There’s No Gate Like OG Gate

Title: Watergate A New History

Rating: 5 Stars

As I read any history of Watergate, two thoughts keep running through my mind. One is how unnecessary the break-in was. Nixon had an impressive set of accomplishments. He negotiated arms control agreements with Soviet leaders. He opened up China by visiting Mao Zedong. He took the US off of the gold standard. Significant progress was made in the Middle East peace process. He created the Environmental Protection Agency. Although he did it using brutal methods, he ended US involvement in the Vietnam War.

In opposition, the Democratic Party was in shambles in 1972. In George McGovern, they nominated a candidate that was probably unelectable in the general election. To make things even worse, he fumbled his vice presidential nomination so that McGovern ended up looking as shifty as Nixon, no mean feat.

There was no question that Nixon was going to win the election. All of the nonsense of breaking into the office of the Democratic National Committee was absolutely superfluous.

The second thought that I have is how inevitable it was. Nixon was deeply insecure and paranoid. Convinced that he was surrounded by enemies and that those enemies were doing things even worse to him than he could ever imagine, his responses to these wild imaginings was going to inevitably destroy him. Once the thread around the Watergate coverup started being pulled, it exposed a whole myriad array of crimes that included wiretapping, using the CIA to stop an FBI investigation, dodgy tax filings, safes full of cash, payoffs, an FBI Director burning evidence, and the imprisonment of a White House Chief of Staff, a White House Domestic Policy Advisor, and an US Attorney General.

When you read a one volume history of Watergate, especially one as well written as this, it really does feel like reading fiction. The large number and wide variety of characters, each with their own motivations, and seemingly uncountable intersecting plot lines remind me of War and Peace. The immensely talented but deeply flawed man at the center of it all is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Richard III or maybe some Greek hero brought down by his fatal flaw.

It’s difficult for me to even begin to summarize all of the facets of Watergate. Instead, I think that I’ll just list some interesting bon mots. If they seem interesting to you, then there’s a very good chance that this book will be up your alley.

The Watergate burglars weren’t exactly criminal masterminds. Hunt and Liddy were monitoring the burglars from a nearby hotel room. When the burglars were arrested, Hunt and Liddy left in a hurry. When investigators later searched the hotel room, they found spy equipment, sequentially numbered $100 bills, letters and mail mentioning E Howard Hunt (?!), and burglars’ address books, including entries for “W. House”. Like I said, not exactly masterminds.

A former New York police officer was used to deliver cash payouts to the families of the arrested burglars. For security purposes, he only spoke on pay phones. He spent so much time on pay phones that he started carrying around a bus driver’s coin changer on his belt.

By the end of Watergate, Nixon’s paranoia has become contagious. All of the major parties involved in Watergate were taping each other and trying to manipulate each other into making confessional statements.

By now, most people know that Woodward’s / Bernstein’s infamous anonymous source was Mark Felt, then the number two person at the FBI. The fact that the guy that was literally one step away from being the FBI Director was skulking around in the middle of the night to talk with a reporter seems insane. What might be even more insane is that Felt’s motive for doing so was, well, not exactly altruistic. Upon Hoover’s death, Felt expected to be named Director. When Nixon instead named someone from outside the agency, L Patrick Gray, Felt was infuriated. His leaks weren’t meant to expose some coverup that he disapproved of but to make Gray look bad so that Felt could take over. What’s even more amazing to me was that Nixon knew, almost from the outset, that Felt was the main leaker. Here the nation was, playing parlor game of who Deep Throat was and Nixon was like, it’s gotta be Mark Felt.

Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, always seemed like an innocent party who was a bit too loyal to the man with whom she worked many years. However, on the tapes, Nixon is heard asking her if she has any cash and she admits that she has $100,000 in cash in a safe. This is not something that you usually hear from an innocent party.

As a child growing up during this time, I remember seeing Martha Mitchell on the news. The network news kind of painted her like a crazy person. No doubt she was a drinker, but that doesn’t change the fact that, while she was talking on the phone to the reporter Helen Thomas, an FBI agent broke into her room, yanked the phone out of the wall, and essentially held her captive.

I knew about the Saturday Night Massacre. Nixon wanted to fire the Watergate Special Prosecutor. He ordered the Attorney General to do so. He refused and resigned. He then asked the Deputy Attorney General to do so. He refused and resigned. He then asked the Solicitor General to do so. Since there was really no one left in the hierarchy, the Solicitor General felt obligated to stay and did as he was asked. What I did not realize was how severe the resulting political firestorm really was. Almost immediately, the mood of the nation flipped towards favoring Nixon’s resignation. What’s significant here is that the Saturday Night Massacre occurred in October of 1973. He didn’t end up resigning until August of 1974. In October of 1973, Agnew had resigned and Ford had not been confirmed as Vice President. Therefore, if Nixon had resigned in October as the nation was beginning to demand, the Speaker of the House, the Democrat Carl Albert, would have become President.

During the last six months or so of Nixon’s administration, he’d almost completely checked out of the actual job of President. There was a day in which he only had two minutes of activity (one phone call). Another day he had something like 12 minutes. Other than that, he just sat brooding in his hideaway office.

At the height of the Yom Kippur War, it appeared that Soviets were using it as an opportunity to insert 50,000 Soviet troops into the Middle East. Kissinger contacted Nixon but found him drunk and depressed. Kissinger met with the Defense Secretary, the CIA Director, and the Joint Chiefs Chairman. They decided to move the US military from DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 3 without any consultation with Nixon (you know, the Commander in Chief and all of that). The Soviets backed down and withdrew their troops.

That was just a taste of some of the shenanigans taking place in the last couple of years of the Nixon administration. Graff does a great job telling the overarching story of Watergate while also integrating little entertaining nuggets of information that brings the characters to light.

At least for the moment, my compulsive periodic need to read about Watergate has been sated.