Bonus: Watergate

the offices of the Democratic National Committee. In nineteen seventy two that the people who worked for the Nixon re election campaign, who worked in the Nixon White House as well, broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel and they actually were caught by a security guard in the summer of nineteen seventy two, but it looked like just a run of the mill burglary.

So when we talk about Watergate, there is this incident of a break in at the hotel to go after the Democrats campaign strategy for nineteen seventy two, which apparently was to lose as badly as possible since only won one state. But then it spiraled out into all these other things that the Nixon administration was doing that were secret, So that Watergate is much more than just the break in.

were known as the Pentagon Papers. And the Pentagon Papers were an attempt by the Defense Department to understand how the United States had gotten into the Vietnam War, which was complete mass in nineteen seventy one, and they were secret, but Ellsberg thought the America people deserved to know what the US government had done way back in the forties, fifties, and sixties, so he leaked the Pentagon Papers. They got a lot of publication. There were court cases about whether

or not the newspapers were allowed to publish them. And Nixon, who was president at the time, could have said, well, these really embarrassed my predecessors. I'll just let it go. But he was really paranoid about leaks, and he was worried that things in the Nixon administration would also leak.

So some of his aides assembled a group of covert operatives, guys who are known to history like Gee Gordon Liddy, who had a radio show for a long time Chuck Coulson, who later went on to become a born again preacher.

And these guys tried to make Elsberg's life miserable. They broke into his psychiatrist's office to steal his files, things like that, And apparently one of these guys relatives said well, what are you doing in the White House, And to cover themselves, they said were plumbers because their job was to fix leaks, and so they became known as the White House plumbers. And you know, the problem with once you hire plumbers is you can't really fire them without

them knowing things. So the administration kept them around, and they were the ones who did the break in at the Watergate hotel, for instance. But as we discovered over the course of the next sort of two years after nineteen seventy two, so the Nixon administration was not just using the plumbers to go after its enemies. They were using the regular people in government. So John Dean, who's a regular on CNN now, is a legal expert on

presidential corruption. He's there because he was a young lawyer in the Nixon White House. One of his jobs was to compose a list of enemies of the Nixon administration, which included such hard hitting political figures as Joe Namath and Paul Newman, because they were popular people who were anti Nixon. And it wasn't just to compile a list. It was, for instance, to say to the IRS audit

our enemies. Use the powers of the federal government, the IRS, the FBI, and even the CIA to go after people in the domestic sphere who were potentially enemies of the Nixon administration. So what started as a break in is the investigations compounded. They discovered there was a lot more to it than just a bunch of second rate burglars getting caught trying to steal Georgian governor's campaign secrets.

smell right. And as they began asking questions, there's a guy named Mark Felt who worked for the FBI, who was aware of what was going on, and he becomes a secret source, takes on the unfortunate name of Deep Throat after a pornographic film that was poker at the time, and he begins telling Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post details and pieces of information that are not publicly known, and that leads them to continue to

ask questions over the course of nineteen seventy two. So the break in in seventy two at first is thought just to be some random burglars looking for stuff that they could steal, so it doesn't affect the seventy two

election at all, and Nixon wins in a landslide. But they keep asking questions into nineteen seventy three, and they begin to reveal that the people who were involved in the burglary actually have connections back to the White House, and once they see that, that's when more journalists pile on, and most importantly, Congress decides to start holding hearings to

find out what was going on. And Nixon did a pretty good job for nineteen seventy three of fending off allegations by saying I didn't know about any of this. This was all people underneath me doing these things, until in late nineteen seventy three one of his aides, justin testifying, accidentally says, well, you know, the president was taping all the conversations in the White House and nobody knew that outside the White House. And this is a guy named

Butterfield who says this. When he says it, Congress are like, Okay, we need these tapes. And that becomes a source of a huge fight between Nixon and Congress over presidential immunity. Basically, does the president have the right to hang onto these things as the president or are these government documents to

serviation able to see? And eventually the Supreme Court rules that the tapes have to be turned over, and that's really when that leads to Nixon recognizing that he is on tape authorizing a lot of these illegal acts, well beyond what happened in the Watergate hotel, and that he's doomed once these tapes are out, there's no way he can stay in power. And not to get two presentists.

But one of the big differences between then and now is that there were key Republican senators who turned against him. Howard Baker, who was a Tennessee Republican who was an upstanding a citizen. He worked for the Reagan administration. He was the person who famously said, what did the president know and when did he know it? And asking that

question coming from the Republican side. Was an indication that there were Republican legislators in nineteen seventy three and then into seventy four who were starting to give up on Nixon. They thought he had crossed too many lines.

his Jewish National security advisor. So the tapes were a combination of direct evidence that Nixon knew that things were being done that were illegal, not just the sort of low level petty but also using agencies in the way they weren't supposed to be used. But then also that he was a really awful person on top of it. So they were embarrassing, and you know, nineteen seventy five Congress held hearings on the CIA because of these tapes, because it was clear that Nixon had used the CIA.

These are the Church Committee hearings and named after a senator from Idaho, Frank Church. And that's, for instance, where we learned all these things about the efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro in the early sixties. All sorts of things came out of these Church Committee hearings. So our current vision of the CIA is a bunch of you know, sort of semi rogue guys go around trying to execute people. That all comes out of the Church Committee hearings, because

most of that was secret before nineteen seventy five. More than anything, what it does is damage this idea that the federal government is basically telling you the truth most of the time, because knowledge did we learn from the Pentagon papers that they lied repeatedly about the war. But then we have all these hearings, we find out that Nixon and his people were lying about the ways the federal government was being used.

was Robert Bork. Bork would come back in the nineteen eighties as a nominee for the Supreme Court, and he was the first of this run of really controversial Supreme Court nominations, and Bork ended up getting I did not obviously get a seat on the Supreme Court. So Nixon really fought hard in the courts to protect his rights basically as president, to do what he wanted. In fact, he said after he left office at one point something to the extent of, if the president does it, it's

legal again. You know, the echoes to today are really really powerful. That Nixon's base take on the matter was he could do whatever he wanted and if he wanted to take people, if he wanted to give orders as president, he could do those things, and that Congress had no power to oversee him. Of course, Congress had the power

to impeach him. And what ultimately drove him from office was as these tapes were released, he recognized that there were not enough Republicans in the Senate who would vote to acquit him, that impeachment was going to go through. The Democrats controlled both houses, but they didn't have a two thirds majority in the Senate. So he recognized that he was going to lose a vote in the Senate, he would be impeached to remove from office. So he decided better to resign on his own terms than to

be impeached. This is one of the things that's really remarkable, I mean, certainly about the Republican Party today. We've never had a party that's been so much in one person's pocket. Even when Reagan was running in nineteen eighty and eighty four, there were people in the party who thought he was too conservative and who argued against him. His own vice president H. W. Bush had called Reagan's economic policy voodoo economics. And then as soon as he gets the nomination eighty eight,

tries to distance himself from some of Bagan's policies. And I was reading up on Jerald Ford's voting record when he was in Congress in the nineteen sixties. He voted for all the Civil Rights Acts as a Republican, and he voted for the Voting Rights Act in nineteen sixty five, and there were a lot of Democrats who voted against those bills. So the ways in which the parties had these sort of strange overlaps that seem different to us now is really a powerful thing. So the Southern Democrats

basically all became Republicans. I think about a guy like Phil Graham, who was a long time Democratic centator, and John Tower, both of them from Texas, who switched parties and became Republicans in the nineteen eighties. And that was a pretty common thing in the nineteen eighties for these Southern Democrats to become Republicans.

in Congress out of the district of Michigan. He was the House Minority leader in nineteen seventy three, and his dream was to someday be Speaker of the House. When it didn't look like Republicans whatever, we'd get to take control of the House. And in seventy three Richard Nixon lost his vice president to a completely different scandal. So his vice president was a guy named Spiro Agnew from Maryland,

and Nixon and Agnew ran in nineteen sixty eight. One of their central campaign planks was law and order because Agnew had helped keep order in nineteen sixty eight in nineteen sixty seven after some of the urban riots, particularly after King's assassination in April sixty eight, so they were running on this law and order campaign, and investigators in Maryland eventually uncovered that Governor Agnew had been taking kickbacks to give contracts to various supporters, so he was a

classic bribery scheme. So Agnew was forced to resign because it was obviously a drag on Nixon to have it somebody who was almost as corupt as he was in the White House, and they had to find somebody who could help the Republican Party and try to restore some of the image of the Republican Party in the middle of nineteen seventy three, and Gerald Ford was exactly the guy. He had never done anything con to recy in his life. He had managed to annoy Lyndon Johnson, which is probably

something on his side. Linda Johnson said something like he was too dumb to chew gum and walk at the same time. So Lynda Johnson didn't like him. So Ford was seen as a guy without a lot of ambition, but very clean, and he would bring some credit back to the Nixon administration. And of course, shortly after that, about a year later, it was when Nixon finally found that he had to resign, and so Jared Ford found himself President of the United States after never having gotten

a vote outside his district in Michigan. The thing about Ford is because he was unsullied by any sort of corruption, and he was a negotiator in Congress. He wasn't a legislation writer. He was a guy who sort of brought people together. I think there was a sense that Ford also could be a guy who could heal some of the divisions if for some reason Nick sent to leave office.

You know, and when Ford was appointed in nineteen seventy three, you know, the Watergate scandal was brewing enough that you know, reasonable people could see that Nixon might not serve out his whole second term. That would not you know, that wouldn't have been a surprise to anybody. And you know, both the Senate and the House had to vote to

confirm him, and they voted overwhelmingly to confirm him. So I understand Haldeman's position, But I think also the people in Congress recognized and Gerald Ford they had a guy who they could trust the presidency to if Nixon got forced out of office, which was plausible in the summer of nineteen seventy three.

that Nixon wouldn't be tried in any court. And Nixon accepted the pardon, and there was a huge explosion about the pardon because people thought that maybe Nixon and Ford had made some sort of deal that, for instance, maybe Nixon agreed to step down on the understand that Ford would pardon him, or maybe even further back than that Nixon chose Ford in nineteen seventy three, because that's really when Nixon had some bargaining power and if he'd be

Ford would pardon him for something. I think one of the things that fuels the pardon conspiracy theory is that Ford was in fact on the Warren Commission, which draws a lot of conspiracy theorists about what he might have known and what he might have covered up he might have been capable of it. So I don't think there was any evidence I think Ford made of a conspiracy.

I think Ford just made a decision that putting Richard Nixon on trial for one thing was going to be a zoo that the things that got revealed in a trial might be pretty damaging for the nation as a whole, and pretty divisive for the nation as a whole. You know, we have to remember that Nixon stood for election on a national ticket five times, twice as vice president, three

times as president. I mean, I remember my dad saying he was so disappointed Nixon because he voted for him five times, and then he had to find out that Nixon was this guy. I think there were a lot of people like that. You know, the seventy two election, Nixon got sixty percent of the vote, and there were still sizeable numbers of people who were like, wow, everybody does it, you know, and Nixon shouldn't have to leave office.

So I think Ford made the decision that it was the right thing to do, even if it was a politically damaging for him, because you know, once you're in the White House, you can't help but think, well, maybe I'll run for president in nineteen seventy six. And I don't know how soon he decided that. I suspect it was about August tenth, about the day after he got into the White House. I think he started thinking I could be president too, and I'm gonna stick around. So

he made the decision to parton Nixon. There were never any trials. When Nixon got to write his memoirs and that it explained what he did, he got to get interviewed by David Frost and other people and explained his what he did and why he did it without the power of potential being charged with perjury. And so, you know,

this is one of those great what ifs. Should Ford have let Nixon go on trial, I think generally, while people at the time were pretty upset about it, most people, I think over time the decision to pardon Nixon probably his worked out as the less bad of those two choices, because, in part, in some ways, if you accept a part and you're sort of acknowledging that you were guilty and you're taking it. You know, Nixon never did that directly,

but I think there was something to that. Having Nixon accept the pardon was his way of saying, yes, I

did the wrong things, and now I'll go back. And I think also the pardon weirdly gave Nixon the opportunity to do this elder statesman thing, which is still kind of remarkable to me that not long after that, people were going to Richard Nixon for commentary on foreign policy in particular, And you know, it was okay for presidents to consult with Richard Nixon to talk about foreign policy because most of the scandals were seen to be domestic and not foreign policy. So Nixon managed to retain this

elder statesman quality. And you know, I remember when he died, people were saying, well, you know, you know, we shouldn't be so harsh on Nixon. Everybody did those things, And you know, the reality is everybody didn't do those things. There were some you know, Johnson did some bad things, but nothing on the level that Nixon did them.

cash to pay the plumbers. You know, there's a lot of stuff below board. So in some ways, the conviction of Donald Trump in New York State was a post Watergate thing because he was taking campaign donations to cover up the I don't want to call it an affair with Stormy Daniels, that meeting with Stormy Daniels, that brief interaction.

So there's that. There was also, I think this larger sense in the public between the Pentagon papers and Watergate that the government was just repeatedly lying and couldn't be trusted. And I think we talked about this with your previous podcast. You know, there's that Pew poll like do you trust the federal government to do the right thing? Most of the time? And in the early sixties was like eighty percent of the American people said that. By the early eighties,

it's down to twenty percent. So ironically, one of the beneficiaries of all this, well two beneficiaries. First was Jimmy car in nineteen seventy six, who had almost no experience, I mean, not that it seems to matter about experience anymore, but he had been the governor of Georgia, and he parlayed that into his electoral victory over Ford, largely by saying, I will never lie to you. And there was a sense that we want people who are honest but maybe

more competent than Gerald Ford. And Carter was a nuclear engineer and he was a farmer and all these things. So Carter was definitely a post Watergate president. I don't think he could have won under other circumstances, and I think it equally Reagan is a post Watergate president with a very different set of policies. But what really propelled Reagan to victory was saying, basically, government is not the

solution to the problem. Government is a problem. Well, it's a lot easier to believe that after you've read the Pentagon papers or read about what Nixon did with the IRS and the CIA and the FBI, and you started saying, well, you know, I can't trust any of these people, so

maybe a smaller government is a good thing. Of course, the government didn't get smaller, kept getting bigger, but in terms of the rhetoric, and then I think there was just a general sense that our whole institutions were really shaky right before for the bi centennial, because the whole nineteen seventy six was like, we're going to celebrate two hundred years of American independence, But it was impossible to escape the fact that we had just appointed a guy

from Michigan to be president who, you know, really wasn't that qualified to be president. I think Ford turned out to be a pretty good president, but we're talking about our election. These choices really good? Well, Ford and Carter didn't look like, you know, nineteen twelve, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft. It looked like, well, this is the best we can do, and that sense of, you know, does the political system unraveling? And we just you know,

we're not getting the best anymore. We can either have Richard Nixon and Lindon Johnson, who are effective but you know, breaking the law left and right, or we can get Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, who seemed pretty honest, but they can't get anything done. So is there some sort of resolution to that? And I think a lot of our skepticism about the American political system comes out of Watergate. So there's some legal changes, but also more than anything, cultural changes.

he could say he would solve the problem. Although that's kind of stupid, like it'd be better off if Johnson solved the war, then he could have done the aftermath. But it certainly seems like Nixon sabotage that. And you know, he ran on this campaign of trying to end the Vietnam War, but he didn't, and if anything, the depending on papers which are about the war brought him down.

And then he was completely distracted in nineteen seventy two seventy three, when the war in Vietnam was coming to its end, and also there was the war in the Middle East in nineteen seventy three, and you know, there

was a story circulating for a long time. The Defense Secretary, James Slessinger and the Secretary of State, who by that point was Henry Kisten, had made a deal that one of them would always be in Washington in nineteen seventy three because Nixon was so out of control that he was drinking too much, he was constantly railing about his enemies, and they were worried that he would start a war

trying to you know, change the subjects from Watergate. Now, Schlessinger later denied that that was the case, but Kissinger never denied it. And what's also clear is that it does appear that one of them was always in Washington in that time period, and that they also gave military commanders orders not to do anything without consulting with one of them to make sure that it wasn't just Nixon going off the rails. You know, that's what we were

worried about. In January of twenty twenty one, you would Mark Milly basically said he was worried that Trump would try to start a war with Iran to distract from the election problem. And Mark Miller was reaching out to the Chinese to try to say to them, look, we're not going to start anything, you know, don't overreact, so you know, in some ways, it was the Vietnam War that destroyed Richard Nixon and made John Ford's presidency popular, and then Ford got left with the disaster that was

the end of the Vietnam War. And while this isn't directly related to Watergate, it is pretty fascinating. One of my students wrote her book or dissertation that was published about human rights policy between the US and Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and one of the things she discovered in the archives was that it was Gerald Ford more than anybody who pushed to save the refugees at South Vietnam, and that Kissinger was doubtful about it, but Ford said,

we owe these people. We need to get as many out of South Vietnam as possible if they want to get out to the United States. And it wouldn't have happened without him. And actually he was more of a defender of South Vietnamese human rights and Jimmy Carter, and that he fought hard, and that the reason why they're such a huge South Vietnamese community in the United States

is that Ford said, we've got a moral obligation. It's pretty clear that he was a policy guy as president and did some very important things that maybe Nixon wouldn't have done.