added insight of Deep Throat’s identity (Mark Felt came forward only in 2005) the story shifts to include a pitched battle for control of the Justice Department and a fight over the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover, played out insi...

The second most famous line of Watergate, Deep Throat’s incantation “Follow the money,” actually was never said at all—it was a screenwriter’s flourish in All the President’s Men.

Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, Art Linkletter, and even FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Chief Justice Warren Burger (not a single member of Congress, however, was to be found). Martha

Nearby atop the Times were three other columns displaying a story by investigative reporter Neil Sheehan: “Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing Involvement,” the first installment of what would come to be known as the “Pentagon Papers,” the leak of a classified yearlong seven-thousand-page study commissioned by Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara, that traced how the U.S. had become embroiled in the Vietnam War. The papers documented, richly and at great length, the official lies that had led so many young American men to die in the jungles of southeast Asia.

The Pentagon Papers contained all the right ingredients for an explosion: They played to Nixon’s conspiratorial, paranoid nature, to his antipathy for the press in general and the Washington Post and the New York Times in specific; moreover, they focused on a government cover-up, catnip to reporters, that stemmed from the thing Nixon hated most next to perhaps antiwar protesters—leakers—and focused on the administration’s most volatile personality: Henry Kissinger. It was the beginning of a scandal that would unfurl for most of the next decade, consume Nixon’s presidency, and change American government forever.

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.

Nixon had battled back to become the thirty-seventh President of the United States—the first losing presidential candidate of the twentieth century to later win.

Few outside of the White House campus’s eighteen acres had any understanding of the power wielded by Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Some plugged-in Washingtonians even struggled to keep them straight; which was the Seattle zoning attorney and which the Los Angeles advertising executive?

Nixon called him “Jew boy” both behind his back and to his face. Despite such disdain and distrust, their shared ambition and insecurities melded together into one of the most fascinating (and powerful and, depending on one’s definition, successful) president-advisor relations in all of U.S. history. “Kissinger and Nixon both had degrees of paranoia,” future secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger said. “It led them to worry about each other, but it also led them to make common cause on perceived mutual enemies.”

When JFK faced the Cuban Missile Crisis, he created something called the “ExComm,” an executive committee of both National Security Council members and other advisors he thought would be valuable, to help lead the crisis planning and response efforts. VI. One of the oddities of this entire episode was that Halperin hadn’t worked on the Cambodia raids; he told Kissinger after he didn’t even know if Beecher’s story in the New York Times was accurate. VII. The total number of so-called “Kissinger wiretaps” is usually listed as seventeen, because the FBI, which struggled to re-create who had been tapped and when, had initially failed to include NSC staffer Richard Sneider on the list. “Simply… no one remembered it,” Mark Felt wrote later.

Indeed, it first appeared that the scandal might skip the Nixon administration entirely; when Defense Secretary Melvin Laird appeared on Meet the Press that Sunday morning, just hours after the Times exposé was released, he wasn’t even asked about it. Across the administration, officials shrugged; neither John Mitchell, William Rehnquist, or Robert Mardian, the three leaders at the Justice Department who might be concerned about a publication of national security secrets, apparently paid any special attention to the report on Sunday.

The Pentagon Papers threatened all that. Not only would their grand triumphs crumble if leaked prematurely, the very contents of the study could unravel Nixon and Kissinger’s careful diplomacy.

Following the president’s direction, the Justice Department moved quickly to confront the paper legally, filing for a restraining order against the Times to prevent it from publishing additional sections of the Pentagon Papers. The Times accepted the restraining order, and court arguments were set for Friday, June 18. Friday morning, the Washington Post stunned the nation when it released its own stories based on copies of the study that it had obtained, one of the most significant decisions in the history of the paper—until then, it had never been a national player on the order of the Los Angeles Times or the New York Times. Katharine Graham, whose family had bought the Post out of bankruptcy in the Great Depression, had become the paper’s publisher in 1963 after the death of her husband; two years later, she’d brought Ben Bradlee in as executive editor, and together they worked to burnish its reputation. The partnership between Graham—the glamorous, wealthy reigning doyenne of the D.C. social circuit—and Bradlee—rakish, handsome, devilishly fashionable with his signature French-cuff Turnbull & Asser shirts, and known for his close friendship with JFK—would be one of the most transformative in American journalism, and no single moment in their thirty-year career together would compare with the pressure, ambition, and risk that came with this one. The move coincided with the Post’s IPO, and the paper’s lawyers and bankers feared that moving ahead with the reporting might s...

Graham said, simply, “Let’s go. Let’s publish.”

For days, the newspapers and the Justice Department battled in court in both New York and Washington, eventually reaching the highest court in the land. 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.

The New York Times v. United States, widely remembered as a seminal freedom of the press case, is far more ambiguous when viewed closely; the majority of six justices wrote six individual concurring opinions, each laying out slightly different tests and limits on the government’s censorship capabilities.

This conversation wasn’t released until 1996, at which point Kissinger denied that he’d been present for the president ordering a break-in at one of the capital’s most respected institutions. “I have no such recollection,”

Even while Liddy marked the group’s papers with the ODESSA name, 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.

While the Plumbers toiled away that August in Room 16, White House Counsel John Dean saw an opportunity to bring some order to the president’s chaotic habits of documenting his political foes. Nixon compiled enemies lists like other people compiled grocery lists—frequently, numerously, and repetitively.

“I’m sure he must have forgotten some of the people who did him wrong—because there were so many of them and he couldn’t possibly remember all of them. He did have a remarkable ability, though, to keep most of them pretty well-catalogued,” Haldeman said later.

To Mark Felt, who had been tasked with executing the urgent, full-field investigation on Schorr, the episode proved a cautionary tale: These Nixon folks seemed far too comfortable deploying the FBI as a political tool—and when it backfired, they were far too comfortable letting it take the blame.

One of the remaining mysteries of Watergate is whether Hunt’s April trip—months before the Pentagon Papers and before he joined the White House—was truly as innocent and retrospective as it has been portrayed. Was Hunt still working for the CIA, and, if so, did he already have a mission in mind? “We did not think he had come to Miami for nothing,” Martinez recalls.

There’s an intriguing discrepancy in the Fielding burglary reports: Later, one of the burglars, Felipe De Diego, said that the burglars had found the Ellsberg file and successfully photographed it. Fielding too has said that the Ellsberg file was actually in the office that night, and when he arrived the next morning, it “looked as if it had been fingered,” leaving open the possibility that either De Diego was telling the truth or that the burglars had raced past it without realizing. Liddy, years later, would wonder if Hunt and the burglars had done an end run around him: Did they actually find what they were looking for, photograph it, and take it back to the CIA? It would have explained the champagne toast.

Fielding’s filing cabinet today is in the possession of the Smithsonian.

In the days ahead, there were hurried conferences among Nixon, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell as they weighed how to handle the military’s betrayal and internal espionage uncovered by Young and the Plumbers.

From the start, Gray mistakenly trusted Mark Felt, and he rapidly named him the acting associate director—the bureau’s number two—elevating him to a uniquely powerful and valuable role that involved translating the bureau to its new director and vice versa.

The Watergate wasn’t supposed to be Liddy’s first operation, but planting electronic surveillance inside the McGovern headquarters had been more difficult than the operatives had imagined.

Their scouting determined that an underground corridor linked the hotel and the office complex, so they rented a hotel banquet room near the corridor for May 26 and planned to fake a corporate event that would last until the complex emptied out for the night. They believed they had a narrow window to execute a break-in: According to McCord and Hunt, an alarm on the corridor stairwell kicked in at 11 p.m. McCord and Baldwin’s observation post across the street would allow them to see when the DNC offices were empty for the night; after the entry, it would serve as a listening post once the bugs were installed. On May 26, the team checked in as guests at the Watergate Hotel and proceeded to dinner.IV They dined in the Continental Room

on shrimp cocktail and filet mignon, drank Cutty Sark Scotch, and smoked cigars. As the others left around 10:30 p.m., Hunt and Gonzalez stayed behind in a closet, but party staffers were still at work in the DNC at the 11 p.m. cutoff. Adding insult to injury, the night guard then locked the banquet room doors and trapped Hunt and Gonzalez inside overnight. Hunt, nevertheless, was in good spirits when he finally managed to escape the next day—arriving in Liddy’s Watergate Hotel room and laughing about how he’d urinated into a partially empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Scotch.

Back in D.C., Liddy and McCord realized as the week progressed that the bugs planted inside the Watergate had failed—one didn’t appear to be transmitting at all, and the other, while it could be heard in Al Baldwin’s observation post, appeared to be on a phone line filled with unimportant calls.

That someone else turned out to be three undercover officers, dressed as hippies and driving a light blue 1972 Ford, Car 727. Sergeant Paul W. Leeper and Officers John B. Barrett and Carl M. Shoffler had also had a quiet night; the most excitement they’d seen was when they tried to warn two women in Georgetown about suspicious men nearby who might be purse-snatchers. (The women had responded “Narc!” and given them the middle finger.) They heard the dispatcher’s open plea, “Any detective car or any cruiser anywhere, [see] guard at the Watergate Hotel… in reference to the possible suspicious circumstances,” and drove to meet Wills and search the building. The ordinary blue Ford pulling up was unremarkable to Baldwin, still

on lookout across the street.VII In fact, he didn’t note any unusual activity until the undercover officers had made it to the sixth floor. Finally seeing movement and lights, puzzled, he radioed McCord to ask how the burglary team was dressed. “We’re wearing suits and ties,” McCord replied. “Well, you’ve got a problem because there are hippie-looking guys who’ve got guns,” he reported back. It was already too late. “They’ve got us,” came a quick radio from inside the Watergate. The police officers were into the DNC offices. “Hands up,” the undercover officers shouted—only to be shocked when five sets of hands popped up from behind desks across the floor.

“I must admit that when I saw those ten hands go up, I thought, Well, I expected one and I’ve got five; how do I know there isn’t a sixth one behind me with a .45 aimed at my skull?” recalled Sergeant Leeper. “I turned around very slowly, but there wasn’t.” The police were even more puzzled as they took in the full scene before them—a politically sensitive location, older-than-usual burglars wearing fancy attire and surgical gloves, carrying sophisticated surveillance equipment and rolls of $100 bills. They told the men they were all under arrest. While Hunt and Liddy listened in growing horror as further on-scene narration came from the listening post (“… Police wagon pulling up at the entrance, also some marked police cars…”), they realized Barker...

“There was trouble,” Liddy answered bluntly. “Some people got caught. I’ll probably be going to jail.”

Regardless of the underlying motive or motives, one thing is clear: By the time dawn rose in Washington, the cover-up had begun.

Nixon on the other hand was furious. Haldeman shared the news around 11 a.m., and the president promptly called Colson, telling the aide he threw an ashtray across the room. “The whole thing made so little sense,” he recounted thinking in his memoir. “Why? I wondered. Why then? Why in such a blundering way? And why, of all places, the Democratic National Committee?”

Inside the locker room, the story tumbled from Liddy’s mouth. “John Mitchell sent me from Los Angeles to inform you that some of the persons arrested last night at the Watergate Hotel might be employed by the White House or the Committee to Re-Elect the President—and he wants you to get them out of jail at once!”

As Lewis gathered details at the scene, Woodward began working the story from the newsroom. He’d been at the paper just about nine months.

As Saturday unfolded, Sussman enlisted another reporter, Carl Bernstein, to gather biographical information on the burglars.VIII The team soon figured out that four of the burglars were from Miami’s Cuban-American community, and Sussman—a heavyset, thirty-eight-year-old newspaper veteran from Tennessee who had been at the paper for nearly a decade—dispatched a reporter accompanying Nixon to Key Biscayne to talk to the exile community in Florida. Mid-afternoon Saturday, Woodward headed to the courthouse for the burglars’ preliminary hearing, where he had several confounding exchanges with Douglas Caddy and Joseph Rafferty, the lawyers who seemed to be representing the burglars.

When court came to order around 3:30 p.m., Judge James Belson asked the burglars their professions. “Anti-communists,” Barker said, speaking for the group as the others nodded. McCord, when asked the same question, replied he was a security consultant. “Where?” the judge asked. “I’ve recently retired from government service,” he said, his voice soft. “Where in government?” “CIA,” he all but whispered.

Woodward, sitting toward the rear of the room, muttered out loud: “Holy shit.”

Altogether, ten Washington Post reporters contributed to those first reports. “As we read it over, no one could fail to be impressed by the extraordinary mystery at hand,” Sussman recalled.