The Original Watergate Stores

by The Washington Post

  On Nov. 7, Mr. Nixon won his great victory and by the time of his second inauguration on Jan. 20 it seemed that America was on the verge of a new era of peace abroad and reconciliation at home. He moved swiftly to implement his new goals, scrapped economic controls he had imposed earlier, hailed the return of America’s prisoners of war from Vietnam, and set out to fashion the new majority that would place his imprimatur on the year to come.

  Now, only three months later, Watergate, the scandal that would not die, has overtaken him and his administration. And Richard Milhous Nixon, who has expressed so many times the personal problems of dealing with crises, is confronted with one of a magnitude that faced his presidential predecessors Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Warren G. Harding and, more recently and in a different context, Lyndon B. Johnson.

  Part II

  Washington, DC – Archibald Cox (center) is sworn in as Special Watergate Prosecutor by Judge Charles Fahy (left) of the District of Columbia Circuit Court, during a ceremony at the Justice Department May 25, 1973. Looking on is Attorney General Elliot Richardson (right) who took his oath earlier at the White House. (Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS)

  The Government Acts

  By the summer of 1973, the Watergate affair was a full-blown national scandal and the subject of two official investigations, one led by Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, the other by North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin, chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee.

  Cox, a liberal Harvard Law School professor with a crew cut, had served as Solicitor General in the Kennedy administration. He was appointed by Nixon’s new Attorney General Elliot Richardson to investigate the burglary and all other offenses involving the White House or Nixon’s reelection campaign.

  Ervin, a conservative Democrat best known for his interest in constitutional law, was chosen by Senate leaders to chair a seven-member investigatory committee. As the Senate Watergate Committee’s nationally-televised hearings captured national interest, Ervin’s folksy but tenacious grilling of sometimes reluctant witnesses transformed him a household name.

  The scandal had spread beyond the original burglary. In April 1973, it was revealed that Watergate burglars, Hunt and Liddy, had broken into the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who gave the top-secret Pentagon papers to the New York Times. Seeking information to discredit Ellsberg, they found nothing and left undetected. In May, a Senator revealed that a young Nixon staffer named Tom Huston had developed a proposal for a domestic espionage office to monitor and harass the opponents of the president. The plan, never implemented, disclosed a “Gestapo mentality,” said Sam Ervin.

  John Dean was the first White House aide to break with the Nixon White House. “Dean Alleges Nixon Knew of Cover-up Plan,” Woodward and Bernstein reported on the eve of his testimony. On the stand, Dean disclosed that he had told Nixon that the coverup was “a cancer on the presidency.”

  But the most sensational revelation came in July 1973, when White House aide Alexander Butterfield told the committee that Nixon had a secret taping system that recorded his phone calls and conversations in the Oval Office. When Nixon refused to release the tapes, Ervin and Cox issued subpoenas. The White House refused to comply, citing “executive privilege,” the doctrine that the president, as chief executive, is entitled to candid and confidential advice from aides.

  “Thus the stage was set for a great constitutional struggle between a President determined not to give up executive documents and materials and a Senate committee and a federal prosecutor who are determined to get them,” said The Post on July 24, 1973. “The ultimate arbitration, it was believed, would have to be made by the Supreme Court.”

  After protracted negotiations, the White House agreed to provide written summaries of the taped conversations to the Senate and the special prosecutor. Ervin accepted the deal but Cox rejected it. On Saturday, Oct. 20, Nixon ordered Attorney General Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson resigned rather than carry out the order, as did his top deputy Williams Ruckleshaus. Solicitor General Robert Bork became the acting attorney general and he dismissed Cox. The special prosecutor’s office was abolished.

  The firings, dubbed “the Saturday Night Massacre,” ignited a firestorm in Washington. Amid calls for impeachment, Nixon was forced to appoint a new special prosecutor, a prominent Texas lawyer named Leon Jaworski who had been a confidante of President Lyndon Johnson. Nixon’s credibility suffered another blow on November 20, when his lawyers informed a federal judge that one of the key tapes sought by investigators contained 18-minute erasure that White House officials had trouble explaining. When Nixon declared at a press conference: “I am not a crook,” more than a few Americans found his denial unconvincing.

  On Dec. 31, 1973 Jaworski issued a report saying that besides the original seven burglars, 12 other persons had pleaded guilty to Watergate-related offenses and criminal proceedings against four more individual were in progress. Nixon rejected accusations of wrongdoing and insisted he would stay in office.

  The Post stories from late spring 1973 through the end of the year:

  Cox Is Chosen as Special Prosecutor Democrat Served Under Kennedy as Solicitor General

  By George Lardner, Jr.

  Washington Post Staff Writer

  Saturday, May 19, 1973

  Former Solicitor General Archibald Cox, 61, agreed yesterday to serve as the Justice Department’s special prosecutor in the Watergate scandals.

  Attorney General-designate Elliot L. Richardson told a press conference that he would name Cox to the proposed $38,000 a-year post if the Senator approved Richardson’s own nomination.

  A Democrat, Cox was a member of the late John Kennedy’s brain trust in the 1960 presidential campaign against then Vice president Nixon. He served as Solicitor General, the third ranking post in the Justice Department, from 1961 to 1965 when he joined the faculty at Harvard Law School.

  At a separate news conference in Cambridge, Cox said any implication of President Nixon would be reported.

  “This is a take of tremendous importance,” he said. “Somehow, we must restore confidence, honor and integrity in government.”

  Besides last June’s break-in at Democratic National Headquarters, the investigation will cover all alleged offenses rising out of the 1972 presidential campaign and any other allegations involving President Nixon, his White House employees or appointees.

  Speaking at the Pentagon, Richardson, who is still Secretary of Defense, said he was confident that Cox’s appointment would help counter any public suspicions that the White House might try to influence the investigation.

  “There wasn’t going to be any influence from the White House anyway,” Richardson declared.

  The Senate Judiciary Committee, which has not been entirely convinced of that, set a hearing for Monday to question both men on how much of a free hand Cox will actually have.

  Richardson said the former Solicitor General found Richardson’s proposed guidelines completely acceptable, “word for word.”

  Senate Democrats dissatisfied with the charter are still expected to press for a change in one key provision that subordinates the prosecutor’s independence to “the Attorney General’s statutory accountability for all matters, falling with the Department of Justice.”

  Richardson indicated that he has no intention of yielding on that point. But he did say he plans one major change in guidelines, suggested by several senators, to exempt the prosecutors from any duty of keeping the Attorney General informed of the progress of the investigation.”

  Cox’s selection ended a sometimes frantic search by Richardson that lasted more than two weeks.

  His first choice, Federal judge Harold Tyler, Jr. of New York City, turned down the job Monday citing his reluctance to step down from the bench, particularly when the ground rules for the prosecutor’s post had not yet been settled.

  Another of the four “finalists” for the job, former D
eputy Attorney General Warren Christopher, took himself out of the running Wednesday, saying that he saw no “reasonable probability” of securing “the requisite independence.”

  The withdrawals served to reinforce doubts about the independence Richardson said the prosecutor would have. They also raised questions abut Richardson’s own prospects for Senate confirmation.

  Richardson offered the job to Cox Wednesday evening in a phone call to the West Coast where Cox was giving a University of California lecture.

  An expert primarily in labor and constitutional law, Cox had been considered earlier and passed over. Richardson said, because of a relative lack of experience in trial work and criminal prosecutions.

  As a consequence, Richardson said, Cox’s chief deputy, to be named as soon as possible will be “a lawyer with extensive experience in litigation.”

  Cox served for three months last year as counsel to a special Massachusetts legislative committee investigating charges of judicial impropriety against two state Superior Court judges, Edward J. DeSaulnier Jr. and Vincent Brogna.

  The two judges had been implicated in a 1962 stock-swindle case involving Michael Raymond of New York, who first aired his allegations in 1971 in testimony here before the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee headed by Sen. John L. McClellan (D-Ark).

  In January of 1972, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ordered Judge DeSaulner’s disbarment as a lawyer (he subsequently resigned from the bench) and censured Judge Brogna. The court then referred the case to the legislature, which alone in Massachusetts can initiate the removal of judges.

  The legislative committee, on the basis of Cox’s investigation, issued a report on April 11, 1972, that urged no further action against Judge Brogna and found the case against Judge DeSaulnier “moot” because he had resigned. The findings stirred some controversy since the committee held no public hearings and Cox did not interview either judge. He declined to say whether he had interviewed Raymond. Judge Brogna remains on the bench.

  Cox agreed to serve as special Watergate prosecutor in a phone call to Richardson around 1:45 p.m. yesterday. After notifying key senators, Richardson, anxious not to prolong the guessing over his selection, announced his choice at a 3:30 p.m. press conference while the FBI was still updating its last background check.

  The Attorney General-designate hailed Cox as “one of the finest solicitors general in recent history … and a lawyer of courage, independence and integrity.”

  Of the two other “finalists” that he passed over, Richardson said that one, retired New York appellate court judge David Peck, 71, not a Wall Street lawyer, decided he could not take the job because of “urgent commitments to clients of long standing.” Of the other, Colorado Supreme Court Justice William Erickson, 49, Richardson said only that he had not been offered the post.

  A one time student of Cox in labor law at Harvard Law School, Richardson said that “anyone who knows him knows he’ll do it right without regard to school ties or, any other association. We’ve never been close friends.”

  Asked whether the nominees were related in any way to Edward Finch Cox, President Nixon’s sons-in-law, Richardson started to say no, did a double take and confessed amid a round of laughter.

  “I didn’t ask him, come to think of it.”

  The two are not related.

  At his press conference in Cambridge, Cox said the investigation might take a year, 18 months or longer. He pointed out that the Teapot Dome inquiry started in the Coolidge Administration took six years.

  He said he was satisfied that Richardson’s guidelines would “permit sufficient independence to do the job right. And whatever else I shall be, I shall be independent.”

  The First Day of Watergate: Not Exactly High Drama

  By Jules Witcover

  Washington Post Staff Writer

  Friday, May 18, 1973

  If you like to watch grass grow, you would have loved the opening yesterday of the Senate select committee’s hearings on the Watergate and related campaign misdeeds.

  Unhurried in the presence of network television cameras or the certain knowledge that America was missing its soap operas, Sen. Sam J. Ervin Jr. (D-N.C.) and his six Senate colleagues spent the first day resolutely making a single point.

  That point, persuasively drummed and droned home in five hours of mostly colorless and snail’s-pace testimony from four secondary witnesses, is that the investigation doesn’t intend to sacrifice thoroughness — or, when necessary, even boredom — for sensationalism, just to hold the TV audience.

  The old Senate Caucus Room, which has heard about skullduggery as far back as Teapot Dome 50 years ago, was decked out in its brightest TV lights and an anticipatory overflow crowd when Ervin gaveled the hearing to order at one minute after 10 a.m.

  The first spectators had arrived outside the old Senate Office Building nearly five hours earlier and were now seated or standing at the rear of the chamber. The first two arrivals, Tom Ling, 24, and Spencer Turnipseed, 25, students at Wesley Seminary, fell asleep, lost their places in line, but got in anyway.

  Ling and Turnipseed both said they were there to hear more evidence than what they had read about Watergate, and most others around them agreed.

  Some talked loftily about wanting “to see the system work,” but Ronald Coleman, a 27-year-old recent graduate of Catholic University and blind, said: “We’ve all got a little sadistic streak in us — like stopping on the highway to watch an accident.”

  But there was little in this first day of the Watergate hearings to please the sadistic, except perhaps the sight of hundreds sitting stolidly through yawn-inspiring recountings or oft-told tales of how the whole business began.

  Samuel Dash, the Georgetown University law professor who is chief counsel, led the witnesses methodically through their stories, with the minority counsel, Fred Thompson, taking over, and then the senators.

  To make the record, they asked many obvious questions for which answers long have been public knowledge, and as they did, you could almost hear television channels being switched from Maine to California. At the outset, Ervin pledged “full and open public testimoney,” and that was what he started serving up yesterday.

  The first witness, Robert C. Odle Jr., 29, described himself as director of administration for the Committee for the Re-election of the President, which in the Nixon administration means he was the office manager.

  Odle, baby-faced, with an accountant’s manner and a dull gray-striped suit he will still look right in when he’s 60, came more in sorrow than in anger or repentence.

  He opened with a little speech about “a million volunteers across the country” and most of the 400 in the re-election committee headquarters who had nothing to do with Watergate, including himself.

  He praised President Nixon, who he said “ultimately will be regarded as one of the greatest Presidents the country has ever known,” and then he proceeded to illustrate, perhaps unwittingly, how things could go wrong at the Committee for the Re-election of the President in spite of such dedication and majority honesty.

  The re-election committee, he made clear, was a place where they watched the small print with a magnifying glass but sometimes didn’t know when a truck was running over them.

  And when he first heard that James W. McCord, the campaign committee’s security chief, had been arrested in the Watergate break-in, at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, his first concern was that he’d have to find a replacement.

  He suddenly realized that as “director of administration” he was now responsible for security at the Committee for the Re-election of the President, and there was always the danger of “retaliation.”

  In a telephone conversation with the deputy campaign director, Jeb S. Magruder, who was in California, Odle said: “My God, I’ve got to find a new guy.” And Magruder replied: “You sure do.”

  That same day — June 17, 1972 — when G. Gordon Liddy
came by and asked him where a paper-shredding machine could be found and how it worked. Odle said he told him, and when he saw Liddy later carrying a big pile of papers to the shredding room, “it didn’t seem very unusual at that time.” He never shredded one document himself, Odle said flatly.

  And then there was the question from Sen. Joseph M. Montoya (D-N.M.) about how McCord was paid. McCord was on the regular payroll, and Odle said he didn’t know anything about cash payments to him.

  “The way the system was set up,” Odle said, “those things [payments to staff members] would go through me.” Apparently it never dawned on him that the way the system was set up, some payments went through him, and others didn’t.

  Odle was also at his believing, trusting best when asked about a file given to him by another re-election committee aide to take home for safekeeping the weekend of the Watergate break-in. He never asked what was in the file and never looked, he testified. It turned out, the line of questioning indicated, that it was the file on the committee’s clandestine operations.

  Odle hardly qualified as a star witness, but it was that kind of day. The other three witnesses were there to make record, and they did, methodically.

  Bruce Kehrli, who was a lieutenant to deposed presidential chief of staff H. R. (Bob) Haldeman and now assists his successor, Gen. Alexander M. Haig Jr., efficiently outlined who did what on the White House staff. Then came two of the police officers who made the Watergate arrests, Sgt. Paul W. Leeper and Officer John Barrett — Leeper crew-cutted with an incongruent Fu Manchu beard and mustache, Barrett long-haired and heavily bearded.

  Leeper stood before charts and a floor plan of the Democratic National Committee and told how his police team “responded” from one room to another until Barrett came upon the culprits and started the Watergate scandal on its way.