From the Archives, 1972: Watergate revisited

First published in The Sunday Age, June 7, 1992.

How a bungled burglary led to Nixon’s downfall

President Richard M. Nixon.Credit: AP

Washington. WITH his long hair and scruffy clothing, under-cover Washington cop Carl Shoffler looked just like the kind of guy Richard Nixon loved to hate. The ones who burned the flags, protested against the Vietnam War, used drugs and generally rejected Nixon’s concept of a clean, old-fashioned, Republican America.

But on 17 June 1972, Shoffler arrested five burglars at the Democratic Party offices in the Watergate complex and helped make President Nixon one of the most despised men in American history — the first President to resign.

“It was a strange moment — me and the two other cops were nervous because we found these five guys in business suits wearing surgical gloves and carrying a walkie talkie,” said Shoffler, now an arson and bomb investigator.

The “third-rate burglary” that Shoffler foiled became the biggest threat to American democracy in 200 years.

What happened was simple and stupid. A watchman at the Watergate building grew suspicious when he noticed the locks to the Democratic Party offices were taped open. He called the police, who arrested James McCord and four anti-Castro activists.

The Watergate complex, location of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters.Credit: AP

All had past links to the CIA. They were hired by White House aides G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, who were stationed across the street, watching their team being arrested.

Initially, the incident largely escaped the notice of the press. But efforts by the White House to cover it up — shredding documents, perjury, paying the burglars to keep silent plotting with the CIA to stop the FBI investigation — would break one law after another, eventually testing whether President Nixon could invoke “executive privilege” to place himself beyond the law.

Nixon had already launched the secret bombing of Cambodia and he seethed at the opposition to the Vietnam War. His campaign for re-election in 1972 was at stake. Although Nixon was apparently unaware of plans for the break-in, his staff knew full well that he approved of the most vicious kind of infighting in order to win.

The Watergate break-in may have also been aimed at dirt, although “with all the press coverage, 20 years after Watergate, no one has definitely said why those five went into Watergate — what they were looking for,” said Shoffler.

Carl Bernstein [L] and Bob Woodward.Credit: AP

Then two young reporters on ‘The Washington Post’, working with a government informer they code-named “Deep Throat” began to unravel the affair. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, as well as other reporters, established the burglars’ links to the White House and traced the $US100 bills they carried to the Committee to Re-elect the President.

By the end of August, Nixon publicly denied any links by his staff to Watergate, even as in secret he plotted to thwart the investigation. Hunt, Liddy and the five burglars were indicted by a grand jury, charged with burglary and wiretapping, on the basis of perjured testimony that Liddy planned the break-in by himself. The seven were to be sacrificed to save Nixon, who successfully won a second term in November.

But the issue did not die. The burglars’ trial before a sceptical Judge John Sirica ended on 30 January 1973. The Senate immediately set up a committee to investigate the election.

Burglar McCord then admitted he had lied during his trial and implicated higher officials. Top Nixon aides John Ehrlichman, Bob Haldeman and John Dean quit.

In June, Dean turned on his former boss and accused the President of direct involvement in a cover-up. In July, a White House aide revealed that all conversations in the President’s office had been secretly taped.

President Richard Nixon.Credit: AP

This led to a bitter struggle by Nixon to withhold the tapes from the Senate. First, he handed over selected transcripts; then selected tapes. Even then, there was a mysterious 18-minute break in the tapes that was never explained.

Finally, on 24 July 1974, the Supreme Court voted unanimously to reject the Nixon claim of “executive privilege” and ordered him to hand over all the tapes.

The tapes revealed that Nixon was intimately involved in covering up the affair from the third day after the break-in. His attempt to have the CIA tell the FBI to lay off the investigation was the smoking gun that led to his decision to resign. Nixon knew that if he did not quit he would be impeached. He announced his resignation on 8 August 1974 and left office the following day at 11.35am.

Nixon never admitted any guilt and he was pardoned for any role in Watergate by Gerald Ford, who stepped up from the vice-presidency.

“WATERGATE meant to me that a person as little as myself, in a democracy, can win if there is exposure,” said Shoffler. “The media is the principal reason that democracy works and the example of that is Watergate.”

W. Mark Felt, a former Associate Director of the FBI, identified himself as Deep Throat.Credit: AP

But not everyone believes that Watergate exemplified the triumph of good over evil.

“Watergate eroded Americans’ faith in institutions,” coming at the end of a 10-year string of calamities such as the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam War, said Kevin Phillips, a conservative political analyst.

“Part of America’s cultural fabric has really never rewoven itself since the 1960s,” he said. And although the media took pride and credit for the downfall of Nixon, “polls show the media is one of the most unpopular institutions in America — there’s too much of a feeling that they’re the arbiter of who falls and who succeeds”.

Mr Stephen Isaacs, a former ‘Washington Post’ editor who hired Bernstein for the paper more than 20 years ago, said Watergate changed journalism by sending thousands of inspired young people to journalism schools.

But after Watergate, too many reporters had a “killer instinct” and wanted to do investigations. Publishers, who found the investigations too costly, also tended to be too politically conservative to support such work.

But while Americans may debate the impact of Watergate, it has inspired people as far as Africa where democratic awakenings have led to the first press freedoms since decolonisation in the 1960s.

“Watergate changed journalism and the role of the journalist,” said Mr Isaacs. “Never had (a journalist) evicted a ruler.”