| Nixon and Watergate (1968-2005) |
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Sections:- Election of 1968
- Democrats in 1968
- Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
- The White House Plumbers
- Watergate Break-in
- Woodward, Bernstein and the Washington Post
- Watergate Enters the Nixon Campaign
- Election of 1972
- The Watergate Investigations: Judge John Sirica
- Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox
- Senate Investigation and the Oval Office Tapes
- The Smoking Gun Tapes
- The Saturday Night Massacre
- Nixon Resigns
- Aftermath
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| Historical Context
By 1968, reasonable Americans could believe that the nation was coming apart as politics devolved into violence. The seemingly endless Vietnam War had grown increasingly unpopular and had forced President Lyndon Johnson end his race for a second term. On 4 April 1968, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis and on 5 June 1968 Robert F. Kennedy, the presumptive Democratic nominee with Johnson out of the race, was assassinated in Los Angeles. Alabama Governor George Wallace, running for president as a third party candidate favoring segregation, sparked race riots in many cities where he campaigned; including Omaha. The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago fell into chaos as the Youth International Party, “the Yippies,” led by Abbie Hoffman, carried on a shadow convention in Grant Park and mocked the proceedings by nominating a pig named “Pigasus” for president. Chicago Police, evidently tired of the joke, attacked the Yippies and, in what was termed in the press a “police riot,” rampaged through the demonstrators.
Against this backdrop, Republican nominee Richard M. Nixon ran a campaign geared to “the silent majority” of Americans who had grown wary of the direction of the country. Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey ran on the better parts of the Johnson legacy; civil rights and the Great Society. George Wallace ran on states’ rights and the maintenance of segregation.
The general election was surprisingly close, though this was primarily due to Wallace carrying the Southern states that would have presumably voted for Nixon. In the end, Richard Nixon was elected with only 43% of the popular vote.
Attached Document
Included here is an article by the Washington Post in the wake of Nixon's 1968 victory.
Question to consider:
1. Considering the instability of the time, why would Nixon’s appeal for peace and quiet resonate with many Americans?
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| Historical Context
The Democrats in 1968 were in chaos. President Lyndon Johnson declined to run for a second full term, front runner Robert Kennedy was killed, and the Democratic Convention devolved into a riot.
Attached Document
Included here is the video of Johnson's speech where he refuses to accept the democratic nomination for President.
Question to consider:
1. What do the events at the 1968 Convention reveal about the Democratic Party, American society, and the outcome of the election?
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| Historical Context
Daniel Ellsberg was an employee of the Defense Department who, in 1971, leaked a classified assessment of the Vietnam War prepared by the Johnson Administration to the press. This 7,000 page document, comprising 47 volumes, which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, cast doubt on the justification for American entry into the war and it revealed that senior government officials had serious misgivings about the war.
When the New York Times began to publish the Pentagon Papers on 13 June 1971, the Nixon Administration was furious. After asking the Times to voluntarily cease publication, the government sued the New York Times and the Washington Post, which began publishing excerpts on 18 June 1971. The United States Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and, on 30 June 1971 ruled 6-3 in New York Times Company v. U.S. that the newspapers could continue to publish the leaked documents.
Attached Document
Included here is the Pentagon Papers published in the Washington Post.
Question to Consider:
1. How do you think ordinary citizens in the late 1960's and early 1970's felt about their government? Why?
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| Historical Context
Following the release of the Pentagon Papers, the Nixon White House created an internal unit designed to ensure internal security. This unit, called the Plumbers because they stopped leaks, was comprised primarily of former FBI and CIA agents who would investigate and punish suspected leakers. The Plumbers’ activities quickly took on an extra legal character when in 1971, seeking material to discredit him, they burglarized the office of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Rather than this being the action of a rouge outfit within the Administration, it was later revealed that Nixon domestic advisor John Ehrlichman knew of and approved the plan to burglarize the office.
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| Historical Context
When initial polls showed President Nixon trailing Democratic nominee George McGovern in the Presidential Election of 1972, the Plumbers began to turn their activities to political espionage. On 17 June 1972, five men were arrested while attempting to plant listening devices and surveillance equipment inside the headquarters of the Democratic Party inside the Watergate building in Washington D.C. Considering the level of clandestine experience, the burglary was quite sloppy; the burglars had placed tape over the door latches to keep themselves from being locked in. A building security guard noticed the tape and was able to follow the trail of taped doors directly to the burglars in the Democratic offices.
Several of the men arrested were Cuban exiles and so, initially, an effort was made to portray the break-in as the work of anti-Castro radicals. This story quickly fell apart however as, on 19 June, it was reported that one of the men arrested, James W. McCord, was the head of security for the Republican Party. John Mitchell, the chairman of the Nixon campaign denied any involvement.
Attached Documents
Two Washington Post articles reporting the Watergate Break-In are included in this section.
Question to consider:
1. How does the Watergate break-in demonstrate the political cynicism of the time?
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| Historical Context
The story of Watergate came to public attention largely through the work of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, investigative reporters from the Washington Post. Despite enormous political pressure placed on Post editor Ben Bradlee and publisher Katherine Graham, Woodward and Bernstein, aided by an enigmatic source nicknamed “Deepthroat” after a popular pornographic movie of the time, kept the Watergate story in the public consciousness until Nixon’s eventual resignation.
Nearly all of the Washington Post articles in this module were written by Woodward and Bernstein.
Question to consider:
1. Is this sort of journalistic investigation of the president good for the country? Why or why not?
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| Historical Context
The Watergate break-in was eventually tied to the Nixon reelection campaign through a $25,000 check from Ken Dahlberg, a major Republican donor in Minnesota, that was laundered through a Mexican bank and deposited in the account of Watergate burglar Bernard Barker. It would later come to light that former Attorney General John Mitchell, as head of Nixon’s “Committee to RE-Elect the President,” (CREEP) controlled a secret fund earmarked for political espionage and dirty tricks. Mitchell would later go to prison for his role in the scandal.
Attached Documents
Included here are three Washington Post articles that further tied the Nixon Administration to the break-in.
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| Historical Context
Despite the growing stain of Watergate, which had not yet reached the President, Nixon defeated Democrat George McGovern by the largest margin in American history to that point, winning 49 states on his way to an easy reelection.
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In addition to the coverage in the Washington Post, Watergate came to be investigated by a Special Prosecutor, a Senate committee, and by the judge in the original break-in case.
Judge John Sirica, nicknamed “Maximum John” for his often harsh rulings, was assigned to the case of the original Watergate burglars. Judge Sirica refused to believe that the burglars had acted alone, as they had claimed, and even resorted to questioning the defendants himself. On 19 March 1973, defendant James W. McCord sent a letter to Sirica confirming that Watergate was a conspiracy. Sirica’s investigation transformed Watergate from the story of a “third-rate burglary,” in the words of White House Press Secretary Ron Zeigler, to a scandal reaching the highest points in government.
Attached Document
Included here is McCord's letter to Sirica.
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| Historical Context
Archibald Cox was a Harvard Law Professor named by his former student, Attorney General Elliot Richardson, as Watergate Special Prosecutor. Initially, when the investigation was limited to the Watergate burglary, it looked like a fairly insignificant position, but, once the existence of the White House tapes was revealed, Cox quickly found himself investigating the President. Since the special prosecutor is an employee of the Justice Department, and executive branch department, Nixon was able to order Cox fired when his investigation came too close to the White House.
Attached Document
A Washington Post article reporting Cox's appointment is included in this section.
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| Historical Context
The Senate began hearings into Watergate on 17 May 1973. The three major television networks arranged a deal to share coverage, alternating between the networks each day. This insured that the Watergate hearings were televised in their entirety.
The hearings dragged on through the summer, largely focused on when the President knew of the break-in. On 25 June 1973, former White House legal counsel John Dean delivered devastating testimony that implicated Nixon from the earliest days of Watergate.
The Nixon Administration was obviously eager to discredit Dean and his testimony so it began to release factual challenges to his account. When former White House aide Alexander Butterfield was asked in the hearings about the source of the White House information, he revealed the existence of an automatic taping system that Nixon had secretly installed in the Oval Office. These tapes, a record of everything said in the Oval Office, would become the focus of the Watergate investigation.
Attached Document
Dean's implication of Nixon is reported here in a Washington Post article.
Question to consider:
1. When Watergate first became public, many aides suggested that Nixon destroy the tapes. How would the story have changed if the investigators never knew of the tapes?
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| Historical Context
When the Supreme Court forced Nixon to surrender the tapes, the effect was devastating. The tapes implicated Nixon from the earliest days of the Watergate cover-up; authorizing the payment of hush money, and attempting to use the CIA to interfere with the FBI investigation. One tape, which promised to be particularly damaging, has an 18 ½ minute gap erased into the conversation. Nixon’s private secretary Rosemary Woods humiliatingly demonstrated for photographers how she could have inadvertently triggered the machine that erased the tape with her foot as she reached for the telephone, but no one bought it.
The most damaging tapes, called “the smoking gun tapes,” were released on 5 August 1974, just after the House Judiciary Committee had approved Articles of Impeachment against President Nixon. The effect was devastating, as even Nixon’s supporters abandoned him.
Attached Documents
Included here is the clip and transcript of the "Smoking Gun Tape," as well as the Washington Post's coverage of the 18 minute gap in the White House tapes and its reporting of the Supreme Court's demand for Nixon to surrender the White House tapes. |
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| Historical Context
The Nixon Administration reached an agreement with the Senate Watergate Committee that Chairman Sam J. Ervin would be allowed to listen to the White House tapes in their entirety and that he would provide a transcript for the Senate Committee and to Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. The deal broke down however when Cox refused to accept the transcripts in place of the tapes. Since the Special Prosecutor is an employee of the Justice Department, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. When Richardson refused, he was fired. Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus to fire Cox and, when he refused, he was fired. Nixon then ordered Solicitor General Robert Bork (who was later nominated for the Supreme Court by Reagan) to fire Cox and he complied.
Upon being fired, Cox said, "Whether ours shall be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people."
Attached Document
Included here is the Washington Post's coverage of the "Saturday Night Massacre."
Question to consider:
1. Is it right that the prosecutor could be fired by the fired by the person that they were investigating? The law was changed after Watergate. How does the law work now. In light of Whitewater investigation, does it work better?
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| Historical Context
On 27 July 1974, the House Judiciary Committee approved Articles of Impeachment against President Nixon. The full House was expected to vote on the matter soon. While Nixon had conceded that impeachment in the House was likely, he believed that the Senate vote to remove him from office would fail. On 5 August 1974, when the “smoking gun tape” became public, a delegation from the Republican National Committee, led by George Bush, broke the news to Nixon that he would not survive the vote in the Senate. On 9 August 1974, Richard Nixon became the first American president to resign.
Attached Document
Included here is the House Judiciary Committee's Articles of Impeachment against Nixon.
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| Historical Context
More than 30 government officials went to prison for their role in the Watergate break-in and cover-up. Richard Nixon was not one of them. On 8 September 1974, President Gerald Ford gave Nixon a full pardon for his role in Watergate.
Woodward and Bernstein’s coverage of Watergate won the Pulitzer Prize for the Washington Post in 1973 and 1974. They would collaborate on two books on the Watergate investigation, “All the President’s Men,” and “The Final Days.” In 1976, “All the President’s Men” was adapted into an Academy Award winning film.
The identity of Deepthroat was kept secret, despite intense speculation, for over thirty years until, in 2005, W. Mark Felt unmasked himself.
Question to consider:
1. Should Ford have pardoned Nixon? Why or why not?
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