06/13/2007

Watergate remembered
By Tom Range, Sr.

The tapes, the Saturday Night Massacre, "I'm not a crook;" all phrases that were instantly recognizable upwards to 35 years ago but are now recalled from the fading memories of those who lived through the national nightmare known to history as "Watergate."  For those who were born, or those reaching social maturity, after the events of June 17, 1972, these phrases have as much meaning as "Teapot Dome," the term describing a presidential scandal of the 1920s.

On that date in June 35 years ago, five men were arrested at 2:30 a.m. trying to plant listening devices, "bugs," in the offices of the Democratic National Committee into which they had broken.  The offices were located at the Watergate Hotel and office complex in Washington, DC.  The five carried documents linking them to the Committee for the Re-election of the President, a campaign organization backing the re-election of Richard M. Nixon, the sitting 37th president who had been inaugurated in 1969.  Nixon was running against Senator George McGovern in the election to be held in November 1972.

In spite of one of the Watergate burglars being a security aide for the Republican Party, the former Attorney General John Mitchell, head of the Nixon re-election campaign, denied any link to the operation.  Criminal investigations, including those being conducted by the FBI, uncovered that payments to the burglars had originated in the Nixon campaign.  Mitchell, while serving as the Attorney General under Nixon, had controlled a secret Republican Party fund used to finance widespread intelligence-gathering operations against the Democrats, labeled by the press "dirty tricks."

By January 1973, former Nixon aides G. Gordon Liddy and James W. McCord Jr. had been convicted of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping in the Watergate incident.  Five others pled guilty.  In April, the President's top White House staffers H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, and the current Attorney General Richard Kleindienst resigned over the scandal.  White House counsel John Dean was fired.  On May 18, the Senate had established its Watergate Committee with its hearings being televised.  All the while, the Nixon White House had denied any complicity in the Watergate burglary. 

On July 13, Alexander Butterfield, a former presidential appointments secretary remarked in Congressional testimony that, since 1971, Nixon had recorded all conversations and telephone calls in his office.  The Senate subpoenaed the tapes to determine, as Senator Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) put it, "What did the president know and when did he know it." 
The allegations of cover-up continued to rap at the door of the Oval Office with revelations of complicity on the part of presidential aides being brought to light almost weekly.  On October 20, 1973, Nixon fired the special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had been chosen by the attorney general to prosecute the Watergate case for the executive branch of the government.  The Attorney General Elliot Richardson and the Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus resigns in protest, following the example of the previous Attorney General Richard Kleindienst in resigning over the machinations of the administration in obstructing investigations.  These multiple discharges from office of Cox, Richardson and Ruckelshaus, all in a single night, have been dubbed "the Saturday Night Massacre."

By mid-November, in the face of mounting criticism of Nixon's conduct, and increased pressure to commence impeachment proceedings, the president went on a televised news conference and declared in his own defense, "I'm not a crook."
The Supreme Court ruled that the Watergate tapes had to be released to the House Judiciary Committee, now convened to consider impeachment.  The White House could not explain an 18 ½-minute gap in one of the subpoenaed tapes. 

The intact tapes disclosed however that the president had been in on the cover-up of the White House involvement since soon after the botched break-in.  What has been called "the smoking gun" tape was recorded in the Oval Office on June 23, 1972, six days after the break-in.  The president is heard discussing with Haldeman plans to thwart the FBI investigations of the incident.  On other tapes, presidential aides are urged, "to stonewall them.  Take the Fifth."  On July 27, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee passed the first of three articles of impeachment, charging obstruction of justice.  A delegation of Republican Party leaders trooped to the White House to convince the President that he had no chance to avoid being impeached by the House and being convicted by the Senate.  On August 8, 1974, Richard M. Nixon became the first U.S. president in resign.

Though now over 30 years in the past, revelations are still unfolding involving the characters involved in Watergate.  The most shadowy of the cast was an informant who had approached the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with leads for their investigative reporting tasks.  They called him "Deep Throat" and had promised not to disclose his identity.  It was not until May 2005 that the family of W. Mark Felt, a former number-two official at the FBI, identified the 91-year-old retiree as the long-anonymous Watergate source.  His motive for helping the reporters was his resentment of the White House in subordinating the functions of the FBI to political purposes.

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