If Richard Nixon had decided to come clean about the burglary, apologized for his underlings, taken responsibility and withstood some withering criticism, he would have never faced resignation. Pictured: Nixon White House Counsel John Dean.
The two articles that preceded this one included coverage of Richard Nixon’s early career until his re-election as president in 1972 and the initial Watergate break-in led by G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt. The story will continue with the cover-up that followed and the origins of the Watergate Investigation that led to the famous Hearings conducted in 1973.
As the 1972 election dawned, Nixon had accomplished his two major election planks from the 1968 campaign. From a high of 537,000 troops when he took office, American soldiers in Vietnam had declined to 250,000. And the streets once riotous had quieted. Law and order were largely restored. On the global front, Nixon had opened China, achieved detente with the Soviet Union, and restored a strong American presence in the Middle East.
Geoff Shepard summed up Nixon’s successes at home: “Domestically, he founded the Environmental Protection Agency and based the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, peacefully desegregated the southern schools, restored the rights of Native Americans, ended the draft, enacted the 18-year-old vote, and appointed four justices to the Supreme Court in his first term. He quadrupled the number of women serving in senior government positions, launched the war on cancer, and broke the heroin epidemic that had been ravishing the nation’s inner cities.”
Having run as a limited government conservative, Nixon had moved into the center and began to crowd the center-left. His base supporters would not abandon him, so he felt confident about ensuring a large mandate. He did not account for what some of his hired help was doing to clinch a landslide.
After Attorney General John Mitchell met with Gordon Liddy, Jeb Magruder, and John Dean, they were all exposed to what became known as Watergate (see Part Two in this series). Their efforts to keep it covered up and avoid prosecution led to the scandal that took down a president.
When Nixon heard about the June 17th break-in on June 20th his initial reaction was, “It’s going to be forgotten.” In Watergate: The Cover-Up for the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, Tom Vandervoort reported, “Despite declaring ‘It’s going to be forgotten’ to aide Charles Colson, Nixon must have felt some trepidation. Because three days later, he discussed the FBI’s investigation with his chief of staff, H. R. ‘Bob’ Haldeman. The Bureau had already connected the burglars to E. Howard Hunt, who reported directly to Colson.” Slowly the scandal was building momentum that Nixon never caught. If, at the moment, Nixon had decided to come clean about the burglary, apologized for his underlings, taken responsibility and withstood some withering criticism he would have still won, and never faced resignation.
Instead, he permitted his two top aides, Bob Haldeman and John Erhlichman to obstruct the FBI investigation using CIA operatives. Another character who entered the drama, Mark Felt, served as associate director of the FBI. Nixon and his aides thought he would help protect the president. The public would learn that Felt was Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Deep Throat. Woodward and Bernstein were the journalists who broke open the Watergate story thanks to Deep Throat. The pair’s employer, the Washington Post, won a Pulitzer Prize for their investigative reporting.
In January 1973, as Nixon looked forward to his second inauguration, the five burglars at Watergate as well as Liddy and Hunt faced court proceedings. By the end of the trials Liddy and James McCord, one of the burglars, had been convicted and the other five had pled guilty. Nixon’s counsel, John Dean, could see the dangers of these findings. He visited Nixon in March of 1973 to impress upon the president the seriousness of the situation.
Vandevoort continued, “Realizing that the president didn’t fully understand the implications of the burglary and the cover-up, Dean offered a full, clear, and candid explanation, calling the matter ‘a cancer—within—close to the presidency.’ Dean acknowledged his own legal jeopardy and that of Haldeman, Erlichman, Colson, and former Attorney General John Mitchell. And he suggested ‘continued blackmail’ by Hunt and the other Watergate burglars could leave Nixon vulnerable.” An excerpt of the conversation can be found at this link.
Dean would later turn evidence against Nixon, and the White House would try to shift the blame of the cover-up onto him. As the problem mushroomed, Nixon attempted to leverage events, but they quickly spun beyond his control. On April 30 he addressed the nation and tried to blame his subordinates for the cover-up. Nixon told the nation that his aides – Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Dean, and a personal friend, Richard Kliendienst, had resigned. He reported to the American people that he was going to find the truth and put an end to this distraction. In effect, Nixon threatened that people might be sacrificed to ensure no more disclosures or defections.
While this was transpiring, the US Senate was beginning an investigation. Vandevoort states in his article that while confirming Patrick Gray as the late J. Edgar Hoover’s successor at the FBI, Gray had revealed that he and Dean had consulted about the ongoing scandal. This raised eyebrows on the Senate Committee charged with recommending Gray’s confirmation and led to the passage of Senate Resolution 60, a select committee charged with the responsibility of studying “the extent, if any, to which illegal, improper, or unethical activities were engaged in by any persons, acting either individually or in combination with others, in the Presidential election of 1972.”
The Hearings were to begin on May 17, 1973, with the president’s men slated to appear before the Committee. Around the same time, Elliot Richardson became Nixon’s new Attorney-General and appointed Archibald Cox as Special Prosecutor, charging Cox with investigating ties between the break-in and the Nixon Administration. Nixon had probably already passed the brink, but there was a small chance he could save his administration if he took immediate action. Instead, once again, Nixon chose to dig in, blame others, avoid or cover up the facts and insist that the press, his old foil, was out to get him once and for all. The Hearings would reveal a story America did not want to believe but soon had to confront. Part Four of the series will examine the historical nature of the Watergate Hearings and its findings.
Dave Redekop is a retired elementary resource teacher who now works part-time at the St. Catharines Courthouse as a Registrar. He has worked on political campaigns since high school and attended university in South Carolina for five years, where he earned a Master’s in American History with a specialization in Civil Rights. Dave loves reading biographies.
