Many tied their critique to the POWs—those “magnificent Americans who understand honor, duty, sacrifice, and love of country as few of the rest of us do,” who “know they can trust our President because his words and deeds have been proven by the passage of time and events. I for one join with these great patriots in backing Mr. Nixon and his policies.” Ronald Reagan, for his part, still nearly broke up during the part of his speeches when he described meeting POWs: “Holding out was the only thing we could do, they told me, the only thing we could still do for our country. . . . Where did we find men like these, just ordinary guys. . . . American guys from the farms, from the small towns, from the cities . . .” Then he would launch into his peroration about why Republicans must not feel defensive: “The Republican Party has traditionally been the victim of shenanigans worse than Watergate. There is documentary proof.” Or he would say that politicians should stop making statements about Watergate altogether: “It’s time for us to shut up and let the law take its course,” he barked from the national governors’ conference, during an interview in which he said he wasn’t even thinking about the 1976 presidential race.
And most of all, the Watergate defenders agreed with their president when he said his quest for national security explained everything the public needed to know about his administration’s alleged wrongdoing—and that, a doctor in Bethesda, Maryland, wrote, “sure as hell is good enough for me.”
The liberal media—the “pack of howling wolves” (Mrs. Robert Brauham of Peoria, Illinois)—had “been trying to discredit the Nixon Admin since it took office in 1969” (Richard Riggs of Corona del Mar, California), “printing every sleazy rumor that comes out of Washington before it is declared fact or fiction.” Now they just operated under the color of Watergate. Where “nobody was murdered, nobody bodily maimed,” complained C. A. Nolan Sr., Rural Route 4, Madison, Indiana—adding, “It been over 20 years since I have read or heard a word about the ‘lost $81 million’ that disappeared during the New Deal–Fair Deal years.” No one talked about the Pearl Harbor conspiracy, either, a Morton Grove, Illinois, man pointed out—when, while “the President [was] examining his stamp collection, the chief of staff out riding, the fleet [was] maneuvered into Pearl Harbor as sitting ducks.”
They made high-minded appeals to due process and Anglo-Saxon common law, attacked the very notion of congressional investigatory hearings (where “innuendo may pass for fact, rumor for reason”), and deployed liberal clichés to grind liberal noses in what they said was rank liberal hypocrisy. After all, one wrote, “The liberal politicians, who are most indignant, and the news media, which scream the loudest about Watergate, are the same ones yelling ‘witching’ and ‘McCarthyism’ when one of their group is caught with his hands in the cookie jar.” In actual fact the committee was obsessed to a fault with non-incrimination; sometimes an hour of witness testimony would be gobbled up with excruciatingly boring circumlocution to avoid placing any individual in legal jeopardy. Senator Ervin had been one of the most loyal votes for Nixon in the Senate. The toughest questioner on the committee was Lowell Weicker, a Republican. No matter. To the die-hards the hearings were an obvious Democratic congressional coup. The editorialists of the Burlington Free Press provided the context: “Certain people can never forgive President Nixon for (1) successfully concluding the war in Vietnam and (2) winning reelection in a landslide of historic proportions. So if the Nixon haters cannot embarrass the President on substantive things, perhaps the Watergate caper can raise a little dust.” Besides, “In Red China and Russia there are hundreds of ‘Watergates’ and worse, but nobody could call attention to official misconduct, even if they dared to.”
Then there was the way the liberal media worshipped the Kennedys. Protected them. Even though everyone knew they were more corrupt than Richard Nixon could possibly imagine—“wire tapping at the Watergate” being “childish pranksterism compared to the massive fraud perpetrated upon the American public in the election of John F. Kennedy by a small margin achieved by the massive vote fraud in Illinois and Texas.” Hadn’t Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy—liberal hypocrite!—been a champion of wiretapping? And what about Ted Kennedy? “I keep being reminded,” a Louisville newspaper reader wrote, “of a girl named Mary Jo Kopechne.” A bumper sticker emerged: NOBODY DIED AT WATERGATE.
Administration defenders in the mainstream media that spring and summer included syndicated columnists William F. Buckley and Nick Thimmesch, National Review’s Jeffrey Hart, and editorialists at right-leaning papers like the Chicago Tribune, the Detroit News, and the Richmond News Leader, which thought that Nixon’s four-thousand-word statement “moves him toward the sunlight of restored public confidence,” and that “the assignment given to various ‘plumbers’ . . . was a prudent, proper, and indeed indispensable assignment.” In the media, they were decidedly in the minority. Most of his defenders were just ordinary letter-writing citizens.
One of them was Baruch Korff, a rabbi from Taunton, Massachusetts. After the New York Times turned down his letter to the editor denouncing the Ervin Committee’s “noisy claque,” which “resembles nothing more than the Parisian mob cheering and shouting as the tumbrels deposit their victims before the guillotine,” Korff published it himself as an ad with his own money, and in just three days harvested three thousand letters of support, hundreds of phone calls, and thirty thousand dollars in donations.
The defenders could be quite funny. It could be a Communist plot, a Chicago Tribune reader argued, and maybe Sam Ervin was in on it, too: was he not one of the hounders of Joseph McCarthy? And “if Senator McCarthy had not been censured,” this correspondent wrote, “we would not be in the mess we’re in now.”
But they could be frightening, too.
“Watching Watergate in Archie Bunker Country,” said the cover of the June 18 issue of New York magazine. It began with the author, top-drawer trend journalist Gail Sheehy, recording what happened when the proprietor of Terry’s Bar in Astoria, Queens, asked his patrons if he might tune the bar’s TV to the hearings. Nine men cried “Forget it!” “The majority called for Popeye cartoons. But Terry couldn’t find a channel that wasn’t polluted with the ‘search for unvarnished truth.’ They had no choice. Television was suppressing their freedom not to know.”
These ironworkers, sandhogs, elevator operators, and beer truck drivers said things like this: that Ted Kennedy “killed a broad” (“Now there was a mountain, and they made a molehill out of it”); that the Democrats “couldn’t get themselves elected if they tried, so they’re picking on the number-one man”; that George McGovern was the man behind the coup. (What about the fact that McGovern kept on defending Nixon? A man named Bernie responded: “That’s the tip-off!”) Terry, the proprietor, was building a house in the mountains: “When the revolution comes, I got it built like a bomb shelter.” None of them voted—so they wouldn’t show up on jury rolls. They treated a copy of the New York Times, slid across the bar by the reporter, like a hunk of plutonium: “No! I’m not interested in it!”
But they had opinions all the same.
On Daniel Ellsberg: “That guy, listen, if I were in charge of the country I would’ve found some way of shooting him.” (Someone added, “If I was Nixon that’s what I’d do—I’d shoot every one of them.”)
On freedom: “My opinion, there’s too much freedom in this country.”
On political philosophy: “I’d take a police state over an anarchistic state. I’m not so sure a police state wouldn’t be so bad in this country.”
Besides, concluded Terry: “If there’s any guilt on Nixon’s part, it’s only in the men he picked.”
AS IT HAPPENED, ANOTHER, VERY different tribe of Watergate observers made a similar case: Clark Clifford’s sort of people. Washington insiders treated D.C. as their village. They found the idea that Watergate was all the fault of the bad seeds the president kept around him, rather than the president himself, a comforting thought.
These were the sort of people
Nixon himself had always identified as his tormentors—the “Eastern liberal elite.” By now they had more or less made their peace with him. They protected him—or protected something they grandiloquently referred to as “the presidency.” And as the scandal gathered steam they began addressing Dick Nixon as one of their own, a fellow gentleman of honor. Like Nixon’s grassroots defenders, they shared a taste for kings.
Elliott Roosevelt, son of the thirty-second president, spoke for them from Lisbon, where Europeans were incredulous about Watergate: “The most frequent comment I hear is that ‘America is destroying itself in the eyes of the world.’ . . . Why does our leadership and our press seem intent on self-immolation for suddenly discovering moral beliefs when [spying] has been a way of life in our system since the start? . . . Why don’t we just throw the inept offenders to the wolves and don’t ruin the presidency?” Of the absurd, exculpatory stratagems issuing from the White House, they opined that the President of the United States could not possibly have had anything to do with them. “Only he can sweep aside preposterous claims of ‘executive privilege’ and order Mr. Dean and other White House aides to testify,” the New York Times editorialized April 1. Which was not likely, given that Nixon was the one who had ordered the preposterous claims in the first place.
They labeled their scapegoats the “Orange County Boys”: “Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and their assistants,” Time wrote, “often regarded by veteran politicians as arrogant, inexperienced, and selfishly protective of the President.” Outsiders, unschooled in their Village’s ways; the “wrong sort”—attempting, Stewart Alsop sniffed in Newsweek, “to alter the very nature of the ancient American political system. Politicians have played tricks on each other since politics was invented. But this is not politics, this is war.” If only the czar knew.
Syndicated columnist Bill Anderson mocked Bob Haldeman’s déclassé interior decoration of the White House and said the underlying problem was that he had been an advertising man. Time’s mandarin in chief Hugh Sidey wrote, “the energies of these men were dirtied not at solving the problems but ignoring or minimizing them.” The guiding metaphor was telling: they were dirty—like pollution. It pointed to the Village’s preferred advice to the president: get rid of them, and you thus get rid of Watergate. “Nixon has a staff infection,” their in-house comedian, Mark Russell, joked. If only more White House denizens could be like that nice Henry Kissinger, whom all of the pundits worshipped: “It is of considerable interest,” Sidey wrote, “that the administration’s leading humorist and bon-vivant—its most accessible major official—is Henry Kissinger, untouched by scandal and clearly the man who has achieved the most.”
Remove the infection, went the argument, and Watergate went away; Washington could function again. And all the right people—people like Henry Kissinger—could finally get back to work setting the world right.
Soviet officials preparing for Leonid Brezhnev’s upcoming visit to Washington, columnist Peter Lisagor’s sources were telling him, saw the inquisition against the president as an impediment to their ongoing attempts to establish a more stable entente between East and West: “They appeared to understand a truth about a nation’s foreign policy that some”—the accursed some—“Americans have ignored, namely that it cannot be compartmentalized. Uncertainty, confusion, rot at a country’s core has a debilitating effect along all its extremities. . . . A machine clogged at its center will function feebly, if at all.”
Then Kissinger turned out to be tainted, too. The latest news was that he, not Nixon, had overseen the 1969 wiretappings—spying on his very own staff, some of the most distinguished young gentlemen in Washington. Joseph Kraft, one of Kissinger’s best friends, had recently filed a column about the national security advisor’s birthday party, titled “HENRY KISSINGER, THE VIRTUOSO AT 50.” Maybe it would not have been so fulsome if Kraft had known at the time of its writing that Kissinger had tapped his phone, too, and that the bash, at Manhattan’s tony Colony Club, included two men whose family phones had been bugged. “How Kissinger Fooled Us All,” a New York magazine article proclaimed the next week. It was a mess. No one in all the right circles knew what to think.
Which suggests why Clark Clifford went out on a limb proposing the president’s resignation. Clifford proceeded on the presumption that it wasn’t really the president’s fault, but he should fall on his sword nonetheless—as a “magnanimous action.”
THE PRESIDENT’S CONNECTION WITH THE conspiracy might soon be better understood. John Wesley Dean III, it was said, was working out some kind of deal to testify before the Ervin Committee.
Dean was the man who knew all the Watergate secrets. The president said so himself—ever since August 29, 1972, ten weeks after the break-in, when he announced that he had assigned his young counsel the task of investigating the scandal. The president explained Dean came back with a report that no one employed by the White House or his reelection committee had been involved in “this very bizarre incident.” Dean then showed up in the news again early in March when it was revealed he had coerced the director of the FBI into sharing its files with the White House, sat in on FBI interviews of Watergate witnesses then lied about it, and was perhaps involved in the destruction of evidence from E. Howard Hunt’s safe in the days following the DNC break-in.
And then the news came: he was ready to testify under oath that he had been doing it all at the behest of the Oval Office. That was when Washington discourse about Dean started shifting. Reports began surfacing that he was in fact the instigator of the Watergate cover-up—perhaps even of the Watergate break-in itself.
And now he would probably be testifying on TV—telling tales, a June 3 Washington Post story revealed, of the thirty-five meetings with the president since 1972 in which they discussed the cover-up together. If true, that would make Nixon a notorious liar—since he said he hadn’t even known of any cover-up until the middle of March 1973. “We categorically deny the assertions and implications of this story,” came the response from the White House. Then, reporters asked, would the White House give the Ervin Committee the logs that had been kept of all the president’s meetings, to prove the assertions untrue? Never, the president’s spokesman replied. Until two days later the White House reversed itself, and said it would do exactly that.
In the matter of Dean versus the president, most Villagers knew exactly where they stood. Joseph Alsop spoke for them. “A general judgment of his character has been reached,” he wrote: Dean was “a smooth-faced young man who is reportedly obsessed by fear of going to jail because of his consciousness of his own good looks.” The very idea that the affairs of state of the greatest nation in the world, Alsop wrote the day Dean was granted limited immunity by the Ervin Committee, should be held up by “the self-serving allegations of a bottom-dwelling slug like Dean,” a proven liar, was enough “to make all common sensible Americans exclaim, ‘This can’t go on!’ ”
It went on. The hearings would reopen June 5, with the three networks rotating gavel-to-gavel coverage. At night, PBS ran the whole thing again as a repeat. This was despite the request of special prosecutor Archibald Cox that televised hearings be suspended for three months to better preserve due process. The committee refused: “The American people are entitled to find out what actually happened without having to wait while justice travels on leaden feet,” Sam Ervin responded in his usual orotund style. Editorial boards agreed. The Louisville Courier-Journal compared the TV proceedings to the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials—the public needed such public rituals to grasp “the point at which obedience to orders becomes a denial of higher and universal laws of civilized behavior”—and also the Army-McCarthy hearings, where “the people finally grasped the essence of a kind of tyranny, rooted in public fear, that was as evil as anything it purported to expose.”
THE NEXT DAY CAME BEFORE the committee a sober young man named Hugh Sloan. The discussion turned to questions of money, and things began to perk up.
Sloan had testified in th
e trial of the Watergate burglars about being instructed to pay massive sums in cash to G. Gordon Liddy in the summer of 1972, with no idea why. This was the very thing Judge Sirica had been most adamant about in his frustration over what the prosecutors had refused to pursue. Now the details were voluminously forthcoming.
The treasurer had been instructed by the campaign’s deputy director, Jeb Stuart Magruder, to disburse $83,000 to Liddy in cash. Being a responsible young man, Magruder promptly reported this most unusual request to his superior, Maurice Stans, who had once been the secretary of commerce. What was the money for, he asked, and why did it have to be cash? “I do not want to know and you don’t want to know,” returned Stans.
Murmurs.
Legal tender had circulated like snowflakes in the offices of the Committee to Re-elect the President. April 6, 1972, the day before a new campaign finance law began requiring public disclosure of all donations, almost $1.8 million in cash had flooded the office. A number of key campaign figures, like Liddy and Herb Kalmbach, the president’s personal lawyer, had authority to draw cash whenever they liked—entering the office with empty trunks, leaving with ones filled with hundred-dollar bills. His concerns, Sloan related, became more pressing after the arrests at the Watergate on June 17. He had by this point disbursed $199,000 in cash to G. Gordon Liddy. He approached John Mitchell for guidance.
“He told me, ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going.’ ” The hearing room erupted in laughter.
The melodramatic turns continued. Jeb Stuart Magruder explained to him that the FBI was going to be sniffing around the committee. He was not to respond with the truth. He was to say the amount disbursed to Liddy was not $199,000 but $80,000.
“He must have been insistent because I remember making to him on that occasion a statement, ‘I have no intention of perjuring myself.’ ”
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 18