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What the Fuck Do We Know Anyway: Nobody Knows Why They Broke Into the Watergate
TLDR: I recently became aware that there is no conclusive consensus answer to the question "Why was the Watergate Break In Ordered?" This despite practically infinite investigative, historical, testimonial resources and interest in the event. This shakes me. Do we actually know anything at all?
I recently finished Watergate: A New History by Garrett M. Graff on audiobook. I highly recommend the book, it is deeply researched and well constructed, combining a strong narrativizing tendency with an ability to show different and conflicting stories and testimony. It creates engaging characters without turning them into caricatures, delivers controversial facts without bias. The audio performance was engaging and well done, even doing a good job with footnotes, it was a good accompaniment to long walks and summer chores.
But the one thought that comes out of it that sticks in my mind, I can't let it go: Graff doesn't have a good reason why the Watergate break in happened. There is no conclusive answer to this question, Graff himself says no one quite knows. In 832 exhaustively researched and extensively sourced pages, Graff ends in a shrug concluding with quotes from John Haldeman himself who 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." and Ehrlichman: "The break-in made no sense to me, it never has."
First, Last, and Always a Farce
Some background, to refresh everyone: Nixon was running for Re-Election against Democrat McGovern for President. A major part of his re-election effort: The Committee to Re-Elect the President, or CRP or CREEP for short. CREEP had a "dirty tricks" or "ratfucking" unit that would play games like donating to an opponent's campaign from a fake communist student group, so the Nixon campaign could point out the donation to the press. Two operatives employed by CREEP, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, were ex-FBI and CIA operatives respectively, and fanatically loyal to Nixon. They both proposed a vastly expanded ratfucking campaign, that would include everything from kidnapping or mugging DNC operatives in the street, to extensive wiretapping, to electronic surveillance at all McGovern events from a follow car, to murdering or drugging political enemies. ((FHM note: never trust anyone who uses a first initialism and his middle name, too melodramatic for my taste)) Both fancied themselves romantic figures, Hunt wrote spy novels in his free time. They had a tendency towards dramatic gestures and announcements. Liddy was known to demonstrate his loyalty to the president at dinners by holding his palm over a lit candle while those at the table watched and smelled it burn. Hunt would, in the midst of the later scandal, loudly announce to his superiors that if they wanted to get rid of him all they had to do was tell him which corner to stand on to get shot and he would be there when ordered. This kind of behavior, and trying to name CREEP the even creepier ODESSA after the mythical organization of ex-Nazis popular in fiction, really just weirded out most of the political staff in the White House, they were viewed less as scary secret-agent men and more as LARPer weirdoes.
Their original "gemstone" proposal to launch covert war on the Dems was turned down, partly for budgetary reasons partly because everyone else thought it was fucking insane, in favor of a smaller plan to maybe wiretap DNC headquarters in DC or something like that. Graff traces a lot of the problems to a tendency in the Nixon Whitehouse to never say "no" but instead bargain people down to a smaller version of whatever they wanted to do.
The Break Ins
Graff traces the start of the path a little earlier, to the break-in at the office of Pentagon Papers' leaker Daniel Ellsburg's psychiatrist, where CREEP hoped to find damaging material on Ellsburg which could be used to destroy his credibility. That affair was equally shambolic. In May, they moved on to the DNC. From Wikipedia:
This is more or less a neutral summary of the consensus core events of Watergate. They definitely broke in to tap the phones in May, the bugs didn't work, they broke back in later and were caught. But there's a lot of variation in accounts of why they broke back in.
Diverging Possibilities
-- The general theory is that Nixon wanted to know what the DNC was going to do, what they had on him in their oppo files, and anything he could get on them to use against them. It is unclear how useful anything that was or could have been found out in the break-in was or would have been. This is almost certainly not entirely true or explanatory. And anyway, wiretapping is always portrayed as a simple in and out, but no one talks about the long-term effort required to sift through phone calls all day to find the useful content. That seems unrealistic in my mind? It would have to be something really important, something targeted that they could quickly skip through calls that weren't relevant, or it would be virtually impossible to just sit through every call hoping you found something controversial.
-- Graff seems to see a likely throughline from the Ellsburg break-in to the Watergate, maybe seeing a paranoia that the DNC might have known about the other break-in and launching another break in to find out. Intelligence operations are self-perpetuating: one leads to cover ups leads to cover ups of cover ups leads to discovery.
-- One account traces the story to a high-end prostitution ring active in DC political circles at the time. John Dean, Porsche-driving playboy young Whitehouse counsel later made famous by Watergate, was dating a girl who may have been mixed up in the ring. The purpose of the bugs and the break-ins was, by this account, to gather counterintelligence in case that story should break. Find out what the Democrats had on Dean, and find ties between some Dems and the prostitution ring, so that if they try to break the story they can be kept quiet. Some even claim that Dean ordered the break-in himself, that this was more personal misuse of campaign assets than political effort. This explains some of the weirdness around which phone lines were actually tapped. But I find it ultimately unsatisfying and anachronistic: Dean wasn't that important at the time, he only became important later. Promoting him to central figure feels more like conservation of characters in a novel than it does like a real version of events.
-- The Cubans, four of the burglars, were all told they were looking for ties between the DNC and Castro's Cuba. This is more or less facially ridiculous, there is almost no chance that Cuba was funding McGovern to any degree. But, did they believe it? Maybe. Or maybe they found it beneficial to pretend that they did, to act like they were passionate anti-communists but unsophisticated, immigrants being manipulated by the evil YTs in charge, and the media and justice system were willing to excuse them as rubes in favor of targeting others. But hey, maybe there was something there, or maybe Hunt and Gordon thought there might be, stranger things and all.
-- The only actual wiretap ever found at DNC headquarters, on DNC head O'Brien's phone, was later found by the FBI when the Watergate scandal had already broke, and was so antiquated and weird that many believe it was actually planted by the DNC to be found by the FBI team, to provide proof that Nixon had tapped their phones. It was simply too old and too obvious to have been done by the actual Plumbers team.
-- Several of the burglary team note that McCord disappeared repeatedly, without explanation during the event. Many theorize that while the Cubans had one mission, McCord may have had another, secret mission that has never been revealed. Secrets within secrets, plots within plots, maybe most of the participants lacked the whole story. In general, Hunt, Liddy, McCord are theorized to have stayed on CIA payroll throughout the scandal, and their actions are regarded suspiciously, maybe the Agency was in charge all along.
-- Many have raised suspicions about why the "Bum Squad" just happened to be on hand, close by, on a day they shouldn't even have been on duty. The Bum Squad worked Vice, which would include prostitution, tying back to the high end prostitutes theorized to be at the center of the counterintelligence scandal. Could it be that the DC Police tipped off in advance? Why was the lookout "distracted" during a pretty short window when he actually had to work?
-- Why was Nixon doing shit like this when he was almost guaranteed to win? This ties into conspiracy theories that the whole of Watergate was a set-up to get rid of Nixon, that the CIA and Deep State wanted Nixon out and set up the whole burglary plan to trap him. This is somewhat belied by Nixon's own decision making, he probably could have survived the break-in had he come clean about it early, it was only the long cover up that sank him.
There really is no satisfactory answer. The confessions and memoirs of participants are contradictory, and most of them are now dead. We really will never know. And that is horrifying to me at an existential level. I'd consumed enough Watergate mentions in history books and History Channel Documentaries back in the day to understand the outline of the story, but I'd always thought that it was a lot more clear than it was. That Nixon had ordered the break in, that the wiretaps had worked, that Nixon was bad because he had done something. I never realized how shambolic the whole operation was. Perhaps the most horrifying explanation: the whole thing was a kind of weird botched abortion of the Gemstone plan originally proposed by Liddy, a negotiated-down version that really achieved nothing. That the whole operation just sort of happened because no one at the top quite said no we can't do that, and the people at the bottom wanted to do something adventurous to justify their role at the campaign, and that it probably achieved nothing and never could have achieved anything. That a presidency was brought down by a pointless exercise in machismo by operative who had only met him briefly if at all. Or maybe one of the deeper conspiracies explains the whole story?
I don't know! And the fact that I don't know, that we don't know, that one of the most thoroughly turned over and published and investigated stories in human history, a story which took place in the 20th century when we had all the technology to record information, a story which has spawned hundreds of books and memoirs and movies and reams of newspaper articles and hours of interviews, a story that launched numerous careers, that all that can't answer a basic question of fact about the crime at the heart of it? That's driving me crazy. What the fuck do we know anyway?
Other Thoughts on the Book
-- The one criticism of the book I would offer is its revisionist tendency towards Woodward and Bernstein. WoodStein is the only figure in the book consistently singled out for negative implications to every action. This is one of the weaknesses of books that seek to take part in a "discourse" on a historical topic, I would imagine that all the negative attention lavished on WoodStein's inaccuracies, fibs, self aggrandizement and exaggeration of his own role would scandalize my mother, who grew up during Watergate and read All The President's Men around that time and saw the Redford movie in theaters, she would have felt like this was puncturing an important myth. I read a few of Woodward's books in my life, though never All The President's Men and recognize his status as an investigative reporter from Watergate, so I kind of get what Graff is doing here, he's engaging with the myths of other Watergate books and media, bringing them down to size. I wonder if Zoomers, for whom Watergate will feel like Teapot Dome or Tammany Hall does to me, will be confused by it. I've definitely had the experience before of reading an ostensibly neutral work of history that became self consciously revisionist and caught up in the discourse, and found it confusing when I wasn't aware of the broader conversation it was engaging in. Authors should be cautious of this tendency.
-- The book is loooooooong. The scandal was loooooooooong. The first events reach public light immediately in mid '72, Nixon wouldn't resign until two years later. Throughout, a trickle, a drumbeat, of revelations reached the press. We can't expect scandals to work fast. There's a tendency to start dismissing a scandal because it's been going on too long and nothing has happened. It's easy to imagine a '70s mottizen posting: "God, can all the turbolibs just get over it already? If they had anything on Nixon with Watergate they would have done something with it years ago!" People back then did say that.
-- On a personal note, a local abandoned factory was recently demolished. I've been driving by it my whole life. The historical society detailed in the local news, how the factory came to fail: Watergate. The owners were among the business leaders tapped, pressured, cajoled by Nixon and his team into donating cash illegally to CREEP, which then used the funds for ratfucking operations. Their cash was actually traced to hush money payments made to the burglars after their arrest! As a result, consumers shunned the company, and it folded soon after, with the building just kind of hanging around for decades. The consequences of Watergate weren't limited to Washington, sweeping up everyone from dairy farmers to George Steinbrenner, who thought he could buy wins in Washington and not just in baseball.
-- On the Deep State: near the end, Nixon was doing as little as four minutes a day of actual work according to his daily schedule, and mainly drank and moped. Kissinger issued, on his own authority, an order to all US military forces that no order from Nixon was to be followed unless countersigned by Kissinger. As Nixon's power evaporated, his cabinet stepped into the void, and Kissinger's long tenure and intelligence lead to him accruing vast amounts of power outside of his immediate purview. Al Haig is sometimes called the "37.5th" president due to his work at this time. For the most part, 1974 was a guide to how the US Government functions without a functional president.
-- Favorite part of the book, A Nixon aide told the following joke during the Watergate scandal:
"How would a Polish President have handled Watergate?"
"I don't know, how?"
"Pretty much like this."
Have you read Geoff Shepard's book (The Nixon Conspiracy) or listened to any podcasts with him? Shepard was a young aide in the Nixon White House and as part of his junior lawyer duties was one of the first people to originally listen to the tapes to review them for problematic material. Recently, as an older man, he got access to a lot of the prosecution documents and then wrote a revisionist history. I haven't read the book in full, but Iistened to a podcast with him and it was very interesting.
Basically, he argues Nixon was completely unaware of the break-in, he was not trying to cover it up, but that he fired special prosecutor Cox because Cox had totally gone rogue, including giving the person much more responsible (Dean) a slap-on-the-wrist plea bargain. The specific trigger point for the firing was Cox reneging on a deal about the tapes, which Nixon thought would show people that Cox was being plainly unreasonable.
Shepard also argues that:
The 18 minute gap was actually likely due to a mistake by the transcriber and it is extremely unlikely that it covered up any key conversations. He additionally notes that it was Nixon's lawyers inside the Nixon White House that discovered the gap and told the judge, but it was then portrayed to the public like the special prosecutors had on their own discovered this nefarious destruction of evidence.
Another famous incriminating line from Nixon supposedly showing Nixon calling for a cover-up was actually a mis-transcription and mis-interpretation of a very low quality tape.
The famous "smoking gun" tape in which Nixon is giving the OK to tell the CIA to stop the FBI from interviewing a certain witness, turned out to have nothing to do with Watergate, but was due to wanting to cover-up a legal campaign donation that was coming from a well-known Democrat (who did not want it known that he supported Nixon).
So all-in-all, Nixon did not try to cover-up Watergate, he could not come clean about it because he actually did not know about it. What got him in trouble was thinking the special prosecutors team was actually trying to find the truth about what happened, when in fact they were on a fishing expedition to take down Nixon. At that point he was screwed, if he tries to block them, it looks incriminating. If he allows them to do anything they want, well, besides the embarrassment of having all the internals of the presidency leaked to the press, no presidency can survive a team of prosecutors going Beria ("find me the man I'll find the crime") on his entire staff.
Nixon's Attorney General appointed a Kennedy man, Archibald Cox, as special prosecutor.
From Wikipedia:
Notice that last bit of editorializing by Wikipedia ... perhaps Nixon was actually genuinely earnest when he said '"get to the bottom of it" "no matter who[m] it hurts."' because Nixon knew that Nixon was innocent and actually wanted the real criminals rooted out and for Nixon to be cleared.
Beyond that...the entire "east coast liberal establishment" hated Nixon, and so by default if you staff a team of aggressive lawyers in Washington you are going to staff it with east coast Ivy League liberals who hate Nixon and would love nothing more than to make a name for themselves by bringing down a president. So he was likely to get an office staffed with anti-Nixon partisans unless one specifically sought ought either conservative extremely principled neutral lawyers.
If we believe Shepard's story and sympathetic to Nixon, we would say that his Attorney General Richardson dramatically underestimated just how ruthless and Machieavelians the liberal-Democratic establishment would be. Richards expected a thorough investigation, but expected that they would still be playing it fair.
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