Forty-five years ago this past week, after the
discovery of what his press secretary dismissed as a “third-rate burglary,” Richard Nixon told Chief of Staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman that the CIA should
head off the investigation by telling the FBI to stay away from it. The
conversation, long sought by the special prosecutor of the scandal, was caught
on a tape that, when revealed, became the “smoking gun” that ended Nixon’s
Presidency.
Watergate
was a political scandal without parallel in American history. It was unlike
even the two scandals that subsequently caught three Presidents in their messy
coils: Iran-contra, in which figures associated with Ronald Reagan and
then-Vice President George H.W. Bush attempted to create a government within a
government, and Monicagate, in which Bill Clinton paid for an intern’s sexual
service not with money but with public mortification, disrupted family life,
and the near loss of his job.
Yet these scandals, which involved special
prosecutors like those who investigated Nixon, did not hinge on taping systems
that could prove or disprove sworn testimony implicating a President in
misdeeds. After seeing Nixon brought low by them, nobody thought that another
President would have them or even hint at
having them. Only a fool with no political background, let alone a sense of
history, would be capable of that, and such a person could never occupy the
Oval Office.
Enter Donald
Trump. Many people whose careers touched on Watergate—notably, journalists
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—have warned that it is premature to compare the
scandal that undid Nixon with the one now afflicting his GOP successor several
times removed. True, it is still early in this investigation, and Nixon and
Trump differ markedly in experience, intellect and even temperament.
But when all is said and done, what is extraordinary
is how loudly the once-faint echoes of Watergate are reverberating now. The
question of White House taping systems alone proves the old adage that history
doesn’t repeat itself; it rhymes.
MSNBC’s
Lawrence O’Donnell recently pointed out that the same legal
issue that brought down Nixon—use of the CIA to stop the investigation of a
crime before it could get fairly started—had now emerged as a crucial matter in
Trump’s massive political distraction.
The Washington
Post reported that Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats informed
associates that Trump had urged him and National Security Agency Director Mike
Rogers to intervene with Comey to end the investigation into Michael Flynn,
Trump’s former national-security adviser. In sworn Senate testimony, Coats and
Rogers would only say they had never felt “pressured to intervene or interfere,”
while skating away from the more direct, specific question of whether Trump
requested that they downplay any possible collusion between his campaign and
the Russian government.
Words and context matter, as O’Donnell pointed out
in drawing attention to the fateful Nixon-Haldeman conversation on June 23,
1972. You can read the whole transcript of that tape here, but, for our purposes, I thought that this substantial
excerpt would throw several points in sharp relief:
Haldeman:
“Now,
on the investigation, you know, the Democratic break-in thing, we’re back to
the-in the, the problem area because the FBI is not under control, because [Director
L. Patrick] Gray doesn’t exactly know how to control them, and they have, their
investigation is now leading into some productive areas, because they’ve been
able to trace the money, not through the money itself, but through the bank,
you know, sources – the banker himself. And, and it goes in some directions we
don’t want it to go. Ah, also there have been some things, like an informant
came in off the street to the FBI in Miami, who was a photographer or has a
friend who is a photographer who developed some films through this guy, [Bernard]
Barker, and the films had pictures of Democratic National Committee letter head
documents and things. So I guess, so it’s things like that that are gonna, that
are filtering in. [Former Attorney General and Nixon campaign manager] Mitchell
came up with yesterday, and John Dean analyzed very carefully last night and
concludes, concurs now with Mitchell’s recommendation that the only way to
solve this, and we’re set up beautifully to do it, ah, in that and that…the
only network that paid any attention to it last night was NBC…they did a
massive story on the Cuban…”
Nixon:
“That’s right.”
Haldeman: “…thing.”
Nixon:
“Right.”
Haldeman: “That the way to handle this now is for us
to have Walters call Pat Gray and just say, “Stay the hell out of this…this is
ah, business here we don’t want you to go any further on it.” That’s not an
unusual development,…”
Nixon:
“Um huh.”
Haldeman: “…and, uh, that would take care of it.”
Nixon:
“What about Pat Gray, ah, you mean he doesn’t want to?”
Haldeman: “Pat does want to. He doesn’t know how to,
and he doesn’t have, he doesn’t have any basis for doing it. Given this, he
will then have the basis. He’ll call [deputy FBI director] Mark Felt in, and
the two of them …and Mark Felt wants to cooperate because…”
Nixon:
“Yeah.”
Haldeman: “…he’s ambitious…”
Nixon: “Yeah.”
Haldeman: “Ah, he’ll call him in and say, ‘We’ve got
the signal from across the river to, to put the hold on this.’ And that will
fit rather well because the FBI agents who are working the case, at this point,
feel that’s what it is. This is CIA.”
Nixon:
“But they’ve traced the money to ’em.”
Haldeman: “Well they have, they’ve traced to a name,
but they haven’t gotten to the guy yet.”
Nixon:
‘Would it be somebody here?”
Haldeman: ‘Ken Dahlberg.”
Nixon:
Who the hell is Ken Dahlberg?
Haldeman: “He’s ah, he gave $25,000 in Minnesota and
ah, the check went directly in to this, to this guy Barker.”
Nixon:
“Maybe he’s a …bum.”
Nixon:
“He didn’t get this from the committee though, from [former Commerce
Secretary and finance chair of the Committee for the Re-Election of the
President Maurice] Stans.”
Haldeman: “Yeah. It is. It is. It’s directly traceable
and there’s some more through some Texas people in–that went to the Mexican
bank which they can also trace to the Mexican bank…they’ll get their names
today. And (pause)”
Nixon:
“Well, I mean, ah, there’s no way… I’m just thinking if they don’t
cooperate, what do they say? They they, they were approached by the Cubans.
That’s what Dahlberg has to say, the Texans too. Is that the idea?”
Haldeman: “Well, if they will. But then we’re relying
on more and more people all the time. That’s the problem. And ah, they’ll stop
if we could, if we take this other step.”
Nixon:
“All right. Fine.”
Juries—and, ultimately, the House Judiciary
Committee that voted for the impeachment of Nixon—were undoubtedly struck by
several matters in the above:
*Why didn’t Nixon, a lawyer of long training—one who
had even argued before the Supreme Court—immediately
tell Haldeman that the proposed scheme was illegal?
*Despite Nixon’s year-long claim that he did not
know the extent of party operatives’ involvement with the break-in at
Democratic National headquarters until March 1973, the tape shows conclusively that he had been briefed within a week.
*There was no single dramatic statement such as “I
want you to stonewall it, to plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up or anything
else” (from the March 22, 1973 taped conversation with aides). But even Nixon’s guttural, inarticulate “Um huh”
was enough to constitute his awareness and approval of the scheme to throw
the FBI off the scent by corralling the CIA in the scheme.
The June 23 tape—finally coughed up by Nixon when
the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that he must do so—induced 11 GOP
congressmen who had previously voted against impeachment on the House Judiciary
Committee to abandon support of him. With even his last line of defense in the
Senate crumbling, Nixon announced his resignation in August 1974, less than two
years after recording one of the decisive landslides in Presidential electoral
history.
Perhaps Trump was too busy mastering the intricacies
of his father’s real estate company as its new president in 1974 to pay any
attention to what was happening to the president of the whole country then. But
somebody should have forced him at some point between then and now to learn
what could befall him if he weren’t more careful in pursuing the Presidency:
*The dangers
of way too many people ready to cut corners on his behalf. Count the names
of all the people either involved directly with the Watergate break-in or knowledgeable
about it. It was foolhardy to think that awareness of this and related
operations could be confined only to the seven Watergate original defendants. In
the end, 40 government officials were indicted or jailed in connection with the
scandal. The surprise was not that James McCord and John Dean broke under the
pressure of considerable jail time, but that more didn’t do so sooner. Several
names have popped up, again and again, in the imbroglio over Russia: not just
Trump, but also son-in-law Jared Kushner, former National Security Adviser
Michael Flynn, former campaign manager Paul Manafort, longtime political
operative Roger Stone, and Jeff Sessions. Who knows who many more will surface?
*A Justice
Department in the President’s pocket will contaminate those at the top without
sidelining any scandal. Mitchell, Nixon’s law partner turned Attorney
General, and Richard Kleindeinst, Mitchell’s successor, could not stem the
investigation. In the end, they were brought down because of their attempt to
placate Nixon through either false public testimony (Kleindeinst) or through conspiracy,
perjury and obstruction of justice (Mitchell). Similarly, Jeff Sessions’
recommendation that Comey should be fired only helped trigger a special
prosecutor—and Trump has whined so bitterly about this that Sessions has only
felt compelled to offer to resign his Cabinet post after only a few months in
office. A rather large price to pay for giving up a Senate seat he could have retained
with little difficulty.
*A fundamental
misreading of people. Nixon agreed with Haldeman that “ambitious” Mark Felt
would be amenable to curtailing the FBI investigation. In fact, Felt would
shortly become “Deep Throat,” Woodward and Bernstein’s crucial informant about
the crimes of the Nixon administration. In thinking that Comey, who had
complicated Hillary Clinton’s quest for the Presidency twice in the last five
months of the campaign, might be amenable to doing his stated bidding, Trump
made a similar disastrous misreading.
*There’s a
reason why investigators “follow the money” in cases like this. “Deep
Throat’s” shrewd if cryptic advice to Woodward applies to the Nixon-Haldeman
tape. The attempt to obstruct justice—or, as the PR-conscious Haldeman
preferred to think of it, “containment” of the scandal—began with money meant
to ensure the silence of the Watergate burglars (in this case, Bernard Barker).
As Robert Mueller’s investigation gets underway, he will surely examine Flynn’s
lobbying on behalf of a Turkish businessman with ties to Russia and Manafort’s
business dealings with a pro-Kremlin government in the Ukraine.
*An election
influenced through an offstage foreign actor. If Nixon thought he could get away with
impacting the electoral process, it is because he had already successfully done
so. In the closing days of the 1968 election, the Johnson administration had
secured a deal calling for the U.S. to cease bombing North Vietnam capital,
Hanoi, in exchange for concessions from the Communist regime. Then, the South
Vietnamese government of Nguyen Van Thieu inexplicably scuttled the agreement.
For years, rumors circulated that, through Nixon aide Anna Chennault, Thieu was
secretly assured he could get a better deal if the Republicans were elected
that fall. It wasn’t until nearly 50 years later that Nixon biographer John
Farrell discovered, in the Nixon Presidential Library, Haldeman’s handwritten
notes from October 1968 indicating the candidate’s instructions to “Keep Anna
Chennault working on” South Vietnam. By 1972, having engaged the “White House
Plumbers” to clamp down on domestic dissenters such as Daniel Ellsberg, Nixon’s
campaign employed a host of “dirty tricks” to undercut the most electable
Democrat in the primaries, Edmund Muskie, and produce a nominee he could more
readily depict as radical, George McGovern. The “Plumbers” were also the unit
involved in the Watergate break-in. Did Trump also employ a foreign country to
manipulate events to sway an American election—an “October surprise”? Those who
say there is no documentary evidence of this should keep in mind that it took a
half-century to confirm the Chennault-Thieu-Nixon cabal. There are far many
more troubling signs already that Trump was engaged in what he so eloquently
calls “the Russia thing.”
The discovery of the “smoking gun tape” doomed
Nixon, but perhaps not for the reason that many pointed to in saying that “the
cover-up was worse than the crime.” Oddly enough, the person who may have put
his finger on the problem best was Nixon speechwriter (and future Presidential
candidate in his own right) Patrick Buchanan.
“The problem is not Watergate or the cover-up,"
he told his boss’s daughter and most loyal defender, Julie Nixon Eisenhower,
according to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s The Final Days. "It's that he hasn't been telling the truth to
the American people. The tape makes it
evident that he hasn't leveled with the country for probably 18 months. And the
President can't lead a country he has deliberately misled for a year and a
half."
Bear that in mind as we approach 2020.
