Watergate, page 77
I’m deeply indebted to the hundreds of historians, journalists, and archivists who have come before me. I want to note and acknowledge in particular a small canon of Nixon and Watergate books that helped guide and shape my research in ways far beyond what my endnotes might otherwise indicate.
Nixon is a well-documented and almost insanely thoroughly biographized president. Beyond the aforementioned texts by Richard Reeves and Stephen Ambrose, four others in particular stand above the rest: Tom Wicker’s One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream, Tim Weiner’s One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon, Evan Thomas’s Being Nixon: A Man Divided, and John Aloysius Farrell’s magisterial Richard Nixon: The Life. They are simply the best of a crowded class.
Similarly, there are four canonical books on the scandal itself: Barry Sussman’s engaging and insightful The Great Cover-Up: Nixon and the Scandal of Watergate, from 1974; J. Anthony Lukas’s 1976 classic Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years, which managed to capture so much so early; Stanley Kutler’s 1992 classic The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon, which still stands as the preeminent exegesis of the scandal; and Fred Emery’s 1994 Watergate: The Corruption of American Politics and the Fall of Richard Nixon.
Ken Hughes was the first to piece together the definitive story of Nixon’s trickery amid the 1968 presidential campaign with his Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate. The story of Mark Felt would be impossible to write without the manifold contributions of Max Holland, whose Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat provided such rich new understanding of that era. Amid the gazillions of words written about Watergate, Melissa Graves, a professor at The Citadel, is about the only one to dive deeply into the work of the FBI investigators, and I found her Nixon’s FBI invaluable. James Doyle’s Not Above the Law is an engaging and informative inside tale of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force; Richard Cohen and Jules Witcover’s A Heartbeat Away tells the Spiro Agnew story in rich detail; Howard Fields’s High Crimes and Misdemeanors is a useful and often overlooked volume on the House Judiciary Committee’s work in the spring of 1974. I would be remiss not to mention that Elizabeth Drew’s Washington Journal was probably the most fun book I read in my research.
Rick Perlstein’s tetralogy on modern conservatism, including especially the middle two volumes, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America and The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, are particularly useful for understanding this moment in American politics, as is—always—Teddy White’s Making of the President series.
Stanley Kutler dedicated years of his life to fighting for a more robust record of Watergate—initiating an important lawsuit with Public Citizen that forced the release of hundreds of hours of the Nixon tapes—as has Tim Naftali, who in his previous role with the Nixon Library did an enormous amount to push to tell the full story of Watergate and to capture, in his numerous and invaluable oral histories, the accounts of key participants. There are three published volumes of tape transcripts painstakingly assembled by Kutler, Douglas Brinkley, and Luke Nichter that stand as a gift to history. Ben Wittes, Jack Goldsmith, and Stephen Bates fought for the release of the “Impeachment Road Map,” what they called the “last great still-secret Watergate document,” in 2018.
* * *
Researching a book heavy on archival materials in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic was no small challenge, and yet I had some amazing luck along the way. Barely an hour after my emailed request, Lee Cloninger at Duke University’s Goodson Law Library was able to provide me with incredible primary source materials from Howard Fields’s unparalleled research into the Rodino committee. I’ve long believed that America’s presidential libraries are some of the greatest national treasures we have, and the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, in Yorba Linda, California, offers great online resources. Their digitized collection of Presidential Daily Diaries spent months open on my computer as I paged through Nixon’s presidency day by day, meeting by meeting, hour by hour. Joel Westphal, at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum, has become a friend over the course of my trips to Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor, and he was instrumental in helping me understand the man who followed Nixon into the White House.
It was hard too not to think about publishing and history as Simon & Schuster lost two of its North Stars: Carolyn Reidy, who had always been a kind and generous supporter of my work, and the legendary Alice Mayhew, who edited so many of the best writers and books of the last half century. She almost single-handedly birthed the idea of the popular political narrative with her work on All the President’s Men in 1974, and helped train and mentor my own editor a generation later. This work owes a deep psychic debt to both of them in ways big and small.
This is my third book with publishing’s next-generation dynamic duo of Jofie Ferrari-Adler and Julianna Haubner. In our near-decade of working together, Julianna and Jofie have together grown into the most important intellectual relationship of my life—the type of full day-to-day friendship and partnership that I’ve ever only previously read about in biographies of Max Perkins and Robert Gottlieb’s memoir. They and Ben Loehnen, Lauren Wein, and the rest of the crew at Avid Reader Press have built what I think is the most interesting and dynamic stable of writers in the industry. I have loved working with Meredith Vilarello, Jordan Rodman, Alison Forner, Carolyn Kelly, and Morgan Hoit, who will always be part of the family.
Jofie is a brilliant and ambitious thinker who understands publishing deep in his soul and has done much to steer and shape my career and help me write the books I’ve published; and he’s steered me away from a dozen other topics along the way. Julianna and I have now been through nearly one million words together, and she combines the patience of Job, the persistence of Sisyphus, the obsession of Carrie Mathison, and the relentless cutting prowess of the world’s sharpest diamond blade. I’ve come to trust her implicitly to find anything amiss.
I’m lucky too to have ended up with Howard Yoon and the team at Ross Yoon—Gail, Dara, Jennifer, and Shannon—who have helped me navigate publishing; my agents at UTA, Andrew Lear and Geoff Morley; and my lawyer, Jaime Wolf.
Jonathan Evans and Rick Willett did yeoman’s work helping to scrub the manuscript in copyediting, and I’m grateful to them for saving me from numerous embarrassing mistakes. Ultimately, of course, all the editorial decisions (and remaining mistakes) are mine alone. Simon & Schuster’s audio team—Chris Lynch, Elisa Shokoff, Tom Spain, and Scott Sherratt, among others—have been wonderful colleagues, set a high bar for excellence, and also happen to be among the last people I saw in real life before the world shut down in March 2020.
* * *
Emily Piche, Erin Delmore, and Mary Lim helped with initial research and getting me organized at the start. The book never would have been finished without the incredible, diligent work of Gillian Brassil, a best-in-class researcher who somehow crossed my path and whom I now hope to convince to keep working with me on future projects forever.
Tim Naftali, James Rosen, and Rick Perlstein, among others—including a few who asked to remain nameless but who know my gratitude to them—helped me work through some of the trickier questions of historiography and were generous in sharing their vast knowledge of Nixon generally and Watergate in particular. Few people have excavated Watergate as Rosen has, and his ability to quote chapter, verse, date, and minutiae is astounding. Adam Higginbotham magnanimously shared some of his own unpublished research, and David Friend helped me parse the story of Vanity Fair’s scoop of the century in 2006: the reveal of Mark Felt.
In my Aspen Institute life, I’m grateful to Vivian Schiller, the world’s greatest boss, for giving me the freedom to tackle “hobbies” like writing a six-hundred-page book, and my colleagues David Forscey, Beth Semel, Ryan Merkley and the rest of the Aspen Digital team for their collegiality. I have missed Savilla Pitt every day since January 16, 2021.
More broadly, there’s a long list of people who have been critical to my being who and where I am today. Among them: Charlotte Stocek, Mary Creeden, Mike Baginski, Rome Aja, Kerrin McCadden, and Charlie Phillips; John Rosenberg, Richard Mederos, Brian DeLay, Peter J. Gomes, Stephen Shoemaker, and Jennifer Axsom; Kit Seelye, Pat Leahy, Rusty Greiff, Tim Seldes, Jesseca Salky, Paul Elie, Tom Friedman, Jack Limpert, Geoff Shandler, Susan Glasser, and, not least of all, Cousin Connie, to whom I owe a debt that I strive to repay each day. My parents, Chris and Nancy Price Graff, encouraged me to write from an early age, instilling in me a love of history and research and an intellectual curiosity that benefit me daily, and my sister Lindsay has always been my biggest fan—and I hers.
I wrote my first two books in a D.C. coffee shop, but now that I live in Vermont and write at home, morning coffee and fuel remain an important part of the process. I’m lucky to live in a city with incredible coffee and world-class food, and the spiritual lift from Speeder & Earl’s coffee in the morning and Abby and Emily Portman’s lunchtime sandwiches at Poppy Café deserve special recognition; I challenge anyone to find better sandwiches than the ones Poppy Café cranks out.
Overall, I do not recommend trying to write a book during a global pandemic, a contested presidential election, and a low-grade American insurrection—and especially not with one daughter and a second son born along the way. I am enormously privileged to have a support structure at home that allows me the time and space to write: the calm presence and help of our nanny, Renèe Hallowell, and my wonderful in-laws, Donna and Paul Birrow, who ended up effectively moving in with us for the pandemic. My wife, Katherine, suffered graciously even more than usual through this book, and I recognize the burden I added to the family with this project. Thank you, as always, KB.
—Garrett M. Graff
Burlington, VT
September 2021
More from the Author
The Only Plane in the Sky
Raven Rock
About the Author
Garrett M. Graff, a distinguished journalist and bestselling historian, has spent nearly two decades covering politics, technology, and national security. He serves as the director of cyber initiatives for The Aspen Institute and is a contributor to WIRED and CNN. He’s written for publications from Esquire to Rolling Stone to the New York Times, and served as editor of two of Washington’s most prestigious magazines, Washingtonian and POLITICO Magazine.
Graff, who lives in Vermont, is the author of multiple books, including The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI and the War on Global Terror and the national bestseller Raven Rock, about the government’s Cold War Doomsday plans. His most recent book, an instant New York Times bestseller and #1 national bestseller The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11, was called a “a priceless civic gift” by the Wall Street Journal and won the 2020 Audiobook of the Year at the Audie Awards. A regular voice and analyst on NPR, PBS NewsHour, the History Channel, and other outlets, he is also the host of Long Shadow, an eight-episode podcast series about the lingering questions of 9/11, and executive producer of While the Rest of Us Die, a VICE TV series based on his book Raven Rock, among other multimedia projects.
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Also by Garrett M. Graff
The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11
Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself—While the Rest of Us Die
The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War
The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House
Dawn of the Code War: America’s Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat (with John P. Carlin)
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Notes
Introduction
Tears welled up: W. Mark Felt, The FBI Pyramid from the Inside (New York: Putnam, 1979), 338.
“did unlawfully, willfully and knowingly combine”: Anthony Marro, “Gray and 2 Ex-F.B.I. Aides Deny Guilt as 700 at Court Applaud Them,” New York Times, April 21, 1978, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1978/04/21/110838543.html?pageNumber=18.
Seventy other FBI agents: Charles R. Babcock, “Gray, 2 High-Ranking Aides Are Indicted in FBI Break-Ins,” Washington Post, April 11, 1978, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1978/04/11/gray-2-high-ranking-aides-are-indicted-in-fbi-break-ins/ed0c09a0-f8bd-4192-b090–38fe9147efbc/.
“When these men acted”: Associated Press, “F.B.I. Indictments Anger Group of Former Agents,” New York Times, April 13, 1978, https://www.nytimes.com/1978/04/13/archives/new-jersey-pages-fbi-indictments-anger-group-of-former-agents.html?searchResultPosition=3.
“God bless you all”: Felt, The FBI Pyramid, 338.
“The Nixon presidency was an intense one”: Kenneth W. Thompson, ed., The Nixon Presidency: Twenty-Two Intimate Perspectives of Richard M. Nixon (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), 35.
Nixon filled the cover of TIME: “The 55 Times Richard Nixon Was on the Cover of TIME,” Time, August 5, 2014, https://time.com/3080127/nixons-time-magazine-covers/.
“To view Watergate in perspective”: Donald G. Sanders, “Watergate Reminiscences,” Journal of American History 75, no. 4 (1989): 1228, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/75.4.1228.
“Watergate,” wrote Tad Szulc: Tad Szulc, Compulsive Spy: The Strange Career of E. Howard Hunt (New York: Viking, 1974), 3.
“It tells you an awful lot”: Jack Limpert, “Deep Throat: If It Isn’t Tricia It Must Be…,” Washingtonian, June 1974, https://www.washingtonian.com/2008/12/22/deep-throat-if-it-isnt-tricia-it-must-be/.
“Power is Washington’s main marketable product”: Jack Anderson, The Anderson Papers (London: Millington, 1973), 3.
“I had thrown down a gauntlet”: Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), 850.
Woodward and Bernstein’s classic: Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, All the President’s Men (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), 1.
Sam Dash, the chief counsel: Samuel Dash, Chief Counsel: Inside the Ervin Committee—The Untold Story of Watergate (New York: Random House, 1976), 167.
in profiling the security guard who busted the burglars: Simeon Booker, “Untold Story of Black Hero of Watergate!,” JET, May 17, 1973, http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/underground_news/pdf/Untold_Story_Frank_Willis.pdf.
H. R. Haldeman mis-assigns: H. R. Haldeman, The Ends of Power (New York: Times Books, 1978), 104.
in written testimony to Congress: Nomination of Earl J. Silbert to be United States Attorney: Hearings Before the Committee on the Judiciary, 93rd Congr. 68 (1974), https://books.google.com/books?id=WkMPGEEWUfQC.
Egil Krogh, in his memoir: Egil Krogh, Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices, and Life Lessons from the White House (New York: Public Affairs, 2007), 22.
Howard Hunt incorrectly dates: E. Howard Hunt, Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent (New York: Berkley, 1974), 153.
“He would turn the same rock”: Thompson, The Nixon Presidency, 128.
“nervous tension”: Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), 96.
“I don’t think the dust”: Helen Thomas, Front Row at the White House (New York: Scribner, 1999), 204.
Prologue The Pentagon Papers
The doctor who had delivered: John A. Farrell, Richard Nixon: The Life (New York: Doubleday, 2017), 43.
“I would like to study”: Ibid., 57.
“Pat and I were happier”: Jonathan Aitken, Nixon: A Life (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1993), 154.
“To be with Bebe Rebozo”: John Ehrlichman, Witness to Power: The Nixon Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 6.
He never learned to spell: Ibid., 77.
“To this day, he doesn’t know”: Haldeman, The Ends of Power, 70–72.
By his second term: Farrell, Richard Nixon, 353.
“Richard Nixon went up the walls”: Ibid., 48.
He ate the same lunch: Ibid., 355.
“there existed, within the angry man”: Ibid., 70.
“No matter how terrible”: Evan Thomas, Being Nixon: A Man Divided (New York: Random House, 2015), xi.
While running for vice president: Farrell, Richard Nixon, 203.
“Mike, we don’t have to get those votes”: Ibid., 407.
“I don’t know, Chuck”: Gerald S. Strober and Deborah Hart Strober, Nixon: An Oral History of His Presidency (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 51.
In the closing days of the 1960 presidential election: “Nixon Will Stump Alaska Today, but Kennedy Is Favorite There,” New York Times, November 6, 1960, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1960/11/06/100888163.html?pageNumber=76.
“compassionate, humane, fatherly”: Stanley I. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (New York: Knopf, 1990), 1.
“Some of his most devious methods”: Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), 1183.
