On the night of June 17, 1972, newly hired night watchman Frank Wills discovered a piece of tape affixed to a locking piston on an interior door to the garage in the Watergate office complex next to the Potomac River in Washington, DC. He removed it. When he returned after buying a hamburger across the street, someone had stuck a new piece of tape over the locking piston. He sounded the alarm.
A short while later, plainclothes police arrested five men who had broken into the Democratic Party’s office on the sixth floor. Two accomplices fled the hotel across the street. It turned out that some of those involved were closely associated with both the White House and President Richard Nixon’s campaign organization ahead of the November 1972 presidential election.
The burglary led to the scandal complex that came to be known as “Watergate” began to roll up, the one that led to Nixon’s departure in August two years later.
It happened just three weeks after I moved to Washington as a correspondent. In an article about crime in the American capital, I had read about a lady on a temporary visit. She could not sleep, took a walk, went through her thoughts – until a policeman stopped her with the question of what she was doing “in a neighborhood like this” in the middle of the night.
She looked up – and saw the White House lit up in the evening darkness.
I thought sometimes on that expression, “in a neighborhood like this,” when all the revelations about the Watergate scandal were rolled up, when Nixon’s spokesman Ronald Ziegler lied about what happened, when the burglars and several of the president’s closest men were prosecuted and convicted, when witness after witness in Senator Sam Ervin’s special Watergate committee spoke of “dirty tricks” against political enemies, when the House of Representatives’ legal committee voted in federal court against Nixon and when his tape recordings after a lengthy legal battle were finally published in July 1974.
Of course, I did not know that everything would end with Nixon’s resignation when I wrote about “Watergate” three days after the burglary as “a magnificent scandal with a political connection”. It was my first of many articles about the scandal, and I had no idea then that two events that occurred on the same day, Tuesday, June 20, 1972, would have a decisive influence on the development of the scandal.
The first incident: Richard Nixon received information this day about the burglary and its connection to himself. This led to him three days later, on June 23, 1972, deciding to urge the FBI, the federal police, not to investigate the matter too carefully, citing (fabricated) requests from the CIA. The real motive was that a proper investigation could lead to other and for Nixon extremely troublesome revelations. Blackout then.
The band from June 23 was eventually released and became the “smoking gun” that killed him
Unfortunately for the president, all this was registered on one of the tape recorders of the brand Uher 4000, which he himself had had installed in the White House just over a year earlier. The band from June 23 was eventually released and became the “smoking gun” that killed him.
The second incident on June 20, 1972, did not take place in Washington but at the Democratic Party’s primary election in Brooklyn, New York, where a political newcomer, Elizabeth Holtzman, surprisingly won over one of the veterans of the Washington Congress, Emanuel Celler. He had sat in the House of Representatives for half a century and was chairman of the House’s Legal Committee.
Thus, another Democrat, Pete Rodino, became chairman of this important committee. Two years later, Rodino skillfully pursued the Supreme Court lawsuit against Nixon and thus played a crucial role in the legal process that led to the fall of the president. There would probably have been no national court against Nixon if Celler had remained chairman of the legal committee.
About this and much more tells the journalist and historian Garrett M Graff initiated, knowledgeable and detailed in a new book entitled “Watergate. A new history ”(Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster). There are already hundreds of books on the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon. Need another book about the scandal? Yes. Graff’s book fills a need, even though he has not done any new interviews or come up with new revelations. Instead, it is based on previous books, interviews collected at various universities, FBI investigations, verdicts, court and congressional records, and above all the transcripts of Nixon’s White House tape recordings that are now available in their entirety.
From all this he has compiled an ongoing, detailed story about the whole scandal complex, ie in addition to the Watergate burglary and the blackout also illegal wiretapping, “dirty tricks” in the election campaigns, the burglary of the whistleblower Daniel Ellsbergs psychiatrists, the plans to break into the think tank Brookings, use the FBI and CIA for political purposes, misuse of campaign funds. Big and small are mixed in a fascinating way.
One can, like Garrett M Graff, claim that “Watergate” changed the political dynamics in Washington, and not least the media. Interestingly, Graff not only highlights the groundbreaking efforts that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein made with their reporting in the Washington Post; Some of the most important revelations in the scandal came in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times and in Time magazine. Graff also emphasizes the solid work that the FBI did in the criminal investigation in the summer of 1972, especially through “special agent” Angelo Lano, who is not mentioned at all in Woodward / Bernstein’s best-selling book “All the President’s Men”, which they published in 1974 a few months before Nixon resigned.
Fields went for a long time under the name “Deep Throat”. His identity was not revealed until 2005.
Interestingly, Graff also reports that Nixon early suspected the FBI chief Mark Felt as the one who leaked information about the investigation, not only to Bob Woodward but also to other journalists. Fields went for a long time under the name “Deep Throat”. His identity was not revealed until 2005.
It is still unclear who ordered the Watergate burglary, and why. Richard Nixon himself did not even know it in advance, but he had created a political atmosphere and attitude that led to shady dealings of this kind. In the background were also Nixon’s narrow election loss in 1960 against John F Kennedy in his first attempt to become president, and the narrow election victory over Hubert Humphrey in 1968. He wanted to win his re-election in 1972 big and at all costs: including “dirty tricks”.
And there was also The Pentagon documents revealed by The New York Times on June 13, 1971, the documents that Daniel Ellsberg had leaked and which revealed the US government’s double play in the Vietnam conflict. Richard Nixon is not mentioned in the documents, but he quickly realized that this revelation about President Lyndon Johnson’s dirty yoke could lead to his own shady dealings being revealed. For example, there were reports that he had actively sought to undermine Johnson’s stance in the peace talks with North Vietnam in Paris because a success there would benefit Nixon’s opponents in the 1968 election, Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
So the lid on! Stop the leaks! In early July 1971, Nixon more or less ordered the burglary of the liberal think tank Brookings to investigate. “They have a lot of material … get it,” he told Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman. The call was captured on tape.
Nixon’s conversation in the White House began on his own orders, most secretly recorded on February 16, 1971. Journalist and author Michael Dobbs outlines the background of another fascinating new book, “King Richard. Nixon and Watergate – an American tragedy ”(Knopf). On the one hand, Nixon wanted to register his own activities for his forthcoming memoirs, and on the other hand, he wanted to make sure that no one would be able to question his, as he hoped, brilliant place in US history. He had nevertheless had some great successes, especially in foreign policy.
Some advisers advised him to quickly destroy the ties. Nixon refused.
The recordings were suspended on July 12, 1973, after the system was revealed during the testimony of the Senate Watergate Committee. Some advisers advised him to quickly destroy the ties. Nixon refused. He was convinced that the recordings would free him from all suspicions of irregularities in the Watergate scandal. As you know, that did not happen. On the tapes are serious statements that eventually fell on him.
At the same time, Dobbs writes, the bands in the long run may alleviate Richard Nixon’s disgraced legacy. Thanks to the ties, we get to know him better than any other president. They dehumanize him, even though they contain harsh, racist, vulgar comments about political enemies, blacks and Jews. In the conversations with his daughters and his wife, he shows, perhaps not surprisingly, a different and softer side as a caring family man. He sometimes shows a certain concern for his employees and he sometimes reveals inner anguish and a bad conscience for his actions.
But with “Watergate” nevertheless, a new and more cynical era began, an era that (so far) culminated with Donald Trump. For obvious reasons, he did not record his conversations in the White House. He chose to spread his message via 57,000 posts on Twitter.
Nixon’s legal adviser John Dean, the star witness against the president in the Senate Watergate hearing, has his opinion clear.
– In comparison with Trump, Nixon mostly looks like a basket boy.
Kurt Mälarstedt is an employee of DN and was the newspaper’s correspondent in Washington 1972-75, 1980-83 and 1993-99.
Read more essays in DN Kultur, for example: Aleksandr Dubrovin was one of Russia’s many evil spirits and dark men