October 7, 2024 • 25 mins
A look at the scandals that brought down the Nixon White House.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Rip Current is the production of iHeart Podcasts. The views
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producers or parent company. Listener discretion is it fine?
Speaker 2 (00:15):
This is a rip Current bonus episode. You don't need
to listen to follow the rip Current storyline, but it
provides more information, context and analysis to enhance the main
podcast enjoy.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
As we worked on rip Current, it became apparent that
fifty years after the fact, not everyone was clear on
what exactly was Watergate. To get a basic overview of
the Watergate crimes and scandal and the repercussions that came
out of it, I talked with Kirk Dorsey, chair of
the History department at the University of New Hampshire.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
My name is Kirk Dorsey. I'm the chair of the
History department at the University of New Hampshire. I teach
US foreign Policy and US fronmental history and I'm now
in my thirtieth year in the department.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Can you just tell us about Watergate?
Speaker 4 (01:07):
So, first of all, Watergate, everybody has heard of it
at some level, because every scandal is a gate. Now
because of that to flight Gate with their New England
Patriots fans here I probably just turned all you off
by mentioned to flight Gate, but everything is Gate. And
it's interesting because the Watergate actually was a building. It
was a building that was still a hotel. You can
make a reservation I think still in the Watergate Hotel,
(01:28):
but it also had offices, and the Watergate building had
the offices of the Democratic National Committee. In nineteen seventy
two that the people who worked for the Nixon re
election campaign, who worked in the Nixon White House as well,
broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in
the Watergate Hotel and they actually were caught by a
security guard in the summer of nineteen seventy two, but
(01:50):
it looked like just a run of the mill burglary.
So when we talk about Watergate, there is this incident
of a break in at the hotel to go after
the Democrats campaign strategy for nineteen seventy two, which apparently
was to lose as badly as possible since only won
one state. But then it spiraled out into all these
other things that the Nixon administration was doing that were secret,
(02:11):
So that Watergate is much more than just the break in.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
Can you kind of talk about the scope of the
things that have sort of collectively been under the Watergate banner.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
Yeah, So it really started in nineteen seventy one. So
there was a guy named Daniel Ellsberg who released a
collection of documents put together by the Defense Department that
were known as the Pentagon Papers. And the Pentagon Papers
were an attempt by the Defense Department to understand how
the United States had gotten into the Vietnam War, which
was complete mass in nineteen seventy one, and they were secret,
but Ellsberg thought the America people deserved to know what
(02:45):
the US government had done way back in the forties, fifties,
and sixties, so he leaked the Pentagon Papers. They got
a lot of publication. There were court cases about whether
or not the newspapers were allowed to publish them. And Nixon,
who was president at the time, could have said, well,
these really embarrassed my predecessors. I'll just let it go.
But he was really paranoid about leaks, and he was
(03:06):
worried that things in the Nixon administration would also leak.
So some of his aides assembled a group of covert operatives,
guys who are known to history like Gee Gordon Liddy,
who had a radio show for a long time Chuck Coulson,
who later went on to become a born again preacher.
And these guys tried to make Elsberg's life miserable. They
(03:26):
broke into his psychiatrist's office to steal his files, things
like that, And apparently one of these guys relatives said well,
what are you doing in the White House, And to
cover themselves, they said were plumbers because their job was
to fix leaks, and so they became known as the
White House plumbers. And you know, the problem with once
you hire plumbers is you can't really fire them without
(03:48):
them knowing things. So the administration kept them around, and
they were the ones who did the break in at
the Watergate hotel, for instance. But as we discovered over
the course of the next sort of two years after
nineteen seventy two, so the Nixon administration was not just
using the plumbers to go after its enemies. They were
using the regular people in government. So John Dean, who's
a regular on CNN now, is a legal expert on
(04:10):
presidential corruption. He's there because he was a young lawyer
in the Nixon White House. One of his jobs was
to compose a list of enemies of the Nixon administration,
which included such hard hitting political figures as Joe Namath
and Paul Newman, because they were popular people who were
anti Nixon. And it wasn't just to compile a list.
It was, for instance, to say to the IRS audit
(04:31):
our enemies. Use the powers of the federal government, the IRS,
the FBI, and even the CIA to go after people
in the domestic sphere who were potentially enemies of the
Nixon administration. So what started as a break in is
the investigations compounded. They discovered there was a lot more
to it than just a bunch of second rate burglars
getting caught trying to steal Georgian governor's campaign secrets.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
So then how does this start to unravel?
Speaker 4 (04:57):
So it starts unravel because they're a journalists who are
just trying to sort out, like there's something that doesn't
smell right. And as they began asking questions, there's a
guy named Mark Felt who worked for the FBI, who
was aware of what was going on, and he becomes
a secret source, takes on the unfortunate name of Deep
Throat after a pornographic film that was poker at the time,
and he begins telling Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of
(05:20):
the Washington Post details and pieces of information that are
not publicly known, and that leads them to continue to
ask questions over the course of nineteen seventy two. So
the break in in seventy two at first is thought
just to be some random burglars looking for stuff that
they could steal, so it doesn't affect the seventy two
election at all, and Nixon wins in a landslide. But
(05:42):
they keep asking questions into nineteen seventy three, and they
begin to reveal that the people who were involved in
the burglary actually have connections back to the White House,
and once they see that, that's when more journalists pile on,
and most importantly, Congress decides to start holding hearings to
find out what was going on. And Nixon did a
pretty good job for nineteen seventy three of fending off
(06:04):
allegations by saying I didn't know about any of this.
This was all people underneath me doing these things, until
in late nineteen seventy three one of his aides, justin testifying,
accidentally says, well, you know, the president was taping all
the conversations in the White House and nobody knew that
outside the White House. And this is a guy named
Butterfield who says this. When he says it, Congress are like, Okay,
(06:25):
we need these tapes. And that becomes a source of
a huge fight between Nixon and Congress over presidential immunity. Basically,
does the president have the right to hang onto these
things as the president or are these government documents to
serviation able to see? And eventually the Supreme Court rules
that the tapes have to be turned over, and that's
really when that leads to Nixon recognizing that he is
on tape authorizing a lot of these illegal acts, well
(06:49):
beyond what happened in the Watergate hotel, and that he's
doomed once these tapes are out, there's no way he
can stay in power. And not to get two presentists.
But one of the big differences between then and now
is that there were key Republican senators who turned against him.
Howard Baker, who was a Tennessee Republican who was an
upstanding a citizen. He worked for the Reagan administration. He
(07:11):
was the person who famously said, what did the president
know and when did he know it? And asking that
question coming from the Republican side. Was an indication that
there were Republican legislators in nineteen seventy three and then
into seventy four who were starting to give up on Nixon.
They thought he had crossed too many lines.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
What is he on tape, sort of authorizing.
Speaker 4 (07:31):
Using federal agencies to go after his enemies, knowing about
the break in that he claimed he knew nothing about
in the Watergate hotel. And then there's all the other
stuff that he was famous for, you know, some of
the just incredibly inflammatory things he said, even you know,
these incredibly anti Semitic things he was saying to Henry Kissinger,
his Jewish National security advisor. So the tapes were a
combination of direct evidence that Nixon knew that things were
(07:56):
being done that were illegal, not just the sort of
low level petty but also using agencies in the way
they weren't supposed to be used. But then also that
he was a really awful person on top of it.
So they were embarrassing, and you know, nineteen seventy five
Congress held hearings on the CIA because of these tapes,
because it was clear that Nixon had used the CIA.
These are the Church Committee hearings and named after a
(08:17):
senator from Idaho, Frank Church. And that's, for instance, where
we learned all these things about the efforts to assassinate
Fidel Castro in the early sixties. All sorts of things
came out of these Church Committee hearings. So our current
vision of the CIA is a bunch of you know,
sort of semi rogue guys go around trying to execute people.
That all comes out of the Church Committee hearings, because
most of that was secret before nineteen seventy five. More
(08:39):
than anything, what it does is damage this idea that
the federal government is basically telling you the truth most
of the time, because knowledge did we learn from the
Pentagon papers that they lied repeatedly about the war. But
then we have all these hearings, we find out that
Nixon and his people were lying about the ways the
federal government was being used.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
Can you talk a little bit about how Nixon tried
to serve as presidency.
Speaker 4 (09:01):
Basically, the Attorney General appointed a special council to investigate
what the Watergate crimes and all the assembled other crimes were,
and Nixon got really frustrated that this guy was getting
closer and closer to getting the truth out about him.
So he ordered his attorney general to fire him, and
the Attorney Onnor resigned and then there was a second
command who also resigned, in the person in the Justice
(09:23):
Department who ultimately agreed to fire Cox. The special investigator
was Robert Bork. Bork would come back in the nineteen
eighties as a nominee for the Supreme Court, and he
was the first of this run of really controversial Supreme
Court nominations, and Bork ended up getting I did not
obviously get a seat on the Supreme Court. So Nixon
really fought hard in the courts to protect his rights
(09:47):
basically as president, to do what he wanted. In fact,
he said after he left office at one point something
to the extent of, if the president does it, it's
legal again. You know, the echoes to today are really
really powerful. That Nixon's base take on the matter was
he could do whatever he wanted and if he wanted
to take people, if he wanted to give orders as president,
he could do those things, and that Congress had no
(10:08):
power to oversee him. Of course, Congress had the power
to impeach him. And what ultimately drove him from office
was as these tapes were released, he recognized that there
were not enough Republicans in the Senate who would vote
to acquit him, that impeachment was going to go through.
The Democrats controlled both houses, but they didn't have a
two thirds majority in the Senate. So he recognized that
(10:30):
he was going to lose a vote in the Senate,
he would be impeached to remove from office. So he
decided better to resign on his own terms than to
be impeached. This is one of the things that's really remarkable,
I mean, certainly about the Republican Party today. We've never
had a party that's been so much in one person's pocket.
Even when Reagan was running in nineteen eighty and eighty four,
there were people in the party who thought he was
(10:51):
too conservative and who argued against him. His own vice
president H. W. Bush had called Reagan's economic policy voodoo economics.
And then as soon as he gets the nomination eighty eight,
tries to distance himself from some of Bagan's policies. And
I was reading up on Jerald Ford's voting record when
he was in Congress in the nineteen sixties. He voted
for all the Civil Rights Acts as a Republican, and
(11:11):
he voted for the Voting Rights Act in nineteen sixty five,
and there were a lot of Democrats who voted against
those bills. So the ways in which the parties had
these sort of strange overlaps that seem different to us
now is really a powerful thing. So the Southern Democrats
basically all became Republicans. I think about a guy like
Phil Graham, who was a long time Democratic centator, and
(11:33):
John Tower, both of them from Texas, who switched parties
and became Republicans in the nineteen eighties. And that was
a pretty common thing in the nineteen eighties for these
Southern Democrats to become Republicans.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
So can you talk a little bit about Ford and
Nixon and how that all kind of played out.
Speaker 4 (11:57):
So Ford is a really interesting character. I mean, he
was our football player at Michigan. He was a Yale
law grad. He got elected to Congress in nineteen forty
eight after serving in the Navy honorably in World War Two. Interestingly,
nineteen forty six saw both Nixon and Kennedy get elected
after serving in the Navy in World War Two. So
there was this sort of influx of veterans in the forties,
(12:17):
and then Ford spent twenty five years climbing the ranks
in Congress out of the district of Michigan. He was
the House Minority leader in nineteen seventy three, and his
dream was to someday be Speaker of the House. When
it didn't look like Republicans whatever, we'd get to take
control of the House. And in seventy three Richard Nixon
lost his vice president to a completely different scandal. So
(12:38):
his vice president was a guy named Spiro Agnew from Maryland,
and Nixon and Agnew ran in nineteen sixty eight. One
of their central campaign planks was law and order because
Agnew had helped keep order in nineteen sixty eight in
nineteen sixty seven after some of the urban riots, particularly
after King's assassination in April sixty eight, so they were
running on this law and order campaign, and investigators in
(13:01):
Maryland eventually uncovered that Governor Agnew had been taking kickbacks
to give contracts to various supporters, so he was a
classic bribery scheme. So Agnew was forced to resign because
it was obviously a drag on Nixon to have it
somebody who was almost as corupt as he was in
the White House, and they had to find somebody who
could help the Republican Party and try to restore some
(13:23):
of the image of the Republican Party in the middle
of nineteen seventy three, and Gerald Ford was exactly the guy.
He had never done anything con to recy in his life.
He had managed to annoy Lyndon Johnson, which is probably
something on his side. Linda Johnson said something like he
was too dumb to chew gum and walk at the
same time. So Lynda Johnson didn't like him. So Ford
(13:44):
was seen as a guy without a lot of ambition,
but very clean, and he would bring some credit back
to the Nixon administration. And of course, shortly after that,
about a year later, it was when Nixon finally found
that he had to resign, and so Jared Ford found
himself President of the United States after never having gotten
a vote outside his district in Michigan. The thing about
(14:06):
Ford is because he was unsullied by any sort of corruption,
and he was a negotiator in Congress. He wasn't a
legislation writer. He was a guy who sort of brought
people together. I think there was a sense that Ford
also could be a guy who could heal some of
the divisions if for some reason Nick sent to leave office.
You know, and when Ford was appointed in nineteen seventy three,
(14:28):
you know, the Watergate scandal was brewing enough that you know,
reasonable people could see that Nixon might not serve out
his whole second term. That would not you know, that
wouldn't have been a surprise to anybody. And you know,
both the Senate and the House had to vote to
confirm him, and they voted overwhelmingly to confirm him. So
I understand Haldeman's position, But I think also the people
in Congress recognized and Gerald Ford they had a guy
(14:50):
who they could trust the presidency to if Nixon got
forced out of office, which was plausible in the summer
of nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
So about Ford's pardoning of Nixon.
Speaker 4 (15:04):
Yeah, this is the great question about Ford's legacy. So
Nixon resigned in August ninth, nineteen seventy four, and al
Hague had called Ford about a week in advance and
said Nixon's going down. Basically, get ready to get sworn in,
because it could happen anytime. So Ford had maybe a
week's notice that it was coming, and he made a
decision in September, so, about a month after he had
(15:26):
been in power, to issue a formal pardon for any
crimes that Richard Nixon might have committed, which made sure
that Nixon wouldn't be tried in any court. And Nixon
accepted the pardon, and there was a huge explosion about
the pardon because people thought that maybe Nixon and Ford
had made some sort of deal that, for instance, maybe
(15:47):
Nixon agreed to step down on the understand that Ford
would pardon him, or maybe even further back than that
Nixon chose Ford in nineteen seventy three, because that's really
when Nixon had some bargaining power and if he'd be
Ford would pardon him for something. I think one of
the things that fuels the pardon conspiracy theory is that
Ford was in fact on the Warren Commission, which draws
(16:08):
a lot of conspiracy theorists about what he might have
known and what he might have covered up he might
have been capable of it. So I don't think there
was any evidence I think Ford made of a conspiracy.
I think Ford just made a decision that putting Richard
Nixon on trial for one thing was going to be
a zoo that the things that got revealed in a
trial might be pretty damaging for the nation as a whole,
(16:29):
and pretty divisive for the nation as a whole. You know,
we have to remember that Nixon stood for election on
a national ticket five times, twice as vice president, three
times as president. I mean, I remember my dad saying
he was so disappointed Nixon because he voted for him
five times, and then he had to find out that
Nixon was this guy. I think there were a lot
of people like that. You know, the seventy two election,
Nixon got sixty percent of the vote, and there were
(16:50):
still sizeable numbers of people who were like, wow, everybody
does it, you know, and Nixon shouldn't have to leave office.
So I think Ford made the decision that it was
the right thing to do, even if it was a
politically damaging for him, because you know, once you're in
the White House, you can't help but think, well, maybe
I'll run for president in nineteen seventy six. And I
don't know how soon he decided that. I suspect it
was about August tenth, about the day after he got
(17:10):
into the White House. I think he started thinking I
could be president too, and I'm gonna stick around. So
he made the decision to parton Nixon. There were never
any trials. When Nixon got to write his memoirs and
that it explained what he did, he got to get
interviewed by David Frost and other people and explained his
what he did and why he did it without the
power of potential being charged with perjury. And so, you know,
(17:31):
this is one of those great what ifs. Should Ford
have let Nixon go on trial, I think generally, while
people at the time were pretty upset about it, most people,
I think over time the decision to pardon Nixon probably
his worked out as the less bad of those two choices, because,
in part, in some ways, if you accept a part
and you're sort of acknowledging that you were guilty and
(17:52):
you're taking it. You know, Nixon never did that directly,
but I think there was something to that. Having Nixon
accept the pardon was his way of saying, yes, I
did the wrong things, and now I'll go back. And
I think also the pardon weirdly gave Nixon the opportunity
to do this elder statesman thing, which is still kind
of remarkable to me that not long after that, people
(18:14):
were going to Richard Nixon for commentary on foreign policy
in particular, And you know, it was okay for presidents
to consult with Richard Nixon to talk about foreign policy
because most of the scandals were seen to be domestic
and not foreign policy. So Nixon managed to retain this
elder statesman quality. And you know, I remember when he died,
people were saying, well, you know, you know, we shouldn't
(18:34):
be so harsh on Nixon. Everybody did those things, And
you know, the reality is everybody didn't do those things.
There were some you know, Johnson did some bad things,
but nothing on the level that Nixon did them.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
So how about legacy of Watergate? What do you think
kind of survives from that?
Speaker 4 (18:50):
Well? What survives? Actually, it's interesting because for many years
there were all these reforms in government that Congress passed.
For instance, campaign finance reform was one of the big ones.
All the rules about how much money could give, who
could give it, how it had to be disclosed. Because
one of the things that came out was that the
Nixon campaign team was just getting scads of cash from
corporations that was not being reported. They were using that
(19:10):
cash to pay the plumbers. You know, there's a lot
of stuff below board. So in some ways, the conviction
of Donald Trump in New York State was a post
Watergate thing because he was taking campaign donations to cover
up the I don't want to call it an affair
with Stormy Daniels, that meeting with Stormy Daniels, that brief interaction.
So there's that. There was also, I think this larger
(19:31):
sense in the public between the Pentagon papers and Watergate
that the government was just repeatedly lying and couldn't be trusted.
And I think we talked about this with your previous podcast.
You know, there's that Pew poll like do you trust
the federal government to do the right thing? Most of
the time? And in the early sixties was like eighty
percent of the American people said that. By the early eighties,
(19:52):
it's down to twenty percent. So ironically, one of the
beneficiaries of all this, well two beneficiaries. First was Jimmy
car in nineteen seventy six, who had almost no experience,
I mean, not that it seems to matter about experience anymore,
but he had been the governor of Georgia, and he
parlayed that into his electoral victory over Ford, largely by saying,
I will never lie to you. And there was a
(20:14):
sense that we want people who are honest but maybe
more competent than Gerald Ford. And Carter was a nuclear
engineer and he was a farmer and all these things.
So Carter was definitely a post Watergate president. I don't
think he could have won under other circumstances, and I
think it equally Reagan is a post Watergate president with
a very different set of policies. But what really propelled
Reagan to victory was saying, basically, government is not the
(20:35):
solution to the problem. Government is a problem. Well, it's
a lot easier to believe that after you've read the
Pentagon papers or read about what Nixon did with the
IRS and the CIA and the FBI, and you started saying, well,
you know, I can't trust any of these people, so
maybe a smaller government is a good thing. Of course,
the government didn't get smaller, kept getting bigger, but in
terms of the rhetoric, and then I think there was
just a general sense that our whole institutions were really
(20:59):
shaky right before for the bi centennial, because the whole
nineteen seventy six was like, we're going to celebrate two
hundred years of American independence, But it was impossible to
escape the fact that we had just appointed a guy
from Michigan to be president who, you know, really wasn't
that qualified to be president. I think Ford turned out
to be a pretty good president, but we're talking about
our election. These choices really good? Well, Ford and Carter
(21:21):
didn't look like, you know, nineteen twelve, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson,
William Howard Taft. It looked like, well, this is the
best we can do, and that sense of, you know,
does the political system unraveling? And we just you know,
we're not getting the best anymore. We can either have
Richard Nixon and Lindon Johnson, who are effective but you know,
breaking the law left and right, or we can get
(21:41):
Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, who seemed pretty honest, but
they can't get anything done. So is there some sort
of resolution to that? And I think a lot of
our skepticism about the American political system comes out of Watergate.
So there's some legal changes, but also more than anything,
cultural changes.
Speaker 3 (21:57):
So is there anything that we haven't touched on that
you think is particularly important or interesting for people to
know about.
Speaker 4 (22:03):
I guess the one other thing about all this that
sometimes gets overlooked is that, you know, Nixon gets his
narrow election victory in nineteen sixty eight because of the
Vietnam War, and all this is going on while the
Vietnam War is going on. So Nixon wins in sixty eight.
Probably he helped sink the nineteen sixty eight piece negotiations that
Lyndon Johnson was trying to pull off in parts so
he could say he would solve the problem. Although that's
(22:26):
kind of stupid, like it'd be better off if Johnson
solved the war, then he could have done the aftermath.
But it certainly seems like Nixon sabotage that. And you know,
he ran on this campaign of trying to end the
Vietnam War, but he didn't, and if anything, the depending
on papers which are about the war brought him down.
And then he was completely distracted in nineteen seventy two
seventy three, when the war in Vietnam was coming to
(22:47):
its end, and also there was the war in the
Middle East in nineteen seventy three, and you know, there
was a story circulating for a long time. The Defense Secretary,
James Slessinger and the Secretary of State, who by that
point was Henry Kisten, had made a deal that one
of them would always be in Washington in nineteen seventy
three because Nixon was so out of control that he
was drinking too much, he was constantly railing about his enemies,
(23:10):
and they were worried that he would start a war
trying to you know, change the subjects from Watergate. Now,
Schlessinger later denied that that was the case, but Kissinger
never denied it. And what's also clear is that it
does appear that one of them was always in Washington
in that time period, and that they also gave military
commanders orders not to do anything without consulting with one
of them to make sure that it wasn't just Nixon
(23:32):
going off the rails. You know, that's what we were
worried about. In January of twenty twenty one, you would
Mark Milly basically said he was worried that Trump would
try to start a war with Iran to distract from
the election problem. And Mark Miller was reaching out to
the Chinese to try to say to them, look, we're
not going to start anything, you know, don't overreact, so
you know, in some ways, it was the Vietnam War
(23:52):
that destroyed Richard Nixon and made John Ford's presidency popular,
and then Ford got left with the disaster that was
the end of the Vietnam War. And while this isn't
directly related to Watergate, it is pretty fascinating. One of
my students wrote her book or dissertation that was published
about human rights policy between the US and Socialist Republic
(24:13):
of Vietnam, and one of the things she discovered in
the archives was that it was Gerald Ford more than
anybody who pushed to save the refugees at South Vietnam,
and that Kissinger was doubtful about it, but Ford said,
we owe these people. We need to get as many
out of South Vietnam as possible if they want to
get out to the United States. And it wouldn't have
happened without him. And actually he was more of a
defender of South Vietnamese human rights and Jimmy Carter, and
(24:37):
that he fought hard, and that the reason why they're
such a huge South Vietnamese community in the United States
is that Ford said, we've got a moral obligation. It's
pretty clear that he was a policy guy as president
and did some very important things that maybe Nixon wouldn't
have done.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Thank you to Kirk Dorsey, chair of the History Department
at the University of New Hampshire. I'm Toby Ball. For
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(25:18):
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Speaker 2 (00:15):
This is a rip Current bonus episode. You don't need
to listen to follow the rip Current storyline, but it
provides more information, context and analysis to enhance the main
podcast enjoy.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
As we worked on rip Current, it became apparent that
fifty years after the fact, not everyone was clear on
what exactly was Watergate. To get a basic overview of
the Watergate crimes and scandal and the repercussions that came
out of it, I talked with Kirk Dorsey, chair of
the History department at the University of New Hampshire.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
My name is Kirk Dorsey. I'm the chair of the
History department at the University of New Hampshire. I teach
US foreign Policy and US fronmental history and I'm now
in my thirtieth year in the department.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Can you just tell us about Watergate?
Speaker 4 (01:07):
So, first of all, Watergate, everybody has heard of it
at some level, because every scandal is a gate. Now
because of that to flight Gate with their New England
Patriots fans here I probably just turned all you off
by mentioned to flight Gate, but everything is Gate. And
it's interesting because the Watergate actually was a building. It
was a building that was still a hotel. You can
make a reservation I think still in the Watergate Hotel,
(01:28):
but it also had offices, and the Watergate building had
the offices of the Democratic National Committee. In nineteen seventy
two that the people who worked for the Nixon re
election campaign, who worked in the Nixon White House as well,
broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in
the Watergate Hotel and they actually were caught by a
security guard in the summer of nineteen seventy two, but
(01:50):
it looked like just a run of the mill burglary.
So when we talk about Watergate, there is this incident
of a break in at the hotel to go after
the Democrats campaign strategy for nineteen seventy two, which apparently
was to lose as badly as possible since only won
one state. But then it spiraled out into all these
other things that the Nixon administration was doing that were secret,
(02:11):
So that Watergate is much more than just the break in.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
Can you kind of talk about the scope of the
things that have sort of collectively been under the Watergate banner.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
Yeah, So it really started in nineteen seventy one. So
there was a guy named Daniel Ellsberg who released a
collection of documents put together by the Defense Department that
were known as the Pentagon Papers. And the Pentagon Papers
were an attempt by the Defense Department to understand how
the United States had gotten into the Vietnam War, which
was complete mass in nineteen seventy one, and they were secret,
but Ellsberg thought the America people deserved to know what
(02:45):
the US government had done way back in the forties, fifties,
and sixties, so he leaked the Pentagon Papers. They got
a lot of publication. There were court cases about whether
or not the newspapers were allowed to publish them. And Nixon,
who was president at the time, could have said, well,
these really embarrassed my predecessors. I'll just let it go.
But he was really paranoid about leaks, and he was
(03:06):
worried that things in the Nixon administration would also leak.
So some of his aides assembled a group of covert operatives,
guys who are known to history like Gee Gordon Liddy,
who had a radio show for a long time Chuck Coulson,
who later went on to become a born again preacher.
And these guys tried to make Elsberg's life miserable. They
(03:26):
broke into his psychiatrist's office to steal his files, things
like that, And apparently one of these guys relatives said well,
what are you doing in the White House, And to
cover themselves, they said were plumbers because their job was
to fix leaks, and so they became known as the
White House plumbers. And you know, the problem with once
you hire plumbers is you can't really fire them without
(03:48):
them knowing things. So the administration kept them around, and
they were the ones who did the break in at
the Watergate hotel, for instance. But as we discovered over
the course of the next sort of two years after
nineteen seventy two, so the Nixon administration was not just
using the plumbers to go after its enemies. They were
using the regular people in government. So John Dean, who's
a regular on CNN now, is a legal expert on
(04:10):
presidential corruption. He's there because he was a young lawyer
in the Nixon White House. One of his jobs was
to compose a list of enemies of the Nixon administration,
which included such hard hitting political figures as Joe Namath
and Paul Newman, because they were popular people who were
anti Nixon. And it wasn't just to compile a list.
It was, for instance, to say to the IRS audit
(04:31):
our enemies. Use the powers of the federal government, the IRS,
the FBI, and even the CIA to go after people
in the domestic sphere who were potentially enemies of the
Nixon administration. So what started as a break in is
the investigations compounded. They discovered there was a lot more
to it than just a bunch of second rate burglars
getting caught trying to steal Georgian governor's campaign secrets.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
So then how does this start to unravel?
Speaker 4 (04:57):
So it starts unravel because they're a journalists who are
just trying to sort out, like there's something that doesn't
smell right. And as they began asking questions, there's a
guy named Mark Felt who worked for the FBI, who
was aware of what was going on, and he becomes
a secret source, takes on the unfortunate name of Deep
Throat after a pornographic film that was poker at the time,
and he begins telling Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of
(05:20):
the Washington Post details and pieces of information that are
not publicly known, and that leads them to continue to
ask questions over the course of nineteen seventy two. So
the break in in seventy two at first is thought
just to be some random burglars looking for stuff that
they could steal, so it doesn't affect the seventy two
election at all, and Nixon wins in a landslide. But
(05:42):
they keep asking questions into nineteen seventy three, and they
begin to reveal that the people who were involved in
the burglary actually have connections back to the White House,
and once they see that, that's when more journalists pile on,
and most importantly, Congress decides to start holding hearings to
find out what was going on. And Nixon did a
pretty good job for nineteen seventy three of fending off
(06:04):
allegations by saying I didn't know about any of this.
This was all people underneath me doing these things, until
in late nineteen seventy three one of his aides, justin testifying,
accidentally says, well, you know, the president was taping all
the conversations in the White House and nobody knew that
outside the White House. And this is a guy named
Butterfield who says this. When he says it, Congress are like, Okay,
(06:25):
we need these tapes. And that becomes a source of
a huge fight between Nixon and Congress over presidential immunity. Basically,
does the president have the right to hang onto these
things as the president or are these government documents to
serviation able to see? And eventually the Supreme Court rules
that the tapes have to be turned over, and that's
really when that leads to Nixon recognizing that he is
on tape authorizing a lot of these illegal acts, well
(06:49):
beyond what happened in the Watergate hotel, and that he's
doomed once these tapes are out, there's no way he
can stay in power. And not to get two presentists.
But one of the big differences between then and now
is that there were key Republican senators who turned against him.
Howard Baker, who was a Tennessee Republican who was an
upstanding a citizen. He worked for the Reagan administration. He
(07:11):
was the person who famously said, what did the president
know and when did he know it? And asking that
question coming from the Republican side. Was an indication that
there were Republican legislators in nineteen seventy three and then
into seventy four who were starting to give up on Nixon.
They thought he had crossed too many lines.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
What is he on tape, sort of authorizing.
Speaker 4 (07:31):
Using federal agencies to go after his enemies, knowing about
the break in that he claimed he knew nothing about
in the Watergate hotel. And then there's all the other
stuff that he was famous for, you know, some of
the just incredibly inflammatory things he said, even you know,
these incredibly anti Semitic things he was saying to Henry Kissinger,
his Jewish National security advisor. So the tapes were a
combination of direct evidence that Nixon knew that things were
(07:56):
being done that were illegal, not just the sort of
low level petty but also using agencies in the way
they weren't supposed to be used. But then also that
he was a really awful person on top of it.
So they were embarrassing, and you know, nineteen seventy five
Congress held hearings on the CIA because of these tapes,
because it was clear that Nixon had used the CIA.
These are the Church Committee hearings and named after a
(08:17):
senator from Idaho, Frank Church. And that's, for instance, where
we learned all these things about the efforts to assassinate
Fidel Castro in the early sixties. All sorts of things
came out of these Church Committee hearings. So our current
vision of the CIA is a bunch of you know,
sort of semi rogue guys go around trying to execute people.
That all comes out of the Church Committee hearings, because
most of that was secret before nineteen seventy five. More
(08:39):
than anything, what it does is damage this idea that
the federal government is basically telling you the truth most
of the time, because knowledge did we learn from the
Pentagon papers that they lied repeatedly about the war. But
then we have all these hearings, we find out that
Nixon and his people were lying about the ways the
federal government was being used.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
Can you talk a little bit about how Nixon tried
to serve as presidency.
Speaker 4 (09:01):
Basically, the Attorney General appointed a special council to investigate
what the Watergate crimes and all the assembled other crimes were,
and Nixon got really frustrated that this guy was getting
closer and closer to getting the truth out about him.
So he ordered his attorney general to fire him, and
the Attorney Onnor resigned and then there was a second
command who also resigned, in the person in the Justice
(09:23):
Department who ultimately agreed to fire Cox. The special investigator
was Robert Bork. Bork would come back in the nineteen
eighties as a nominee for the Supreme Court, and he
was the first of this run of really controversial Supreme
Court nominations, and Bork ended up getting I did not
obviously get a seat on the Supreme Court. So Nixon
really fought hard in the courts to protect his rights
(09:47):
basically as president, to do what he wanted. In fact,
he said after he left office at one point something
to the extent of, if the president does it, it's
legal again. You know, the echoes to today are really
really powerful. That Nixon's base take on the matter was
he could do whatever he wanted and if he wanted
to take people, if he wanted to give orders as president,
he could do those things, and that Congress had no
(10:08):
power to oversee him. Of course, Congress had the power
to impeach him. And what ultimately drove him from office
was as these tapes were released, he recognized that there
were not enough Republicans in the Senate who would vote
to acquit him, that impeachment was going to go through.
The Democrats controlled both houses, but they didn't have a
two thirds majority in the Senate. So he recognized that
(10:30):
he was going to lose a vote in the Senate,
he would be impeached to remove from office. So he
decided better to resign on his own terms than to
be impeached. This is one of the things that's really remarkable,
I mean, certainly about the Republican Party today. We've never
had a party that's been so much in one person's pocket.
Even when Reagan was running in nineteen eighty and eighty four,
there were people in the party who thought he was
(10:51):
too conservative and who argued against him. His own vice
president H. W. Bush had called Reagan's economic policy voodoo economics.
And then as soon as he gets the nomination eighty eight,
tries to distance himself from some of Bagan's policies. And
I was reading up on Jerald Ford's voting record when
he was in Congress in the nineteen sixties. He voted
for all the Civil Rights Acts as a Republican, and
(11:11):
he voted for the Voting Rights Act in nineteen sixty five,
and there were a lot of Democrats who voted against
those bills. So the ways in which the parties had
these sort of strange overlaps that seem different to us
now is really a powerful thing. So the Southern Democrats
basically all became Republicans. I think about a guy like
Phil Graham, who was a long time Democratic centator, and
(11:33):
John Tower, both of them from Texas, who switched parties
and became Republicans in the nineteen eighties. And that was
a pretty common thing in the nineteen eighties for these
Southern Democrats to become Republicans.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
So can you talk a little bit about Ford and
Nixon and how that all kind of played out.
Speaker 4 (11:57):
So Ford is a really interesting character. I mean, he
was our football player at Michigan. He was a Yale
law grad. He got elected to Congress in nineteen forty
eight after serving in the Navy honorably in World War Two. Interestingly,
nineteen forty six saw both Nixon and Kennedy get elected
after serving in the Navy in World War Two. So
there was this sort of influx of veterans in the forties,
(12:17):
and then Ford spent twenty five years climbing the ranks
in Congress out of the district of Michigan. He was
the House Minority leader in nineteen seventy three, and his
dream was to someday be Speaker of the House. When
it didn't look like Republicans whatever, we'd get to take
control of the House. And in seventy three Richard Nixon
lost his vice president to a completely different scandal. So
(12:38):
his vice president was a guy named Spiro Agnew from Maryland,
and Nixon and Agnew ran in nineteen sixty eight. One
of their central campaign planks was law and order because
Agnew had helped keep order in nineteen sixty eight in
nineteen sixty seven after some of the urban riots, particularly
after King's assassination in April sixty eight, so they were
running on this law and order campaign, and investigators in
(13:01):
Maryland eventually uncovered that Governor Agnew had been taking kickbacks
to give contracts to various supporters, so he was a
classic bribery scheme. So Agnew was forced to resign because
it was obviously a drag on Nixon to have it
somebody who was almost as corupt as he was in
the White House, and they had to find somebody who
could help the Republican Party and try to restore some
(13:23):
of the image of the Republican Party in the middle
of nineteen seventy three, and Gerald Ford was exactly the guy.
He had never done anything con to recy in his life.
He had managed to annoy Lyndon Johnson, which is probably
something on his side. Linda Johnson said something like he
was too dumb to chew gum and walk at the
same time. So Lynda Johnson didn't like him. So Ford
(13:44):
was seen as a guy without a lot of ambition,
but very clean, and he would bring some credit back
to the Nixon administration. And of course, shortly after that,
about a year later, it was when Nixon finally found
that he had to resign, and so Jared Ford found
himself President of the United States after never having gotten
a vote outside his district in Michigan. The thing about
(14:06):
Ford is because he was unsullied by any sort of corruption,
and he was a negotiator in Congress. He wasn't a
legislation writer. He was a guy who sort of brought
people together. I think there was a sense that Ford
also could be a guy who could heal some of
the divisions if for some reason Nick sent to leave office.
You know, and when Ford was appointed in nineteen seventy three,
(14:28):
you know, the Watergate scandal was brewing enough that you know,
reasonable people could see that Nixon might not serve out
his whole second term. That would not you know, that
wouldn't have been a surprise to anybody. And you know,
both the Senate and the House had to vote to
confirm him, and they voted overwhelmingly to confirm him. So
I understand Haldeman's position, But I think also the people
in Congress recognized and Gerald Ford they had a guy
(14:50):
who they could trust the presidency to if Nixon got
forced out of office, which was plausible in the summer
of nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
So about Ford's pardoning of Nixon.
Speaker 4 (15:04):
Yeah, this is the great question about Ford's legacy. So
Nixon resigned in August ninth, nineteen seventy four, and al
Hague had called Ford about a week in advance and
said Nixon's going down. Basically, get ready to get sworn in,
because it could happen anytime. So Ford had maybe a
week's notice that it was coming, and he made a
decision in September, so, about a month after he had
(15:26):
been in power, to issue a formal pardon for any
crimes that Richard Nixon might have committed, which made sure
that Nixon wouldn't be tried in any court. And Nixon
accepted the pardon, and there was a huge explosion about
the pardon because people thought that maybe Nixon and Ford
had made some sort of deal that, for instance, maybe
(15:47):
Nixon agreed to step down on the understand that Ford
would pardon him, or maybe even further back than that
Nixon chose Ford in nineteen seventy three, because that's really
when Nixon had some bargaining power and if he'd be
Ford would pardon him for something. I think one of
the things that fuels the pardon conspiracy theory is that
Ford was in fact on the Warren Commission, which draws
(16:08):
a lot of conspiracy theorists about what he might have
known and what he might have covered up he might
have been capable of it. So I don't think there
was any evidence I think Ford made of a conspiracy.
I think Ford just made a decision that putting Richard
Nixon on trial for one thing was going to be
a zoo that the things that got revealed in a
trial might be pretty damaging for the nation as a whole,
(16:29):
and pretty divisive for the nation as a whole. You know,
we have to remember that Nixon stood for election on
a national ticket five times, twice as vice president, three
times as president. I mean, I remember my dad saying
he was so disappointed Nixon because he voted for him
five times, and then he had to find out that
Nixon was this guy. I think there were a lot
of people like that. You know, the seventy two election,
Nixon got sixty percent of the vote, and there were
(16:50):
still sizeable numbers of people who were like, wow, everybody
does it, you know, and Nixon shouldn't have to leave office.
So I think Ford made the decision that it was
the right thing to do, even if it was a
politically damaging for him, because you know, once you're in
the White House, you can't help but think, well, maybe
I'll run for president in nineteen seventy six. And I
don't know how soon he decided that. I suspect it
was about August tenth, about the day after he got
(17:10):
into the White House. I think he started thinking I
could be president too, and I'm gonna stick around. So
he made the decision to parton Nixon. There were never
any trials. When Nixon got to write his memoirs and
that it explained what he did, he got to get
interviewed by David Frost and other people and explained his
what he did and why he did it without the
power of potential being charged with perjury. And so, you know,
(17:31):
this is one of those great what ifs. Should Ford
have let Nixon go on trial, I think generally, while
people at the time were pretty upset about it, most people,
I think over time the decision to pardon Nixon probably
his worked out as the less bad of those two choices, because,
in part, in some ways, if you accept a part
and you're sort of acknowledging that you were guilty and
(17:52):
you're taking it. You know, Nixon never did that directly,
but I think there was something to that. Having Nixon
accept the pardon was his way of saying, yes, I
did the wrong things, and now I'll go back. And
I think also the pardon weirdly gave Nixon the opportunity
to do this elder statesman thing, which is still kind
of remarkable to me that not long after that, people
(18:14):
were going to Richard Nixon for commentary on foreign policy
in particular, And you know, it was okay for presidents
to consult with Richard Nixon to talk about foreign policy
because most of the scandals were seen to be domestic
and not foreign policy. So Nixon managed to retain this
elder statesman quality. And you know, I remember when he died,
people were saying, well, you know, you know, we shouldn't
(18:34):
be so harsh on Nixon. Everybody did those things, And
you know, the reality is everybody didn't do those things.
There were some you know, Johnson did some bad things,
but nothing on the level that Nixon did them.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
So how about legacy of Watergate? What do you think
kind of survives from that?
Speaker 4 (18:50):
Well? What survives? Actually, it's interesting because for many years
there were all these reforms in government that Congress passed.
For instance, campaign finance reform was one of the big ones.
All the rules about how much money could give, who
could give it, how it had to be disclosed. Because
one of the things that came out was that the
Nixon campaign team was just getting scads of cash from
corporations that was not being reported. They were using that
(19:10):
cash to pay the plumbers. You know, there's a lot
of stuff below board. So in some ways, the conviction
of Donald Trump in New York State was a post
Watergate thing because he was taking campaign donations to cover
up the I don't want to call it an affair
with Stormy Daniels, that meeting with Stormy Daniels, that brief interaction.
So there's that. There was also, I think this larger
(19:31):
sense in the public between the Pentagon papers and Watergate
that the government was just repeatedly lying and couldn't be trusted.
And I think we talked about this with your previous podcast.
You know, there's that Pew poll like do you trust
the federal government to do the right thing? Most of
the time? And in the early sixties was like eighty
percent of the American people said that. By the early eighties,
(19:52):
it's down to twenty percent. So ironically, one of the
beneficiaries of all this, well two beneficiaries. First was Jimmy
car in nineteen seventy six, who had almost no experience,
I mean, not that it seems to matter about experience anymore,
but he had been the governor of Georgia, and he
parlayed that into his electoral victory over Ford, largely by saying,
I will never lie to you. And there was a
(20:14):
sense that we want people who are honest but maybe
more competent than Gerald Ford. And Carter was a nuclear
engineer and he was a farmer and all these things.
So Carter was definitely a post Watergate president. I don't
think he could have won under other circumstances, and I
think it equally Reagan is a post Watergate president with
a very different set of policies. But what really propelled
Reagan to victory was saying, basically, government is not the
(20:35):
solution to the problem. Government is a problem. Well, it's
a lot easier to believe that after you've read the
Pentagon papers or read about what Nixon did with the
IRS and the CIA and the FBI, and you started saying, well,
you know, I can't trust any of these people, so
maybe a smaller government is a good thing. Of course,
the government didn't get smaller, kept getting bigger, but in
terms of the rhetoric, and then I think there was
just a general sense that our whole institutions were really
(20:59):
shaky right before for the bi centennial, because the whole
nineteen seventy six was like, we're going to celebrate two
hundred years of American independence, But it was impossible to
escape the fact that we had just appointed a guy
from Michigan to be president who, you know, really wasn't
that qualified to be president. I think Ford turned out
to be a pretty good president, but we're talking about
our election. These choices really good? Well, Ford and Carter
(21:21):
didn't look like, you know, nineteen twelve, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson,
William Howard Taft. It looked like, well, this is the
best we can do, and that sense of, you know,
does the political system unraveling? And we just you know,
we're not getting the best anymore. We can either have
Richard Nixon and Lindon Johnson, who are effective but you know,
breaking the law left and right, or we can get
(21:41):
Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, who seemed pretty honest, but
they can't get anything done. So is there some sort
of resolution to that? And I think a lot of
our skepticism about the American political system comes out of Watergate.
So there's some legal changes, but also more than anything,
cultural changes.
Speaker 3 (21:57):
So is there anything that we haven't touched on that
you think is particularly important or interesting for people to
know about.
Speaker 4 (22:03):
I guess the one other thing about all this that
sometimes gets overlooked is that, you know, Nixon gets his
narrow election victory in nineteen sixty eight because of the
Vietnam War, and all this is going on while the
Vietnam War is going on. So Nixon wins in sixty eight.
Probably he helped sink the nineteen sixty eight piece negotiations that
Lyndon Johnson was trying to pull off in parts so
he could say he would solve the problem. Although that's
(22:26):
kind of stupid, like it'd be better off if Johnson
solved the war, then he could have done the aftermath.
But it certainly seems like Nixon sabotage that. And you know,
he ran on this campaign of trying to end the
Vietnam War, but he didn't, and if anything, the depending
on papers which are about the war brought him down.
And then he was completely distracted in nineteen seventy two
seventy three, when the war in Vietnam was coming to
(22:47):
its end, and also there was the war in the
Middle East in nineteen seventy three, and you know, there
was a story circulating for a long time. The Defense Secretary,
James Slessinger and the Secretary of State, who by that
point was Henry Kisten, had made a deal that one
of them would always be in Washington in nineteen seventy
three because Nixon was so out of control that he
was drinking too much, he was constantly railing about his enemies,
(23:10):
and they were worried that he would start a war
trying to you know, change the subjects from Watergate. Now,
Schlessinger later denied that that was the case, but Kissinger
never denied it. And what's also clear is that it
does appear that one of them was always in Washington
in that time period, and that they also gave military
commanders orders not to do anything without consulting with one
of them to make sure that it wasn't just Nixon
(23:32):
going off the rails. You know, that's what we were
worried about. In January of twenty twenty one, you would
Mark Milly basically said he was worried that Trump would
try to start a war with Iran to distract from
the election problem. And Mark Miller was reaching out to
the Chinese to try to say to them, look, we're
not going to start anything, you know, don't overreact, so
you know, in some ways, it was the Vietnam War
(23:52):
that destroyed Richard Nixon and made John Ford's presidency popular,
and then Ford got left with the disaster that was
the end of the Vietnam War. And while this isn't
directly related to Watergate, it is pretty fascinating. One of
my students wrote her book or dissertation that was published
about human rights policy between the US and Socialist Republic
(24:13):
of Vietnam, and one of the things she discovered in
the archives was that it was Gerald Ford more than
anybody who pushed to save the refugees at South Vietnam,
and that Kissinger was doubtful about it, but Ford said,
we owe these people. We need to get as many
out of South Vietnam as possible if they want to
get out to the United States. And it wouldn't have
happened without him. And actually he was more of a
defender of South Vietnamese human rights and Jimmy Carter, and
(24:37):
that he fought hard, and that the reason why they're
such a huge South Vietnamese community in the United States
is that Ford said, we've got a moral obligation. It's
pretty clear that he was a policy guy as president
and did some very important things that maybe Nixon wouldn't
have done.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Thank you to Kirk Dorsey, chair of the History Department
at the University of New Hampshire. I'm Toby Ball. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite show. For more
information on rip Current, visit the show website at ripcurrentpod
(25:18):
dot com.
Host
Toby Ball
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