A day like today, but 50 years ago, in 1972, five men were arrested at the headquarters of the Democratic Party campaign team. What was first intended to be passed off as a robbery soon began to be perceived for what it was: an attempt at political espionage. What changed everything was discovering, after remarkable journalistic work, that who was behind the incursion and an entire black campaign to destroy his opponents, was the White House itself, with the full knowledge of President Richard Nixon. Two years later, in August 1974, Nixon became the first president in the history of the American Union to resign from office to avoid prosecution.
Watergate is one of the best stories in journalism: it is paradigmatic, so exemplary that to this day it is the subject of studies, of new discoveries and characters involved, of movies, series, books. Many journalists and media participated in this investigation, but Bob Woodward (probably the best American journalist of the last half century) and Carl Berstein, then two young reporters from the Washington Post, were the ones who led the central course of that investigation, supported by the legendary director of that morning, Ben Bradley. Woodward and Berstein became celebrities, but they never stopped working in any notable way to this day. Both have just published a text that has many readings: “Nixon had defined corruption. Until Trump came.”
They begin by recalling George Washington, who in his farewell address in 1796 warned of the fragility of American democracy. “Ambitious, malicious and unprincipled men will be able to undermine the power of the people and usurp for themselves the reins of government,” Washington said.
The Watergate case goes beyond the discovery of a political espionage plot.
“The core of Nixon’s criminality was his successful subversion of the electoral process, the most fundamental element of American democracy,” they maintain. “Nixon accomplished this through a massive campaign of political espionage, sabotage, and disinformation that allowed him to literally determine who would be his opponent in the 1972 presidential election. Over the next two years, Nixon’s illegal conduct was gradually exposed by the media. news outlets, the Senate Watergate Committee, special prosecutors, a House impeachment inquiry, and finally by the Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision, the court ordered Nixon to turn over the secret recordings of him, which doomed his presidency.”
Woodward and Bernstein recall the entire process. “In 1971, Howard Hunt, a former CIA agent, and G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent, were hired to work for the White House in a Special Investigations Unit, known as the Plumbers. Their initial mission was, they say, to cover up leaks from Nixon administration officials to the media… With the start of the campaign, Hunt and Liddy were transferred to the Nixon re-election committee to conduct espionage, surveillance and sabotage operations. In one of the strongest and most effective espionage efforts, Elmer Wyatt, a Nixon campaign agent, was infiltrated into Muskie’s campaign command (the strongest Democratic candidate) where he became the senator’s driver. Wyatt was paid $1,000 a month to deliver copies of confidential documents that he was transporting between Muskie’s Senate office and his presidential campaign headquarters.”
Meanwhile, Gordon Strachan, chief political adviser to Chief of Staff HR Bob Haldeman, and Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s appointments secretary, who was like a son to the president, hired Donald Segretti, an old college friend and former Army lawyer, to implement sabotage plans. Segretti, in turn, hired 22 people to inflict these “political wounds” and received $77,000 in checks and cash. Herbert Kalmbach, Nixon’s personal attorney, secretly made the payments with leftover campaign funds.
“There were many actors in the drama of Watergate,” wrote Nixon’s chief of staff, Haldeman, in his 1978 book, The Throes of Power, “and behind them all lurked the ever-present shadow of the President of the United States.”
Haldeman wrote, Woodward and Berstein recount that “this tendency to attack too forcefully (…) reflected a belief in the concept—as well as a willingness too great to accept it—that the end justified the means.” In other words, Nixon believed that his political survival was for a “greater good” that justified subverting the will of the people. “A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits,” Nixon wrote in a note to himself in 1969.
In 1977, just three years after he left office, Nixon gave a series of interviews to British journalist David Frost. There he said that he had “defrauded the American people” but that he had not obstructed justice. Nixon added that a president has broad authority and cannot break the law. “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal,” he said in the interview.
So far, part of the remarkable text that Woodward and Berstein published on June 13 in the Washington
Post. They extrapolate that story with that of Donald Trump. We must do our own readings.
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