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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.
What would be later summarized as “dirty tricks” really was the story of how Nixon’s team, ironically blinded by the desire for law and order and national security, violated the constitutional rights of politicians, journalists, and American citizens.
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.
This wide-reaching vision for a domestic surveillance program complemented Nixon’s own conviction that the nation’s chief executive was entitled to broad powers that decided what was legal and what wasn’t when it came to protecting the country. “He saw the president as above the law and empowered to do anything he or the intelligence community deemed necessary in furtherance of national security,” historian Melissa Graves said.
