Lest We Forget
OSHINSKY, DAVID M.
Lest We Forget The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon By Stanley I. Kutler Knopf. 733 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Professor of history, Rutgers; author, "A...
...Why didn't the President destroy the tape recordings of his Oval Office conversations...
...One disaster followed another...
...author, "A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy" My students know little about Watergate...
...But 1973, Kutler wisely reminds us, was a different time with different perspectives...
...Several White House aides, including Leonard Garment and Alexander M. Haig Jr., convinced him that destroying the tapes at this point would only enhance the public's perception of his guilt...
...In 1952, Nixon the Vice Presidential candidate had to fight for his political life after stories surfaced about a political slush fund...
...They included a plan to sabotage the air-conditioning system at the Democratic National Convention, another to have call girls "compromise" the leading Democratic candidates, and a third to kidnap radical activists who might cause trouble for Nixon at the Republican National Convention...
...He spent little time with him, often ignoring him for months at a stretch...
...This was not a silly caper, an isolated affair...
...Put simply, anything would have been better than releasing those tapes...
...Who can forget the wild public reaction to the final batch, the truly damaging ones...
...Bob) Haldeman, his Chief of Staff, that "we were finally in a position to have someone doing to the opposition what they had done to us...
...Watergate was part of a "seamless web" of criminal activity that John Mitchell dubbed "the White House Horrors...
...What worried the President, it seemed, was O'Brien's knowledge of illegal contributions from foreign sources to the Nixon campaign...
...For Gerald Ford, the pardon was an act of mercy, but some Americans wanted justice as well...
...John Dean ran the cover-up, with Nixon coaching from the wings...
...Mitchell was both amused and disappointed by Liddy's presentation...
...But Haldeman knew better...
...It didn't work...
...Four of the men were Cubans who had worked previously for theCIA...
...Before long, investigators would trace both men to a secret intelligence unit operating inside the White House...
...The Wars of Watergate is worth reading because it brings the real Nixon back to life, for all of us...
...He could not permit a serious investigation of their activities without exposing the White House "Plumbers" operation...
...A huge majority described the bugging of Democratic headquarters as a minor event that occurred frequently "in the heat of a campaign...
...Butterfield, a Nixon loyalist, assumed that he was merely corroborating what Haldeman and other staffers had already told the committee...
...In his memoirs, Nixon recalls telling H.R...
...The Nixon they see is jetting home from China to brief the President, or walking the halls of Congress with a Senator on each arm...
...In 1960, Nixon may have lost the bitterly contested Presidential election because his lethargic running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge, liked sleeping better than campaigning...
...Ford simply wanted to put Watergate behind him...
...Second, the White House could not "afford an angry Pat Gray loose on the streets...
...Miles Monroe: "He actually was President of the United States, but I know whenever he used to leave the White House, the Secret Service would count the silverware...
...Nixon carefully portrayed himself as a man consumed by the "real issues" of détente, the Middle East and Vietnam, with no time left for monitoring those who acted unwisely in his name...
...With Agnew gone, a giant obstacle had been removed from thepathto Nixon's own impeachment—the fear of an unqualified successor...
...John W. Dean III, the White House Counsel, believed that Nixon hated (and hoped to incriminate) O'Brien for two distinct reasons: his link to the Kennedys and his relationship with billionaire Howard Hughes...
...Agnew and his lawyers argued that a sitting Vice President could not be indicted...
...His mistake, as Kutler makes clear, was to grant that pardon without demanding contrition in return...
...Watching from a nearby hotel room were the supervisors of the operation—Liddy and E. Howard Hunt...
...How will Richard Nixon be remembered by future generations...
...What he ignored, of course, were his own sleazy campaigns against Representative Jerry Voorhis in 1946, Senator Helen Gahagan Douglas (the "pink lady") in 1950, and Governor Pat Brown in 1962...
...The tapes were his "deepest secret," writes Kutler...
...3. What about the Nixon pardon...
...they were led by James W. McCord, the security director for Nixon's campaign committee...
...Have we got people that are trustworthy on that?' the President asked...
...I told my staff that we should come up with the kind of imaginative tricks that our Democratic opponents used against us and others so effectively in previous campaigns...
...Mitchell in 1972, Liddy detailed some of his Gemstone "ideas...
...Dean was typical of the young men around the President: handsome, loyal, obedient, ambitious, and amoral, a "WASP Sammy Glick...
...Kutler documents these "horrors" in brilliant detail...
...Richard Nixon barely apologized for Watergate...
...animated the thoughts and actions of his aides, who fulfilled his wishes...
...Indeed, as Kutler writes: "Few knowing students of constitutional law would have anticipated the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court in 1974 forcing Nixon to surrender some of his tapes...
...In October 1972, four months after the break-in, a major opinion poll showed little public concern about Watergate...
...And the—let it hang out, so to speak...
...This was typical Nixon, bloated with self-pity, always the victim...
...The plans, he said, were "not quite what I had in mind...
...his book is too long, poorly edited in spots, and was written in apparent haste...
...Devised originally to "plug leaks" in the Executive branch, it was known as "the Plumbers...
...In 1973, aBaltimore grand jury began investigating allegations that Agnew, as Governor of Maryland, had accepted kickbacks from building contractors...
...My aides] knew that this time I wanted the leading Democrats annoyed, harassed, and embarrassed—as I had been in the past...
...Kutler provides no important new information about the President's resignation or the pardon that followed...
...Then Hunt began demanding "hush money" for the burglars in "escalating" amounts...
...He worried about the theme song (it must be country-and-western), and die lapel pin (it must contain the flag), and the color of his clothing (it must not be too dark...
...In 1972 there were new "enemies" to confront...
...Impeachment might have become dangerously popular," he says, "but it also would have consumed enormous time and energy, perhaps enough so that following an Agnew impeachment, Congress and the nation might have had neither the inclination nor the will to move against the President...
...guess we have,' he said, providing his own response...
...But worse—far worse—is die image these students carry of Richard M. Nixon as the statesman for our age...
...Woodward and Bernstein are mistaken for accident lawyers, like Jacoby and Meyers...
...By the spring of 1973, Haldeman, Domestic Council Chief John D. Erlichman and Dean were all gone from the White House—with Dean confessing everyone's sins in the slim hopeofavoidingprison...
...On October 10,1973, Agnew pleaded nolo contendere to a charge of income tax evasion...
...But Kutler has plowed through a mass of information, interviewed the main characters (save Nixon himself), and provided a first-rate explanation of events...
...Later that day, he resigned...
...Gerald Ford proved himself a loyal Vice President, sticking by Nixon to the end...
...He responded—and saved his career—with the unforgettable "Checkers" speech...
...Then came Spiro Agnew...
...To this day, says Kutler, there are no certain answers...
...Nixon now agrees that he made a serious mistake...
...Gray later withdrew from consideration, but the cover-up was in trouble...
...Liddy, for example, believed that the object of the Watergate break-in "was to find out what O'Brien had of a derogatory nature about us, not for us to get something on him or the Democrats...
...One White House aide described the Vice President's rhetoric as akin to what good Republicans "say on commuter trains when their thoughts turn from moneymaking to politics...
...The evidence is circumstantial...
...And who can blame them...
...Nixon didn't like the man...
...For five years, the President had treated Agnew as a pawn...
...First, the President wanted a pliable director, a man he could use and control...
...Here are the questions Kutler raises and the judgments he renders...
...O'Brien's source was a Greek newspaperman with ties to Vice President Spiro Agnew...
...Deep Throat" is a video they rent on party nights...
...Agnew's attacks upon bureaucrats, intellectuals and the media seemed tailor-made for Nixon's "Silent Majority...
...The story Stanley I. Kutler tells is not new...
...The remedy, they claimed, was an investigation by the House of Representatives—which could mean impeachment, a Senate trial and removal from office...
...Less than three months earlier, Nixon had underlined their importance when he warned Haldeman that the tapes had to remain secret...
...Asked in 1986 to recall the "greatest lesson" of Watergate, he replied: "Just destroy all the tapes...
...Was a deal made with Gerald R. Ford...
...In fact, Agnew was used by the President in much the same way that Nixon had been used by Eisenhower in the 1950s—as a hatchet man for the Republican Right...
...According to those around him, though, the President was "obsessed" with one in particular—Lawrence O'Brien, chairman of the Democratic National Committee...
...Mitchell did not seem to care that criminal strategies had been discussed in his presence...
...On June 17,1972, five men were arrested while burglarizing the Democratic National Headquarters at Watergate...
...But the White House was behind them, says Kutler, and the target surely was Nixon's...
...Other staffers suspected a different motive for Nixon's interest in the Democrats' Chairman...
...But when the Vice President resigned, Richard Nixon lost his queen...
...One of the most interesting themes of Wars of Watergate is the haunting relationship between Richard Nixon and the Vice Presidency—the endless problems he faced running for, and dealing with, that particular office...
...He was sentenced to three years in prison (suspended) and a $10,000 fine...
...John Dean, Jeb Magruder and Gordon Liddy mean nothing to them...
...What the President did not dare "hang out" were the tapes that showed him obstructing justice, suppressing evidence, abetting perjury, and interfering with the FBI...
...The tapes were Richard Nixon's insurance policy—for Watergate and for history...
...He did this by convincing the Bureau's Acting Director, L. Patrick Gray, that a careful probe of the incident would compromise CIA operations "all the way back to the Bay of Pigs...
...they remind us of Watergate's complexities—the strength of Solicitor General Robert Bork, the arrogance of Judge John Sirica, the duplicity of Senator Howard Baker...
...Apparently, the White House instructed Liddy to "find out about O'Brien's 'shit file' on Nixon"—an assignment that led directly to the Watergate break-in...
...However imprecise and vague the standing of Executive privilege as a constitutional doctrine, mere Presidential assertion of the prerogative had historically been enough to sustain it...
...There was nothing illegal about this, Williams noted...
...In the Woody Allen movie Sleeper, set in the year 2173, a videotape of Nixon is being studied by a scientist, who asks Allen (Miles Monroe) about the man on the screen...
...At other times, he seemed to be speaking a language that only he and his closest aides could decipher: President: "You think, you think we want to, want to go this route now...
...Its main purpose was to disrupt the Democratic Party in the coming Presidential campaign...
...Four years later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower tried to dump Nixon from the ticket by offering him a Cabinet post...
...The break-in was part of a larger operation known as Gemstone, devised by G. Gordon Liddy, the eccentric chief counsel for the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP...
...Nixon wanted no such thing...
...What the hell...
...President: "Well.it'sonlythequestions of the thing hanging out publicly or privately...
...Kutler thinks so, and his logic is compelling...
...The idea of impeachment frightened him...
...In 1992,1 suspect, they will watch him return in triumph to the Republican National Convention—his resurrection complete...
...1. Why did Nixon's men burglarize the Democratic National Headquarters, and who was behind them...
...That meant a confirmation hearing, where Gray, under intense questioning from Senate Democrats, admitted that he had worked with Dean to limit the Watergate investigation...
...As for why he did not destroy them, Kutler accepts the traditional argument: "Nixon believed that the tapes, selectively exploited, would exonerate him...
...Agnew wanted his day in court, but not a criminal court...
...and the President could have then explained the need for confidentiality in his dealings with foreign ambassadors, heads of state, and White House aides...
...At a secret meeting with CRP chairman and Attorney General JohnN...
...Years later many people criticized this reasoning as naïve...
...Scientist: "Some of us have a theory that he might once have been President of the United States, but that he did something horrendous...
...Butterfielcd's revelation stunned Nixon but did not change his mind...
...At this point, however, Nixon blundered badly by nominating Gray to be the FBI's permanent director...
...As Bob Haldeman put it: "Who the hell cares...
...Thus began the cover-up that would end with the President's resignation in disgrace...
...While publicly supporting his Vice President, he advised House leaders that the evidence against Agnew was overwhelming, and that the judicial process should be allowed to run its course...
...Initially, Nixon viewed Agnew's problems as a welcome diversion from Watergate...
...Buggings, break-ins, forgery, obstruction of justice—the list goes on and on...
...His first job was to prevent the FBI from carefully investigating the Watergate burglary...
...In July, Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield told investigators about a taping system in the ? val Office...
...His capsule biographies are superb...
...The President was furious...
...He's just got to ride that through," the President declared...
...Nixon kept pressing his aides for more "intelligence" on O'Brien, whose office was in the Watergate...
...How damaging, he thought, that a Kennedy intimate was now making big money as a secret lobbyist for the very same man...
...He concludes—correctly, I think —that Nixon was their spiritual source: "His well-documented record of political paranoia, his determination to wreak vengeance on his enemies, and his overweening concern with winning his own elections...
...They carried some unusual equipment, such as cameras and phone-bugging devices...
...That sounds about right to me...
...Most of all, he worried about using the full power of his office to guarantee his re-election—no holds barred...
...He never admitted his crimes...
...Nixon apparently sabotaged Agnew's plan...
...Word for word, he repeated the President's words," is a fair example of the prose...
...Attorney Edward Bennett Williams, Nixon's long-time adversary, said he would have advised the President to burn the tapes before they were subpoenaed...
...Among them were three checks, totaling more than $500,000, from the Greek Intelligence Service...
...At times they showed him to be vulgar and bigoted, spewing epithets at minorities across the board...
...Nixon never forgot that the Kennedy Justice Department had harassed him in 1961 for his own dealings with Hughes...
...He worried about Watergate because he understood the stakes...
...Kutler demolishes the portrait by showing how Nixon was a devious micromanager who directed almost every aspect of the 1972 campaign...
...That feeling faded when the Vice President dug in and refused to leave office without a fight...
...In the words of Hamilton Fish, a Republican member of the House "Impeachment" Committee: "There was no smoking gun...
...McCord broke down, fearing a stiff jail sentence from Judge "Maximum John" Sirica...
...Taking a page from Joe McCarthy, the Nixon camp also circulated a cropped photo of Brown with Nikita S. Khrushchev...
...Although Haldeman described Agnew as "scared shitless," Nixon showed little sympathy or concern...
...2. Why did the Nixon White House go to such lengths to cover up Watergate, which Nixon described as " a footnote to history...
...His bombshell came in response to a routine question asked of every witness before the Senate Watergate Committee...
...Dean: "It's a limited hang out...
...Gray believed this lie—partly because it came from the White House Counsel, and partly because Hunt, McCord and the Cubans had once worked for the CIA...
...Let the press kick him around for a while...
...The arrest of McCord and the Cubans put Nixon in a bind...
...If Agnew went that route, even voluntarily, the President could be next...
...The whole room was filled with smoke...
...The break-in was authorized by Mitchell and Jeb Stuart Magruder, his deputy at CRP...
...In a revealing interview with Kutler, Dean offered two likely reasons for Nixon's blunder...
...His pardon involved no deal or conspiracy, at least none that Kutler could find...
...Had Nixon made another mistake...
...Erlichman: "It's a modified limited hang out...
...no tape or document exists that proves the President planned the burglary, or even knew about it in advance...
...Nixon knew the tapes could ruin him...
...He simply wanted safer missions with greater returns...
...During the Brown campaign, Nixon and Haldeman were reprimanded by a Republican judge for creating a bogus organization (the Committee for the Preservation of the Democratic Party in California) to knowingly mislead the voters...
...That, in turn, could unearth other illegalities, including the effort to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, who had recently leaked the Pentagon Papers tothepress...
...Dean: "Well, it's, it isn't really that Haldeman: "It'salimited hang out...
...So that all records—everything was wiped out about him...
...Furthermore, they all were sure that a plea of Executive privilege could beat back any judicial or Congressional claims to the material...
...Richard Nixon did not burn those tapes because he thought they were safely his...
...Beyond that, he regarded them as politically and historically invaluable —again, if used in a selective fashion...
...Given his firsthand knowledge of the cover-up, the only thing worse than nominating him was not nominating him...
Vol. 73 • May 1990 • No. 8
