Watergate Is the Scandal That Never Ends

Fifty years after Nixon’s resignation, we’re still dwelling on, and learning new things about, this epochal yet perplexing moment in our modern history.

O n the morning of August 9, 1974, when Richard Nixon boarded Army One on the South Lawn of the White House, his family and a few selected aides in tow, and flashed his V-for-victory wave, most Americans thought they were witnessing the end of Watergate.

The unprecedented resignation of an American president seemed like a fitting final chapter in what the new chief executive, Gerald Ford — freshly sworn in by Chief Justice Warren Burger, the only man to sit in the Oval Office who was never elected to the presidency or vice presidency — would call, in televised remarks that afternoon, “our long national nightmare.”

For Nixon, the reversal of fortune was singular. Not two years earlier, he had been reelected in one of the largest landslides in U.S. history, capturing 49 states, 60.7 percent of the popular vote, 96.65 percent of the Electoral College. Only he and FDR ran on a national ticket five times.

For much of the rest of the country, however, the episode was . . . a Big Yawn, a TV show that had jumped the shark. In the muted reaction to Nixon’s resignation, writer Tom Wolfe, the white-suited reporter who served, improbably, as the era’s chief :::cultural historian:::, saw the stability of the American political system. “It has a center of gravity,” Wolfe wrote in 1979, “like a 102-inch High Point Vinyleather sofa”:

The president of the republic was forced from office, and as a result . . . nothing happened. . . . The tanks didn’t roll, the junta delivered no communiqués from the Pentagon, the mobs didn’t take to the streets, either before or after. . . . Not even a drunk Republican ventured out to heave a brick through a head-shop window. . . . Instead, everyone sat back and watched Nixon’s handpicked successor, Gerald Ford, do a pratfall from one side of the continent to the other and enjoyed that, too, as if he were William Bendix playing Chester Riley in The Life of Riley. Then, just to show how concerned they were about the steadiness of the ship of state, the citizens elected, off the wall, an unknown down-home matronly voiced Sunday-schoolish soft-shelled watery-eyed sponge-backed Millennial lulu as the next president.

The 1970s, as Wolfe had already written in New York magazine, was “the Me Decade,” a period when Americans, exhausted by the upheavals of radical politics, put the craziness of the Sixties behind them, tuned it out and focused, instead, on their inner selves — resolved, as Wolfe put it, to “find the Real Me . . . get rid of all the hypocrisies and impedimenta and false modesties that obscure the Real Me.”

Indeed, on the night of August 8, when Nixon announced his impending departure in an Oval Office address, CBS News correspondent Richard Threlkeld told anchor Walter Cronkite in a live report from Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco that, to residents there, the seismic impact of Watergate “hasn’t really taken hold, as if, almost, it’s all happening in some other country to some other people.”

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In Decade of Shocks: Dallas to Watergate, 1963-1974, published in 1983, author Tom Shachtman encapsulated what had become, by the early Eighties, a consensus-retrospective view: that the killing of President Kennedy and the resignation of his old nemesis bookended a decade (or so) of riots, assassinations, and war, the space race and civil rights, the Beatles and Muhammad Ali, Woodstock and the Cultural Revolution, and so much else.

It was a way of looking at the recent past that defined a decade by developments, not digits: The Sixties didn’t “start” until November 22, 1963, and didn’t “end” until the saga of Nixon, secret bomber of Cambodia, reached its conclusion in Watergate, described by Harper’s, in 1973, as “the poisonous afterbirth of Vietnam.”

The problem was: Watergate never ended; the character of the scandal, the respective roles of Nixon and the people and institutions surrounding him, kept changing, for those with eyes beyond the Real Me.

A month after Nixon’s resignation, for example, Americans watched President Ford, during a live televised address on September 8, sign Proclamation 4311, which granted “a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.”

Ford’s first pratfall was misreading those dates during his address. He substituted “July” for “January,” thereby replacing the date of Nixon’s first inaugural with that of the moon landing.

Then came U.S. v. Mitchell, the Watergate cover-up trial, a kind of Nuremberg for the Vietnam era, which ended on January 1, 1975 — the Sixties again, extended still further in time! — with the federal convictions of former U.S. attorney general John Mitchell, former White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, and other senior Nixon administration officials who had once stood for law and order, athwart amnesty, abortion, and acid.

The five and a half hours of the televised Nixon-Frost interviews, culled from 28 hours of videotaped sessions and broadcast over four episodes in May 1977, marked the ex-president’s first sustained questioning about Watergate and his presidency at large. Around 45 million people tuned in to the first episode.

Then came the books, including RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (1978), each Watergate account an Event unto itself. HALDEMAN TALKS blared the cover of the February 27, 1978, edition of Newsweek that ran excerpts from The Ends of Power (1978), the former chief of staff’s memoir. In one of his final interviews, in September 1993, Haldeman would tell me The Ends of Power was not reliable, that it reflected his ghostwriter’s much-improved second draft and paid some lawyers’ bills, but that he was presently at work on a new and much better account of the Nixon presidency. It came out the following spring as The Haldeman Diaries, published posthumously after Haldeman, a devout Christian Scientist, refused treatment for abdominal cancer. Later recognized by historian Richard Reeves as a “pre-computer organizational genius,” Haldeman packaged his 700-page diary, an essential complement to Nixon’s tapes in the documentation of his presidency, with a CD-ROM for additional content.

The publication of Jim Hougan’s revolutionary Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA (Random House, 1984), largely ignored in its time, changed the entire narrative of the scandal. Through unprecedented use of the Freedom of Information Act, Hougan obtained 30,000 pages from the FBI’s original investigation of the break-in and wiretapping at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, the doomed surveillance operation that ended with the burglars’ arrest, at gunpoint, on June 17, 1972, and touched off the great scandal.

The first person outside the government to review these records, Hougan revealed, among other things:

• that the Central Intelligence Agency had infiltrated, and was actively reporting back to Langley on the activities of, the White House Plumbers who conducted the Watergate operation;

• that the FBI never found any wiretaps installed at the DNC;

• that the wiretap the Democrats reported finding on the telephone of the ostensible target of the Watergate operation, DNC Chair Larry O’Brien, was swiftly determined by the FBI Laboratory to be inoperative, a “toy” markedly dissimilar from the other devices seized from the burglars, and was probably planted by the Democrats themselves after the June 17 arrests;

• and that the CIA “agent” on the break-in team, Bay of Pigs veteran Eugenio Martinez, carried on his person at the time of the arrests, and unsuccessfully tried to conceal, a key that the FBI fit to only one location: the desk of DNC secretary Ida “Maxie” Wells.

Secret Agenda argued that Wells’s telephone was the true target because it was being used to facilitate dates between Democrats visiting Washington and a call-girl ring that was operating, police records showed, out of the nearby Columbia Plaza apartments. Wells denies this to the present day.

Subsequent disclosures, however, archival and testimonial, have only bolstered Hougan’s findings. In 2002, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, one rung below the Supreme Court, held that the evidence “tends to corroborate the call-girl theory.”

In 1991, Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin published Silent Coup: The Removal of a President, a New York Times best seller that followed up Hougan with the bombshell disclosure that the “madam” of the Columbia Plaza call-girl ring was the best friend of — lived with — John Dean’s wife, Maureen. The two could be seen posed chummily beside each other in the photographs section of Mrs. Dean’s 1975 memoir, Mo: A Woman’s View of Watergate. Elsewhere, the madam could be seen chummily posed beside Joe Nesline, the capital’s preeminent organized-crime figure.

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John Dean was the young White House counsel who managed the Watergate cover-up until it collapsed, then traded testimony incriminating to Nixon and his men in exchange for Senate immunity and leniency after trial.

The allegation that Dean’s wife was tied to the call-girl ring under surveillance at the DNC, denied by Mrs. Dean to the present day but corroborated by disclosures over the last two decades, gave rise to what the New York Times, by 2009, called “rival visions of Dean.”

All of this came to a boil in ten years of litigation (1992–2002) that pitted Dean and Wells against the authors of Secret Agenda and Silent Coup, along with Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy, who in the 1990s endorsed the call-girl theory. These defamation lawsuits were to Watergate what M*A*S*H was to the Korean War: an account of a historical event that lasted three times as long as the event.

Dean v. St. Martin’s Press, as well as Wells v. Liddy and its sequel, Wells v. Liddy II, triggered discovery and trials that have yet to be fully mined by Watergate historians. The massive document production and deposition testimony came both from figures who had never testified publicly during the scandal’s original run and from more familiar faces. Under eight days of videotaped depositions conducted between September 1995 and January 1996, John Dean disavowed key aspects of his bombshell Watergate testimony and his memoir, Blind Ambition (1976).

During his original promotion tour for the book, in December 1976, Dean told the San Francisco Examiner he did not use a ghostwriter — “he insists the writing is all his own” — and that he took pains to ensure the work’s accuracy: “I was so careful in writing it. If there are any mistakes it would affect the credibility of the entire book and my own credibility.”

Two decades later, however, in the litigation he launched, the disbarred lawyer described Blind Ambition as “a good portrait and dramatization [but] not absolutely accurate”; said he had never read the book “cover to cover”; and accused his ghostwriter, Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch, of making things up “out of whole cloth . . . pure Taylor Branch” (an allegation that Branch, contacted by this writer in 1997, angrily denied).

In the “Author’s Note” for Blind Ambition, Dean claimed he had written it only after he had “reviewed an enormous number of documents as well as my own testimony”; in his depositions, Dean acknowledged the accuracy of what he had conceded to Len Colodny, on tape, in January 1989: “I didn’t even reread my testimony when I wrote my book.”

Likewise, as his depositions unfolded, Dean grudgingly acknowledged that at times his testimony before the Senate Watergate committee, the House Judiciary Committee, and various criminal proceedings included “misstatements,” “overstatement,” “self-serving” statements, “verbal slips,” at least two instances of “total forgetfulness,” one case where he was “maybe imposing hindsight on events,” and another, during cross-examination in U.S. v. Mitchell, where he “wasn’t listening careful [sic] . . . and [went] along with a leading question, and I’m not sure why.” Imagine if other sensational witnesses of the 20th century — Whittaker Chambers, say, or Clarence Thomas — had, in revisiting their appointments with destiny, expressed similar misgivings, under oath no less.

In the 1970s, it had seemed as though Dean boasted total recall, that his testimony, as his lawyer asserted, had been “corroborated in all significant respects” by the Watergate tapes. Not until I published “Anniversarygate,” in National Review in 1997, was it revealed that the Watergate special prosecutors had drafted a lengthy memorandum in February 1974, never turned over to defense counsel in U.S. v. Mitchell, titled: “Material Discrepancies Between the Senate Select Committee Testimony by John Dean and the Tapes of Dean’s Meetings with the President.”

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The Dean and Wells litigation ended with no retractions from the revisionists and a jury verdict for Liddy.

Also stretching into the 21st century were the periodic releases of “new” Nixon tapes. Of the 3,700 hours of audio material generated in the two and a half years of the taping system’s operation, captured on 950 reel-to-reel recordings, some 500 hours remain unreleased.

It wasn’t until October 2000, and a trip to the National Archives in College Park, Md., that I became the first person outside the government to review the tapes of December 1971–January 1972, when Nixon learned that the Joint Chiefs of Staff — for two years, in wartime — had operated a spy ring against him and his national-security advisor, Henry Kissinger.

A Navy-trained stenographer and courier, Yeoman Charles Radford — assigned to Kissinger’s detail on the National Security Council by Kissinger’s own deputy, General Alexander Haig — had quietly stolen or copied 5,000 classified documents and delivered them to a pair of admirals who in turn provided the materials to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Thomas Moorer, and other officials. The ring had been uncovered by the Plumbers.

Withheld until the 21st century — I published the first excerpts in the Atlantic Monthly in 2002 — the Moorer-Radford tapes revealed the depths of the espionage against Nixon. Such revelations, as I wrote on RealClearPolitics in 2022, “force us . . . to conceive of Watergate as a Cold War-era power struggle between a duly elected president and the national security state, with Nixon as much a victim in the affair as he was a perpetrator. In a time when legions of Americans believe in the existence of a ‘deep state,’ getting the history of Watergate right takes on new urgency.”

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So perhaps, in addition to looking backward, it is equally appropriate on this, the last major anniversary of the Nixon presidency that will be marked by anyone who lived through it, to think about the future of the Scandal That Never Ends.

Do we know everything about Watergate? Assuredly not. Many areas remain ripe for new research.

One example: In Secret Agenda, Jim Hougan published the previously unreported account of William McMahon, a former Secret Service officer who disclosed that the CIA had detailed employees from its Office of Security to the Secret Service unit that maintained the White House taping system.

This revelation carried with it the implication, as Hougan noted, that the CIA had enjoyed “unrivaled access to the president’s private conversations and thoughts” for the two years (1971–73) the taping system was operational.

There sits a paper trail, one of many, as yet undiscovered.