This Day in Presidential History (Dean, Nixon and Watergate)

March 21, 1973—Watergate began to unravel, eventually bringing down a Chief Executive just re-elected in a landslide, when President Richard Nixon ignored counsel John Dean’s warning that the mushrooming scandal was “a cancer on the Presidency.”

Perhaps more than any other event in modern history, Watergate contributed all kinds of phrases to the American political lexicon: “at this point in time,” “inoperative,” “modified limited hangout,” “twisting slowly, slowly in the wind,” “the Big Enchilada,” “expletive deleted),” and “stonewall it” (the phrase that finally led to a mass affirmative vote on the House Judiciary Committee in favor of Nixon’s impeachment, thus forcing his resignation). But Dean’s phrase stands out for being the most descriptive and the most prescient.

For two hours on this morning, the President met with Dean and chief of staff H.R. Haldeman on the coverup arising from the break-in at the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel. Within the past week, Newsweek had run a cover story, "Nixon's Palace Guard," on the growing evidence of ties between top aides and the seven Watergate defendants.

Now, Dean spelled out as much as he knew: that deputy campaign director Jeb Stuart Magruder knew much about the bugging; that White House special counsel Charles Colson might also have been involved; that campaign fundraiser Herbert Kalmbach had provided funds for the defendants’ attorneys; and—the topper—that E. Howard Hunt was blackmailing them for $122,000 more or he’d reveal all he’d done for the campaign and administration, including a break-in at the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

The amount of attention throughout this day on Watergate signaled the President’s increasingly preoccupation with the scandal. He and his staff finally understood the legal and political gravity of the situation. “We now have a different problem than we did during the election,” wrote Haldeman in his notes on the day (later printed in The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House). “We’ve got to figure all the problems and possibilities.”

Despite an adversarial relationship with the press from early in his Presidency—really, perhaps, going back to the beginnings of his career—Nixon had been able to stage-manage events largely as he wished, mostly due to Americans’ traditional trust in their Presidents.

From this day onward, however, control of events increasingly slipped out of his grasp. Like the metaphorical medical condition that Dean predicted, the bad days started to outnumber the good ones.

Nixon’s command of the political terrain was not only undermined by his “silent majority’s” recognition that he had committed what journalist Theodore H. White called a Breach of Faith, but also by the resignation a month later of Haldeman, a former advertising executive who had helped resurrect his boss from the political dead by remolding his public image for the 1968 campaign.

In elementary school I seized each day’s paper to see what Nixon’s gang was up to. High on my hate list was Haldeman, who, with his humorless mien, drill-sergeant crewcut, and absolute command of the President’s schedule, became known among the press and Washington inner circles as “Nixon’s S.O.B.” and “The Iron Chancellor.”

Today I’m inclined to feel more compassion for this aide who received as much abuse from Nixon as he inflicted on others. It could not have been easy to work for a self-centered, obsessive political junkie who, after more than a decade of close interaction, did not know the number of children in Haldeman’s family.

It was even harder to try to guess which of his boss’ statements was a momentary irrational thought and which an unbending order. Retired New York Times columnist William Safire revealed that, in Nixon’s first year in office, a bad landing on Air Force One prompted a singular tirade by his former boss: "That's it! No more landing at airports!" Haldeman listened, nodded, then paid the order no further mind.

Two days after the meeting among Dean, Haldeman and Nixon, Judge John Sirica read in open court a letter from Watergate defendant James McCord, disclosing political pressure from on high to plead guilty and hinting at the involvement of others not identified during the trial. The revelation was the first of a daily round that eventually led to convictions for 25 Watergate figures, as well as the first resignation (and later pardon) of an American President.

After all this time, it’s amazing to think not only that some doubted this paranoid micromanager could have instigated the cover-up, but also that they also discounted the possibility that he ordered the original break-in, too.

More and more actors over the years have played either Nixon or a thinly fictionalized version of him, including Peter Riegert, Jason Robards Jr., Frank Langella, and Anthony Hopkins. But for my money, the best was Dan Hedaya, complete with jowls, hunched-over frame, and hooded scowl, in the 1999 film Dick (whose charm only begins with that short but extremely appropriate title). It lays out the real story of how Watergate came to be revealed.

It’s a tale involving two giggly teenage ditzes, Betsy and Arlene (played by Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams, respectively), who on a tour of the White House, recognize G. Gordon Liddy as the weirdo they saw skulking around the Watergate Hotel, where Arlene resides.

“Tricky Dick” attempts to gain their silence by hiring them as “official White House dog watchers” (for the obstreperous Checkers) and, later, the more official-sounding "Presidential youth advisors,” but they outsmart and outlast the presiding political genius of their day. Along the way, you’ll learn all sorts of secrets never divulged on those Watergate tapes (e.g., the girls set off a “Hello, Dolly” sing-along at a summit by accidentally distributing marijuana-laced brownies to the principal adult participants).

When you’ve finished watching this unbelievably realistic film, remember who first told you (or reminded you) about it….