Watergate: A New History
By Garrett M. Graff

The crime:

A team of covert operatives under the direction of the Republican Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CREEP) was arrested after breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Office Building in Washington D.C. in the early hours of June 17, 1972. It would later turn out that the break-in was only part of a larger campaign of dirty tricks (a.k.a. ratfucking) being waged by CREEP. The subsequent investigations and attempted cover-up by the White House would lead to multiple criminal convictions and the resignation of President Richard Nixon a couple of years later.

The book:

In the fifty years since Watergate the suffix –gate has become shorthand for any sort of political scandal. This despite the fact that what actually happened a half-century ago still isn’t all that well known, even among students of the period. Despite its notoriety, the facts in “Watergate,” at least what is known of them, make up a highly complex story that’s hard to get one’s arms all the way around. “Watergate was never a one-off burglary,” Garrett Graff writes. “It was the Gordian knot of scandal, unable to be untied neatly or at all.” Even today there are still a number of unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable, questions.

At nearly 700 pages, Graff’s “new history” certainly tries to be exhaustive as well as precise. Perhaps too much so. I felt that in several places he was getting lost in the weeds. But the thing is, the network of scandal, bad behaviour, “dirty tricks,” and outright criminality that constituted “Watergate” was hard for anyone covering it at the time to keep straight and is even more difficult now when so many of the names and faces, each of them involved in so many shady activities, have been forgotten. Then there were all the different investigations. Reading, I found myself constantly shifting gears as I tried to remember whether a particular legal point being raised had to do with the grand jury proceedings, the Senate Watergate Committee, or the House Judiciary Committee on impeachment. At one point I found myself wishing that Graff had included a cast of characters as a reference, but then wondered how long such an index would have been. Twenty pages at least. There were a lot of players.

A big part of what makes Watergate confusing is the fact that everyone involved had a slightly different, personally exculpatory, tale to tell (and in almost every case a tale they told, in their memoirs) about how it all went down. Then there were all the ancillary examples of other misdemeanors, many of them long forgotten. I think most people know how Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign under a cloud (pleading no contest to a single felony charge to avoid further embarrassment) at the same time as the Watergate hearings were getting all the headlines. This is something that would normally stand out as a historical watershed but for the fact that his boss would soon follow him into exile. But who today remembers the Chennault affair? The Huston plan? The fact that the Pentagon was spying on the National Security Council? The Dita Beard memo? I knew nothing about any of these but they were all part of the same White House culture.

Then there is the fact that the break-in was so stupid that it’s hard to understand how it made sense to the actors involved. Nixon would go on to win the presidency in the 1972 election in a historic landslide, taking every state except Massachusetts, so why would he bother cheating? What advantage did he think he would gain? Or did the people in charge not take nuts like Gordon Liddy seriously? As Chief of Staff Alexander Haig later opined, “The original crime was stupid, and the idea that it was possible to cover it up was more so . . . I thought that Nixon was just too smart to be involved.”

As an aside on the point of why Nixon bothered, here is biographer John A. Farrell writing in Richard Nixon: The Life:

It is said that the Watergate break-in was an act of folly because by the time the burglars were arrested Nixon had triumphed in Moscow and Beijing, the radical McGovern had clinched the Democratic nomination, and Nixon’s reelection was assured. But until the Easter Offensive [North Vietnam’s invasion of the South], and the Russian summit secured, the White House was still caught up in the fear that the Democrats would coalesce around Senator Edward Kennedy. In mid-April, as Jeb Magruder and Gordon Liddy were plotting to break into the Watergate, Nixon was weighing the ugly prospect of defeat in Vietnam – and the fall election.

I think understanding how it all came about is important, and lies at the heart of what I think is really significant about Watergate. Yes, it was a clusterfuck that very much reflected the personality of the president and the toxic environment that his administration had become: its paranoia, vengefulness, and sheer nastiness. (Though the ball apparently got rolling mainly thanks to National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s meltdown over the Pentagon Papers – the publication of which initially didn’t bother Nixon at all.) But the scandal also highlights the way many such power structures operate. The point is to insulate those at the top with what became known as “plausible deniability.” The sign on Harry Truman’s desk, The Buck Stops Here, was always a joke, as it is in every CEO’s office, and Watergate only drove the point home. The buck is meant to stop long before it gets to the guy at the top. Power is all about being free of responsibility.

There was nothing new in Nixon operating this way. Throughout history the man at the top has enjoyed immunity from blame when things go south. Leading up to the Russian Revolution the masses spared the tsar from most of their anger, feeling that he was just surrounded by evil advisors. A few hundred years earlier Oliver Cromwell had to struggle against similar popular sentiments just before the outbreak of the English Civil War. He had to explicitly reject Parliament’s claim that they weren’t going to war against the king but against his “evil counsellors.” As Christopher Hibbert relates the story in his biography of Charles I, “Cromwell thought this pure casuistry and told his men that if he charged the king he would fire his ‘pistol upon him as at any other private person,’ and that anyone among his recruits who didn’t feel able to do the same could go enlist with someone else.”

One way people in positions of leadership maintain this degree of insulation from the acts of their agents, operatives, and flunkies is by the vagueness of their directions. The clearest historical example of this is presented in Ian Kerhaw’s biography of Adolf Hitler, where he describes the process of what he calls “Working towards the Führer.” What this refers to is the way in which radical actions were often instigated from below, not as the result of express directives, but because they were felt to be in line with Hitler’s broadly defined aims. This was so successful that even today there is no “smoking gun” in the historical record tying Hitler to the ordering of the Final Solution.

All of which brings us back to Watergate and Howard Baker’s famous line about “What did the president know and when did he know it?” We still don’t know. In the final pages of this book Graff presents the points of view of two of the closest of the president’s men:

Haldeman, speaking decades later, said, “No one here today, nor anybody else I can identify, knows who ordered the break-in at the Watergate or why it was ordered.” Ehrlichman, for his part, “The break-in itself made no sense to me; it never has.”

Well, as the saying goes, success has many fathers and failure is an orphan. So it has always been. From the evidence we do have though it seems clear that everyone in the administration was “working towards Nixon”: planning a campaign of dirty tricks that weren’t directed from above but which were in line with the sort of thing Nixon wanted to see happening. And he very well might have got away with it, despite everyone knowing he bore ultimate responsibility, but for the fact that there was a smoking gun in the form of the White House tapes. These nailed him for the cover-up, if not the crime.

To recap: I learned a lot more about Watergate from this book than I thought there was to know, as well as the numerous related side-hustles. I did think there was a bit too much detail in places, the getting lost in the weeds I mentioned above, but even the footnotes (of which there are multitudes) are worth reading. I also really appreciated the way Graff took down pretty much everyone involved, including some names who have previously got off relatively easily. The portraits of Mark Felt (Deep Throat), John Dean, and Al Haig are memorably etched in acid. But to be sure there are still unanswered questions that get to the heart of the affair, which is why Watergate will continue to fascinate generations of historians to come.

Today, we’ll never really know the full truth of Watergate. The remaining mysteries are spread among too many people, many of who are now dead, their secrets buried alongside them. There remain big, unanswered – and perhaps now forever unknowable – questions even about the central Watergate break-in itself: Who ultimately ordered it? What was the actual purpose and target of the burglars? Were its central players, Hunt and McCord, cooperating with the CIA even as they carried out the operation at the DNC’s offices? Were the burglars really after political intelligence or were they hunting for blackmail material?

My own sense is that many of these questions would be unanswerable even if we could still question all the principals under oath. The break-in was just one bad idea among many that some loose cannons were allowed to run with and that nobody in a position of authority pumped the brakes on, perhaps in part because they figured it was the kind of thing Nixon was pushing for, or because they didn’t take any of it seriously. What the burglars were after was dirt in a general sense, or any information of value. I doubt they could have had in mind anything specific. Then, when it all went south, Nixon was very much in charge of the cover-up, which is what deservedly finished him.

Noted in passing:

Among the related mini-scandals Graff chronicles that have slipped into obscurity is the “bizarre episode” of the so-called Canuck letter. I didn’t know about this one either, but it has to do with an anonymous letter sent to a New Hampshire newspaper that accused then Democratic primary candidate Ed Muskie of referring “to French-Canadians with the slur ‘Canucks.’” As it turns out the letter had been the work of Republican dirty tricksters, but Muskie’s campaign swiftly derailed.

What surprised me was that the term Canuck (misspelled as “Cannocks” in the letter) was seen as a slur, or specifically directed at French-Canadians. In the nineteenth century “Johnny Canuck” was a cartoon figure (a lumberjack, not specifically French-Canadian) who was used to personify Canada much as John Bull and Uncle Sam were used as stand-ins for England and the United States. During World War 2 Johnny Canuck became a comic-book action hero, and in the 1970s Captain Canuck was born. The Canucks are also Vancouver’s professional hockey team. But, as Wikipedia explains in their entry on the Canuck letter, “While an affectionate term among Canadians today, ‘Canuck’ is a term often considered derogatory when applied to Americans of French-Canadian ancestry in New England.”

Takeaways:

A successful conspiracy has to be limited in membership and tightly targeted in its aims. Watergate failed, epically, on both counts. There were simply too many people involved, with no one clear on what anyone else was doing, or why. When it started coming undone there was no way to keep containment on the cancer.

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