Richard Nixon's S.O.B.

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"Every president needs an S.O.B. — and I'm Nixon's."

H.R. Haldeman

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My family was still out of the country when former White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman took the witness stand at the Senate Watergate Committee's hearings 40 years ago today so I didn't see him testify, but I'm sure he was quite a sight.

He always was in those days. He was kind of a Mephistopheles with a crewcut, I guess; with the German surname, he always seemed more sinister than the rest — to me, anyway. Maybe it was the influence of those World War II movies I watched as a child.

Haldeman and former White House aide John Ehrlichman were known as Richard Nixon's "Berlin Wall" because of their Germanic surnames and their tendency to restrict access to the Oval Office.

They also had the shared trait of unquestioned loyalty to their leader — even when that leader had forced them to resign only a few months earlier.

Haldeman's testimony had been eagerly anticipated because of his special position in the Nixon White House as chief of staff. The job was still new and evolving when Haldeman became chief of staff, but he appeared to relish its reputation as a presidential "gatekeeper."

It was said Haldeman was closer to Nixon than anyone else in the White House (with the possible exception of Nixon's wife). The word around Washington was that he was the first person to see Nixon each morning and the last to see him each night — and, because of the nature of his job, he saw Nixon many, many times in between.

It was to be expected, therefore, that he would be a Nixon defender on the stand. And he was.

"I have full confidence," he told the Watergate committee 40 years ago, "that when the entire truth is known, it will be clear to the American people that President Nixon had no knowledge of or involvement in either the Watergate affair itself or the subsequent effort of a 'coverup' of the Watergate."

Ironically, the Watergate figure with whom Haldeman probably had the most in common 40 years ago today — at least on the surface — was John Dean, who had testified a month earlier.

Both men delivered lengthy statements on their first days on the witness stand and answered questions on the other days. But that was where the similarities ended. Their stories were quite different.

In his statement 40 years ago today, Haldeman insisted that he and Richard Nixon had no knowledge of the Watergate break–in and that Dean had "badly misled" them. He also said he had listened recently to the tape of the March 21, 1973 meeting between Nixon and Dean in which Dean warned Nixon that there was a "cancer ... close to the presidency."

Haldeman observed that he had participated in part of that meeting but had missed the first hour — and the edited transcripts that Nixon released the following spring confirmed that.

Dean, Haldeman told the committee, "[had], in a number of instances, misinterpreted the intent or implications of things that might have been said."

Haldeman went on to say that "[h]aving observed the president all those years, in many different situations, it was very clear to me on March 21 that the president was exploring and probing; that he was surprised; that he was trying to find out what in the world was going on; he didn't understand how this all fit together, and he was trying to find out."

However, "It is impossible," wrote Theodore H. White, "to misinterpret the flow of [Dean's and Nixon's] conversation; the president [had] ordered Dean to buy time for him ..."

On the stand the next day, Haldeman vigorously denied participating in a coverup, then he wrapped up his testimony on the third day by describing his proposal to link Communist protests to the campaign for the Democrats' nominee, Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota.

But as each member of the committee took his turn questioning Haldeman, it was increasingly clear that Haldeman knew little (or said he knew little) of the important details of key events that other witnesses had described.

For example, Haldeman — a man known for taking meticulous notes on large legal pads — said he could not recall when he first heard of the Watergate burglary. Even Haldeman admitted that was "incredible."

Haldeman's opening statement may also have included the public unveiling of one of the most noxious justifications for Watergate that was offered by the Nixon White House. In an almost offhand kind of way, Haldeman alleged that the Democrats engaged in far more serious sabotage during the 1972 campaign than the Republicans.

Lowell Weicker, a Connecticut Republican (and an unsuccessful candidate for his party's presidential nomination in 1980) who loathed the Nixon White House and considered its behavior a betrayal of GOP principles, challenged Haldeman on that point. He produced a memo from Haldeman to Dean suggesting that Dean spread a story linking Communists to protests in which McGovern supporters also participated.

The inescapable conclusion — for anyone who had been paying attention to the hearings — was that the memo confirmed what Dean had said about paranoia in the White House in general and in Nixon's and Haldeman's minds specifically.

Perhaps the most astonishing revelation came when Haldeman spoke of the White House tapes.

In just a couple of weeks since they learned of the tapes' existence, the senators on the committee had clearly come to regard the tapes as crucial to their investigation, but they had been denied access to them. However, Haldeman spoke almost nonchalantly about keeping several of the tapes at his home in a 48–hour period earlier that month and listening to a specific tape at the president's request.

This was only a few months after Nixon had asked for and received Haldeman's resignation.

Haldeman's lawyer read into the record a White House letter instructing Haldeman not to discuss the contents of the tapes, but Haldeman seemed oddly eager to speak about them, anyway. He asserted that the tapes proved that Nixon did not know as much about the coverup as Dean had claimed.

Committee chairman Sam Ervin was skeptical, contending that the White House and Haldeman had done some "canoodling together" to leak a sanitized version of the tapes in the hearings while keeping the originals from the committee's scrutiny.

Weicker wondered aloud how the White House could justify letting Haldeman listen to the tapes while denying that privilege to Dean and the others.

Sen. Daniel Inouye was skeptical that anyone could be sure the tapes had not been tampered with while they had been unguarded in Haldeman's possession.

And majority counsel Sam Dash pondered the question of how Nixon could claim the tapes were confidential when he allowed Haldeman — a private citizen at that point — to keep some in his home.

There were no answers from Richard Nixon's S.O.B.

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The Centennial of a 'Humble Healer'

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"I am a Ford, not a Lincoln. My addresses will never be as eloquent as Mr. Lincoln's. But I will do my very best to equal his brevity and his plain speaking."

Gerald Ford

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Today would have been Gerald Ford's 100th birthday. He didn't miss being here for it by much, either. He was 93 when he died in December of 2006.

He lived longer than any other president. So far.

As nearly as I can tell, not much of a fuss is being made about the centennial — except maybe in Ford's hometown of Grand Rapids, Mich., where the Grand Rapids Symphony planned a Ford tribute in its Independence Day "Picnic Pops" performance — with the focus being on a special composition written in Ford's honor titled "One of Us, Portrait of A Humble Healer."

This weekend, there have been all sorts of activities in Grand Rapids, and the Vail Daily News in Vail, Colo., where Ford took his ski vacations, says "[t]he valley will stop for a few moments" in Ford's honor.

Other than that, though, there doesn't seem to be much of a fuss, as I said earlier.

In Omaha, Neb., the town where Ford was born, the Omaha World–Herald reports that, while the occasion "will be marked with no pomp and circumstance ... America's 38th president won't be forgotten."

A recent Pew Research Center article observed that, in a Gallup poll last year, a majority of respondents said Ford was an average president, neither above nor below average.

Those who remember the Ford presidency are bound to have differing opinions of him — and that is true of all presidents, even those who have been judged by history to be among the greats. Most folks probably would say Ford was humble. Fewer probably would call him a healer, but I think nearly everyone would agree that Ford was a decent guy.

He was what people of my parents' generation called a "stand–up" guy.

Rarely is there that kind of agreement on any president. But, when compared to the dark, dour and paranoid presidency of Ford's predecessor, Richard Nixon, I guess just about anyone would look like a decent guy.

Ford really was. But he is primarily judged for what was perceived at the time to be a decidedly indecent act — his pardon of Nixon on Sept. 8, 1974, about a month after he took office. Regardless of the general decency of the man, he continues to be judged by many on the basis of that single act.

And that was/is understandable. Nixon's popularity had dropped into the 20s by the time of his resignation. Most of Nixon's fellow Republicans in Congress — on whom Nixon had been counting to keep him from being convicted in an impeachment trial in the Senate — turned on him when the Supreme Court ordered him to turn over the tapes he had been refusing to surrender for months, and the "smoking gun" that proved his early involvement in the Watergate coverup was revealed.

There was a lot of bitterness in the country over the fact that Nixon had dragged the nation through a two–year investigation, protesting his innocence all the while, only to be indisputably shown to be a liar, and, even though there were those who believed an ex–president should not be sent to prison, many more Americans wanted Nixon to stand trial in a court, where he would have to tell the truth or face additional criminal charges.

When Ford pardoned Nixon, it removed any possibility that Nixon would have to face the legal music. That made many Americans angry — enough, some political analysts would say, that it cost Ford election to the presidency in his own right two years later.

Until the end of his life, Ford would say — and not without some justification — that pardoning Nixon was the only way for the country to put Watergate behind it and focus on the sputtering economy.

It was the kind of remark a decent, stand–up kind of guy would make — as were Ford's remarks in his first State of the Union speech in January 1975.

"I must say to you," Ford said, "that the state of the Union is not good: Millions of Americans are out of work. Recession and inflation are eroding the money of millions more. Prices are too high, and sales are too slow. This year’s federal deficit will be about $30 billion; next year's probably $45 billion. The national debt will rise to over $500 billion. Our plant capacity and productivity are not increasing fast enough. We depend on others for essential energy. Some people question their government's ability to make hard decisions and stick with them; they expect Washington politics as usual."

Tell the truth. Can you imagine any other president in your lifetime being quite that blunt with the American people?

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I have often reflected on Ford's decision in late 1973 to accept Nixon's nomination of him to fill the vice presidential vacancy left by the resignation of Spiro Agnew. I have wondered what it was like. In hindsight, it seems somewhat inevitable that Ford would become first vice president and then president. But there must have been a time — however brief it may have been — when Ford's decision had not been made, and it still was possible that he might turn Nixon down.

I always wonder to whom Nixon might then have offered the vice presidency — and how that might have changed America and the world.

Some 16 months earlier, Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern had to do something similar when his running mate was dropped and a new one had to be selected. He offered the spot to just about every prominent Democrat, and they all turned him down — until he got to Sargent Shriver.

McGovern never made his offer in public so there are no recordings of those Democrats turning him down — but they always wound up in the news. The details were only made public — if at all — in books or interviews long after the fact.

I have no memory of anyone other than Ford being offered the vice presidency in 1973, but I can imagine a few of the thoughts that must have gone through his mind when the offer was made. And, based on what I know of Ford, I'm sure he consulted his wife, Betty, before giving Nixon an answer.

He always claimed he expected to be something of a place filler for the rest of Nixon's term, and then he would retire to Michigan when it was over. He apparently accepted the vice presidency with no expectation that he would be president. He figured Nixon would ride out the storm.

Well, that was his story. And maybe that really was what he believed. But my memory is that Nixon's approval ratings took a serious hit when it was revealed in the Watergate hearings (coincidentally, a couple of days after Ford's 60th birthday) that there had been a secret taping system in the White House.

That meant that there was a witness that could verify what Nixon and his associates had said in their meetings after the Watergate break–in. The only real question at the time was whether the witness' account would be heard. Would Nixon be able to run out the clock on his term before that account was heard?

Although Nixon and his lawyers tried every legal trick in the book, the Supreme Court ultimately ruled in the summer of 1974 — several months after Ford's confirmation as vice president and more than two years before Nixon's term was due to end — that Nixon had to relinquish the tapes to the investigators.

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In those tapes was the "smoking gun" that ended Nixon's presidency.

At that point, most people seemed to realize that it was just a matter of time — and not much of that — before Nixon would be leaving office. By then, Ford must have been anticipating the massive changes that were about to take place in his life.

Ford certainly didn't give the country politics as usual, even though one of his earliest acts was dismissed as such by many Americans. He was like a breath of fresh air when he became president, which is no doubt why so many Americans felt betrayed when he pardoned Nixon.

To continue with the breath of fresh air analogy, it was like breathing fresh oxygen for four weeks after a steady diet carbon dioxide — only to suddenly inhale carbon dioxide again without warning. There was a national coughing spasm.

There was a lot of raw emotion in the Watergate era, and I have often wondered if Ford might not have encountered such a hostile reaction had he waited longer to issue the pardon.

Some economists of the time felt it was urgent to put Nixon and Watergate behind the country so full attention could be given to the economy. But if their counsel prompted Ford to issue the pardon when he did, those economists did both the nation and the new president a disservice.

Although I disagreed, I always felt Ford truly believed it was essential for the country to move forward, and pardoning Nixon was the only way to do that — while he never managed to completely regain the trust he lost when he pardoned Nixon, Ford was an upfront kind of guy, determined to press on no matter how great the adversity.

And the adversity for Ford in the 1976 presidential campaign only got worse when John Dean, the man who first exposed the Watergate coverup, wrote in his book about the scandal that he had heard from another source that Ford had been involved in efforts to postpone a congressional investigation into Watergate until after the 1972 election, which would have made him an accessory.

I came from a family of Nixon haters, but I was willing to give Ford the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he was sincere when he said his motivation was to move the country forward. Perhaps it was that quality that made him an All–America center/linebacker and the acknowledged team leader at Michigan in the 1930s. (It was said Ford "would stay and fight in a losing cause.")

Perhaps that trait was honed even earlier, in his days as a Boy Scout.

Whatever the origin may have been, it forced even Ford's political adversaries to admit to a certain amount of admiration for the way he carried himself before, after and during his presidency.

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The Empire Strikes Back

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"You will be better advised to watch what we do instead of what we say."

John Mitchell
July 1969

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John Dean had wrapped up his testimony about a week and a half earlier, and Congress had adjourned for its July 4 recess.

When the Senate Watergate Committee resumed its business 40 years ago today, the former attorney general of the United States and former manager of Richard Nixon's re–election campaign, John Mitchell, was scheduled to testify. He testified for three days.

Mitchell and Nixon were friends before Nixon became president. They had been friends since 1946, and they were colleagues on the same law firm before Nixon launched his second campaign for the presidency. Mitchell managed Nixon's successful 1968 bid and Nixon's re–election campaign in 1972 as well.

For whatever reason, Mitchell had Nixon's full confidence. Many Americans did not realize this 40 years ago, but Mitchell seemed to understand Nixon's personality — and, as a result, occupied a unique role among Nixon confidantes.

He might have been better suited to be Nixon's chief of staff, but I suppose Nixon was drawn to Mitchell's accomplishments in the legal field.

When Mitchell joined Nixon's New York law firm in 1967, he occupied the office adjacent to Nixon's, Theodore White wrote in "Breach of Faith." The men had several things in common, White wrote — born only eight months apart, they were of the same generation, and both had been veterans of World War II.

"Nixon was lonely in New York," White wrote. "[H]e enjoyed visits to Mitchell's country home ... where he could pound the piano. Tart–tongued, bald–headed, Mitchell had an almost roguish charm — and an air of tough, unruffled calm. Smoking his pipe, he would sit at a conference table, almost always speak last, then speak with apparent good sense."

In his book about the 1972 campaign, White wrote that Mitchell was the "[h]ardest of all the hard men around the president, by far," and that truly was something in the Nixon White House. "[H]e was as charming a conversationalist as one could meet," White wrote, "and at the same time as cold a personality as one ever encounters in politics."

I didn't see Mitchell's testimony when it happened, but I saw clips from it many times after. And I would agree with White's assessment. Mitchell's cold public persona came across loud and clear.

When Mitchell began his testimony 40 years ago today, he was almost surely the most well–known representative of the Nixon administration to appear. Dean had made an instant splash because he was the first to point the finger at Richard Nixon. For that reason, more than any other, there had been much anticipation of his appearance. But he was virtually unknown before his testimony.

Two big names who would follow Mitchell into the witness chair in July 1973 — Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman — were highly placed Nixon loyalists, too, but they were not as well known. Like so many other things that summer, the relative anonymity of Haldeman and Ehrlichman would soon be things of the past, but, on this day in 1973, Mitchell was probably the most effective witness to make the case for Nixon in the aftermath of Dean's testimony.

And he took a bullet for Nixon 40 years ago today. He accused Magruder of lying in his testimony, and he disputed what Dean had said.

(Mitchell had a way with words. He was the one who labeled administration activities "White House horrors." It was a phrase members of the committee used when questioning Mitchell — sometimes incorrectly, in Mitchell's view. When Sam Dash, counsel for the majority, used the phrase in a reference to the Watergate break–in, Mitchell corrected him: "Those are not the White House horrors, Mr. Dash." The distinction? The planning of such an operation was a "White House horror;" the actual carrying out of the plan was not.)

But Mitchell's smug, often arrogant attitude, which may have been appropriate for a courtroom, made it hard for anyone, even Nixon's defenders on the Senate committee, to like him.

Dash asked Mitchell at one point about a meeting he had with G. Gordon Liddy at which illegal activities were discussed, "[W]hy didn't you throw Mr. Liddy out of your office?"

"Well, I think, Mr. Dash," Mitchell replied, "in hindsight I not only should have thrown him out of the office, I should have thrown him out of the window."

The remark drew a smattering of apparently sympathetic — and somewhat nervous — laughter.

"Well, since you did neither ..." Dash said as the committee room erupted in loud laughter, refusing to be diverted from his point, " why didn't you at least recommend that Mr. Liddy be fired from his responsible position at the [president's re–election] committee since obviously he was presenting to you an irresponsible program?"

To which Mitchell replied, "Well, in hindsight I probably should have done that, too."

Folks became more familiar with Haldeman and Ehrlichman when Mitchell testified for a second day.

After he returned to the stand, Mitchell said that Haldeman and Ehrlichman did participate in a coverup, but they did so to protect Nixon.

But first, he had to answer a question from Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye, who observed that Mitchell had testified that he regarded Nixon's re–election to be so important that he was "willing to engage in activities which have been well described as being irregular."

"To what length are you now willing to go to deceive in an effort to avoid further implication of the president in the activities under investigation by this panel?" Inouye asked. "More specifically, are you willing to lie to protect the president?"

"I do not have to make that choice," Mitchell answered, "because, to my knowledge, the president was not knowledgeable."

After being grilled by the committee chairman, Sen. Sam Ervin, on decisions he had made following the Watergate break‐in, Mitchell remarked, "It is a great trial being conducted up here, isn't it?"

On his third day of testimony, Mitchell was questioned about conflicts in his testimony and vigorously defended his credibility.

I have often wished that I could have seen Mitchell's testimony when it was happening because I get the feeling, from seeing brief video clips and reading transcripts of his testimony, that he wasn't persuasive.

If anything, he struck me as being evasive. I always thought he was a weaselly sort.

"[Y]ou enjoy the distinction ... that it was your purpose not to volunteer anything," Dash said at one point. "Is there a distinction between your not volunteering anything and lying? If you do not volunteer an answer to a direct question, you might say you do not volunteer anything, but actually you are lying."

Mitchell's reply? "I think we would have to find out what the specifics are, what the particular occasion and ..."

See what I mean?

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A Cancer Growing on the Presidency

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"We have a cancer within, close to the presidency, that's growing."

John Dean to Richard Nixon
March 21, 1973

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When the Senate Watergate Committee convened in mid–May 1973, wrote Theodore H. White in "Breach of Faith," the committee's vague objective was to investigate 1972 presidential campaign activities.

In five weeks of hearings, the committee had heard some intriguing testimony but nothing that could directly link Richard Nixon to the crimes that had been committed in his name.

That started to change 40 years ago today when former White House counsel John Dean began a week of testimony.

Well, actually, the tide began to shift a couple of weeks earlier when Jeb Magruder, a former special assistant to the president and deputy director of Nixon's re–election campaign, testified that the former attorney general and campaign director, John Mitchell, had authorized him to burglarize the Democratic headquarters.

That certainly ratcheted up the interest in Dean's testimony. Mitchell and Nixon were close. Mitchell, after all, had directed Nixon's campaigns in 1968 and 1972. In between, he had been Nixon's top law enforcement officer.

There was nothing very exciting about the testimony on the surface, though. As theater, it was tedious. Dean delivered an opening statement on the first day in a lifeless monotone, and he referred to many people with whom viewers weren't necessarily familiar.

While there may have been nothing exciting about his delivery, there was plenty that was exciting in his testimony. And a buzz of excitement preceded his appearance before the Senate Watergate Committee. His testimony became must–see TV long before the phrase was used to promote a network schedule.

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Dean had a lot to tell the senators, and he used his entire first day on the stand to read a massive opening statement, pausing occasionally for a sip of water.

Dean told the senators that Nixon had been involved in the coverup all along. He also said he warned the president — prophetically, as it turned out — that "there was a cancer growing on the presidency and that if the cancer was not removed the president himself would be killed by it."

Looking back on that conversation, with the benefit of the transcript of the actual recording, White observed that Dean, in his choice of the cancer analogy, had "obviously thought through his briefing [for Nixon] carefully."

As the week went on, Dean told the senators that Nixon had misled the nation and insisted his accusations against Nixon were true. He revealed the existence of the "enemies list" and told the senators its purpose, and he told a story of a president who was obsessed with demonstrations and spoke of using IRS audits as weapons against his political foes.

Dean's testimony that week was often so detailed that some observers openly wondered how he could possibly have retained so much detail about conversations he'd had months earlier. To confirm what he said, it would be necessary to have some kind of corroborating evidence. But the conversations hadn't been recorded. Or had they?

"The televised hearings were already an unexpected hit that summer," wrote Matthew Cooper last month in the National Journal, "but the ratings soared with Dean's testimony. Still, when Dean finished, Nixon's defenders dismissed his account as one man's obfuscations and misinterpretations of what the president meant."

"Then, a few weeks later, a former White House aide named Alexander Butterfield testified before the committee that the president had installed a taping system in the White House," Cooper wrote.

And all bets were off.

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The Peaks in a Scandal Investigation

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"Somewhere between my ambition and my ideals, I lost my ethical compass."

Jeb Magruder

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More than a quarter of a century passed between our births, and I was still a boy when he appeared before the Senate Watergate Committee 40 years ago today.

It's fair to say I didn't completely understand what was happening. Nevertheless, I understood enough that I must say I kind of empathized with Jeb Magruder. I couldn't really help it.

He had had a meteoric rise. He started out as a salesman, then, when he was 34, he was appointed to the White House staff. For one so young, it must have been mind–boggling.

It also led him to do things in his service to Richard Nixon that he almost certainly never imagined he would do. But I always admired the fact that he never tried to pass the buck.

After informing the senators of his work for the Committee to Re–Elect the President (in which he participated in Nixon's 49–state triumph, at the time the second–largest electoral vote margin in history), he said, "Unfortunately, we made some mistakes in the campaign ... For those errors in judgment that I made, I take full responsibility. I am, after all, a mature man, and I am willing to face the consequences of my own acts."

In hindsight — and even at the time — most people would say they were more than errors. But perhaps that is semantic quibbling. Magruder did confess to his own guilt when he testified before the Senate Watergate Committee — which is more than can be said of Nixon.

Magruder's testimony was the first, really, to put the coverup conspiracy inside the walls of the White House, but he was careful not to implicate Nixon when he did so. (He reversed that in a PBS documentary in 2003, nearly a decade after Nixon's death.)

"These mistakes were made by only a few participants in the campaign," Magruder insisted 40 years ago today. "Thousands ... assisted in the campaign to re–elect the president, and they did nothing illegal or unethical. [A]t no point ... did the president have any knowledge of our errors in this matter."

Magruder did assert, however, that John Mitchell, John Dean and Bob Haldeman were involved. That wasn't exactly news in June 1973 — but now it was on the record. That was an important legal step.

In his book "Breach of Faith," Theodore H. White wrote of how the committee's investigation had moved slowly at first and likened its progress to hiking up a trail and reaching peaks along the way.

With his testimony, White wrote, "Magruder made the first peak — publicly, under oath, he said the authority to burglarize Democratic headquarters had been given him directly by the former attorney general, John Mitchell."

Magruder went on to write a book titled "An American Life: One Man's Road to Watergate," but he followed a rather different path to his testimony before the Watergate Committee.

In "All the President's Men," Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote that Magruder, initially reluctant to say anything, had been regarded as a "super–loyalist" — but he went to the prosecutors in April of 1973 when the house of cards that was the coverup was collapsing around him.

One of Woodward's sources within Nixon's re–election campaign organization told him Magruder would be "the next McCord" — a reference to Watergate burglar James McCord's letter to Judge John Sirica in early 1973 just before the burglars were to be sentenced. It prevented the sentencing from being that last act in the Watergate drama — and was, in White's words, a "peak" in the Watergate scandal.

Much like Magruder's testimony 40 years ago today — although I don't think I would call it a game changer.

The Nixon White House had kept the Watergate scandal under wraps for nearly a year — until McCord began talking about things like perjury and hush money — and they managed to keep a lid on things for awhile longer.

But the peaks in the investigation were coming more frequently now. The next one would come within two weeks when John Dean took the stand.

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Reasserting That the People Rule

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"We are beginning these hearings today in an atmosphere of the utmost gravity. The questions that have been raised in the wake of the June 17 break–in strike at the very undergirding of our democracy. If the many allegations made to this date are true, then the burglars who broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee ... were in effect breaking into the home of every citizen of the United States. And if these allegations prove to be true, what they were seeking to steal was not the jewels, money or other property of American citizens but something much more valuable — their most precious heritage, the right to vote in a free election."

Sen. Sam Ervin
May 17, 1973

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Forty years ago today, the Senate Watergate Committee held its first session.

(I'm going to resist the temptation to compare what began four decades ago today to the scandals that have been erupting in Washington recently — even though there are many initial similarities. The scandals will only prove to be truly comparable if they play out like Watergate did.)

I doubt that very many Americans realized at the time where the road on which the committee had taken the nation would lead. Initially, President Nixon appeared to be insulated from the unsavory activities that had led to the Watergate break–in — just as Barack Obama today claims to have beeen unaware of what was done in his name. All the highest–ranking officials insisted that, even if they acknowledged their own culpability, the president was guiltless.

It would be more than a month before John Dean's testimony would directly challenge Nixon's stated version of events. It would be about two months before the existence of a taping system in the Oval Office — and, therefore, the existence of evidence that could confirm whether Dean's version or Nixon's was correct — became public knowledge.

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Those things happened during the Watergate Committee's work in the summer of 1973.

The hearings that summer were a genuine sensation. Years before cable TV, decades before the internet, people were bringing portable TVs to their workplaces to follow the testimony. Drivers were listening to the hearings on their car radios.

On a retrospective on Watergate I watched once, I heard Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee say that, at the height of the hearings, he could walk from his newsroom to the street, where he could get a taxi and take it anywhere in the city, and he could get out and walk along any street and never miss a beat in the coverage, so pervasive was the coverage by the media of the day.

But that was later.

On this day in 1973, I couldn't say how many Americans were watching. In my hometown, school had not yet dismissed for the summer — as I recall, the dismissal of school came in late May — so I would have been in school on the day the hearings began. My mother was at home in those days, but I have no memory of coming in from school that afternoon and finding her watching the TV. Perhaps she was, but I was a child and the weather was probably nice, and I probably did what I usually did after school on nice days at that time in my life.

I probably played baseball with the neighborhood kids until our parents called us in for dinner or until the sun went down.

Which means I probably made a beeline for my room, put on my rattiest clothes and went back outside to take advantage of what remained of daylight.

I have no memory of the opening statement by the chairman of the committee, Sen. Sam Ervin of North Carolina.

But, as I read it now, four decades after the fact, I am struck by the timelessness of the message — Ervin's assertion that "the right to vote in a free election" is more valuable than jewels or money or property.

Over time, fame and fortune have become part of the American dream, but the original American dream was to have a land where power resides with the people. Individual affluence has nothing to do with that.

It just doesn't get any more basic than that. It has always been at the heart of America, from the earliest days when America was little more than an idea right up to modern times, that the people rule here — and they wield their power through the ballot box.

That isn't always good news for incumbent officeholders — but America isn't about them.

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A Simple Twist of Fate

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This day in 1973 was a pivotal one in the story of the Watergate scandal.

By March 23, 1973, the scandal had mostly stalled. The Washington Post, TIME magazine and The New York Times continued to publish stories, but the public's general interest in the investigation was way down. Supporters of President Nixon protested that there was a media bias against the president, and many people in the political center were beginning to agree.

(One of the things that the Watergate scandal made clear to me was the fact that, no matter how much Americans may dislike their president, they will give him more than the benefit of the doubt. Nixon was about as loathsome as they come, but, although many of his supporters had misgivings about him, they always wanted to think well of whoever was president, and they refused to convict him in their minds until the constantly mounting evidence of his complicity left them no choice.)

To be sure, there have been times in America's history when the press acted not so much as a watchdog but as a lapdog. But the Watergate scandal was not one of them. Forty years later, I take pride, as a journalist, in noting that the reporting of that scandal was mostly accurate — astonishingly so, considering how many attempts were made by the administration to throw the reporters off the scent.

But in the early spring of 1973, the story really hadn't gained a lot of traction.

That changed 40 years ago today. James McCord and E. Howard Hunt, the last of the Watergate burglars, had been convicted in January, and John Sirica, the judge who presided over their trial, was slated to hand down the burglars' sentences in March. Prior to doing so, he received a letter from McCord, alleging that the burglars had entered guilty pleas under duress, the defendants had perjured themselves, and other, unnamed individuals had been involved in the conspiracy and its coverup.

McCord asked Sirica — who was known as "Maximum John" for his tendency to hand down the most severe penalties allowed by law — for leniency. Sirica handed down some stiff penalties — Hunt, for example, was sentenced to 35 years — but Sirica made it clear the sentences were "provisionary," depending on their cooperation with investigators.

McCord's sentence, however, was postponed, and Sirica revealed in court the existence of the letter. McCord also asked to meet privately with Sirica after sentencing. When the request was granted, he told the judge that he and the other defendants had lied at the bidding of former Attorney General John Mitchell and then–White House counsel John Dean.

It was a game changer.

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As McCord had anticipated in his letter to Sirica, he was called to testify before the Senate committee that was investigating the Watergate break–in and coverup.

He probably didn't foresee the public's reaction — with the exception of Dean's testimony about a month later, McCord's testimony on the first full day of witness questioning may have been the most heavily anticipated.

But it seems likely that, if not for the letter McCord wrote to Sirica, his testimony could have been quite different — if it had happened at all.

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When Nixon and Dean Conferred

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From the day in July 1973 when their existence was publicly revealed until the Supreme Court ruled against him a year later, Richard Nixon fought to keep the tapes of his Oval Office meetings and his telephone conversations private.

In the end, of course, he wasn't entirely successful. But none of that was known 40 years ago today.

My memory of the summer of 1972 is that very little was known by a public that, by and large, really didn't seem to care. Perhaps it was too obsessed with the war in Vietnam.

But, occasionally, I heard the word Watergate, and, from time to time, I saw articles in the newspaper that had been picked up from the Washington Post — which was, for the most part, out there by itself in practicing the art of shoe–leather journalism, the hallmark of the early investigation.

Most of the folks in the media of 1972 did not care for Nixon — although most of their employers either endorsed him or took a pass — but they tended not to make their feelings known, and many columnists did not challenge the president.

Perhaps they were intimidated by his big (and consistent) leads in the polls — and the knowledge that he was virtually certain to win a second term.

But the truth was that Watergate really didn't receive the kind of attention in 1972 that it did the following year. If it had, it might have been dismissed as politically motivated — and might not have gained traction until 1973, anyway.

(I don't really think it would have made much difference. The "dirty tricks" of the Nixon operatives had succeeded in sabotaging the candidacies of most of the Democrats, and George McGovern was well on his way to the Democratic nomination by the time of the Watergate break–in.

(Replacing McGovern as the nominee would have been a major headache that dwarfed the logistical nightmare created by the scandal that necessitated dropping McGovern's running mate, Tom Eagleton.)

Nevertheless, Nixon and Dean were aware of negative reporting from some journalists. In his testimony to the Senate committee in 1973, Dean seemed to be blaming Nixon for the toxic atmosphere in the White House.

With the benefit of hindsight and the knowledge that almost nothing was done in the Nixon White House without the president's knowledge, that is a proposition that is easy to accept.

Their conversation, Dean said, "turned to the press coverage of the Watergate incident and how the press was really trying to make this into a major campaign issue. At one point ... I recall the president telling me to keep a good list of the press people giving us trouble."

Meanwhile, the wheels of justice were turning that summer — often silently, often slowly, but they were turning — and it was 40 years ago today that E. Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy and the five Watergate burglars were indicted by a federal grand jury.

In hindsight, that was an important turning point in the Watergate investigation. If there had been no initial indictments, the legal basis for continuing with the investigation would have been completely undermined.

And the hope at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was that the matter would stop there. History, of course, tells us it did not.

At the end of that Friday, White House counsel John Dean participated in a White House meeting dedicated to strategy on Watergate–related investigations. It was, Dean would later tell the Senate select committee chaired by Sen. Sam Ervin, the first time he spoke to Nixon about Watergate.

Indeed, Dean claimed, it was the first meeting he had with Nixon.

It's still unclear to me, after all these years, whether Nixon and Dean discussed the matter before Sept. 15, 1972, but the evidence is clear — via the president's own recordings — that they had access to the same sources for information.

At the time, the existence of the voice–activated recording system was known only to a select group — those who needed to know — and, in 1972, Dean was not among them.

Consequently, it was ironic when, the following year, Dean memorably told Republican Sen. Ed Gurney, a member of the so–called "Watergate committee," that "my mind is not a tape recorder."

Dean did not know until after his own testimony, when Alexander Butterfield revealed it under direct questioning, that a system for recording Oval Office conversations had been installed in 1971 — and it ultimately would confirm the credibility of his memory.

The recordings also proved Dean's memory was not flawless. But it was good enough that it earned the respect of investigators, even those whose loyalties were to the Nixon White House.

Dean said it was the very fact that he had been asked in to talk with Nixon that made the conversation so vivid in his memory. Even though he worked in the White House counsel's office, it was hardly routine for him to be invited to the Oval Office.

It's almost spooky now to read the transcript of the Sept. 15 conversation — as submitted by the White House in the spring of 1974 in a futile attempt to satisfy the subpoenas from congressional Democrats — knowing that the recording system was silently preserving everything.

As I re–read the transcript recently, I was struck, as always, by the casual way — visible even in the clearly doctored version — Nixon treated decisions that were intended to keep a lid on things. And by the anger — the raw sense of entitlement — that often flared when he believed others had not responded appropriately.

"You had quite a day today, didn't you?" Nixon said to Dean. "You really got Watergate on the way, didn't you?"

"We tried," Dean replied.

When Dean said that "some apologies may be due" — implying that further action could be avoided if such apologies were offered — chief of staff Bob Haldeman snorted, "Fat chance," and Nixon snarled, "Get the damn," the rest of which was labeled inaudible, although it doesn't take much imagination to complete the thought.

"We can't do that," Haldeman admonished the president.

But the rest of the 50–minute conversation focused on what they could do.

One such strategy revolved around the possibility of providing proof that a bugging device that had been found in a telephone in the DNC office had been "planted" by the DNC.

If such evidence could be found, Dean speculated, it could "reverse" the Watergate story.

When Dean testified before the Senate Watergate Committee the following year, he remembered that Nixon's primary concern was whether the trials would begin before the upcoming election.

Nixon also instructed him, Dean told the senators in June 1973, to "keep track" of those who tried to make Watergate a campaign issue "because we will make life difficult for them after the election."

According to the transcript of the conversation, which was released by the White House in April 1974, Dean was the one who first mentioned keeping a list of the president's critics in the press.

"[O]ne of the things I've tried to do," Dean was quoted as saying, "I have begun to keep notes on a lot of people who are emerging as less than our friends because this will be over someday, and we shouldn't forget the way some of them have treated us."

Knowing the lengths to which Nixon went to cover up his complicity in Watergate, it's certainly possible that the White House manipulated the transcript to make Nixon appear innocent — the transcripts were famously edited to delete the presumably off–color adjectives Nixon and his associates used in their conversations, and it was revealed after Nixon resigned two years later that roughly 17 minutes of the Sept. 15 conversation (during which Nixon was said to have threatened to fire Treasury Secretary George Shultz if he attempted to prevent the White House from using the IRS for political purposes) were missing from the White House transcripts.

(In the transcript, the absence of the remainder of the conversation was dismissed as being "unrelated to Watergate.")

But Nixon's dark side came through, in spite of any whitewash efforts that may have been made.

In the transcript, Nixon responded that "I want the most comprehensive notes on all those who tried to do us in. ... [T]hey were doing this quite deliberately, and they are asking for it, and they are going to get it. We have not used the power in this first four years ... but things are going to change now."

That strikes me as being pretty dark as it is. But what if that portion of the dialogue actually occurred before Dean spoke about keeping notes?

Wouldn't that suggest that Nixon gave Dean an assignment and Dean, in an attempt to butter up the boss in their first meeting, responded with, essentially, "Oh, yes, I'm ahead of you on that."

In the transcript, Dean certainly seems eager to occupy a spot on the president's good side. After Nixon spoke about using "the power" in his second term, Dean responded, "What an exciting prospect."

One can only imagine what might have been.

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'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly'

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"I came here to tell you the truth — the good, the bad and the ugly."

Lt. Col. Oliver North
July 7, 1987

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A good word to describe Oliver North when he began his Iran–Contra testimony a quarter of a century ago would be defiant.

He seemed to enter the hearing room with a chip on his shoulder, and he was all too eager to defend the secret policy he had been carrying out.

Many Americans probably heard his name for the first time when Ronald Reagan dismissed him following the revelation of that policy in November 1986.

After that, as I recall, he mostly slipped from the public's thoughts until his former secretary, Fawn Hall, testified about how she had helped shred documents for her boss and smuggled others from the office.

Then people began clamoring for North to testify — as if most had just heard his name for the first time. And, I guess, there were those who had. I suppose there were some people — very sheltered people — who had no idea who Oliver North was before this day in 1987.

In fact, I know there were. I was one of them. Well, not entirely. I mean, I had heard the name in connection with reports about his involvement in the scandal and his intention to testify. Otherwise, I didn't know much about him.

But after this day 25 years ago, his name was a household word.

In 1987, I was working nights on the Arkansas Gazette's sports desk so I watched North's testimony every day — until about the middle of the afternoon on days when I had to go to work, all day on days when I didn't.

(On those days when I worked, I would often set my VCR to record in my absence. Then, when I returned home after midnight, I would stay up and watch the rest of his testimony from that day.)

Rudy Abramson of the Los Angeles Times wrote that North was "the most eagerly awaited witness since Watergate's John W. Dean III" 14 years earlier.

There is truth in that, but it wasn't quite the same.

When Dean testified in the summer of 1973, I remember hearing his testimony on radios and TV sets wherever I went. My parents watched Dean's testimony on the family TV set, and they had the car radio set to the testimony so it was possible for me to go from the house to the car and never miss a thing.

Then, almost anywhere I might go — the grocery store, the barber shop, whatever it might be — I could see/hear the testimony on small portable TVs or on radios.

(My family lived in the country, a few miles outside the city limits. I remember one day when my father need to get something from a hardware store in town, and I went along with him. I could hear the testimony on the TV as we left the house, then Dad switched on the radio when we got in the car and we listened to it all the way into town. Then, we may have missed a minute or two of testimony when we walked from the parking lot into the hardware store, but when we did, we found that the proprietor was watching the telecast on his portable TV.

(As long as we were in town, Dad wanted to run a few errands at nearby stores so we walked from the hardware store to the other businesses. All along the way, I could hear the testimony — on radios in cars and stores, on portable TVs. Hardly missed a beat.)

Before his testimony, Dean's was not a familiar face to most Americans. But even though I was much younger at the time of Watergate, I knew more about Dean when he started his testimony than I knew about North.

Looking at it from another angle, both of those key witnesses — North and Dean — received generally high points for credibility from congressional investigators and viewers.

Dean challenged Richard Nixon's version of events, and Nixon's own tapes demonstrated how reliable Dean's memory and word were. Ultimately, Nixon resigned.

North, on the other hand, did not implicate Reagan in any wrongdoing. He did not challenge Reagan's decision to dismiss him when the plot came to light; if Reagan was involved more directly, North did not accuse him.

It seemed to me at the time that a lot of people hoped he would — or, at least, that he would get caught in a contradiction that would give ammunition to the administration's critics.

Kind of like the people who go to car races hoping to see a pileup.

The revelation of the Iran–Contra scandal in November 1986 marked the end of a really astonishing spike in presidential popularity. For nearly two years, Reagan had enjoyed the approval of more than half of survey respondents — often far more than half.

His approval dropped below 50% when Iran–Contra was made public, though, and it only rose above 51% once in the next 19 months — when Hall testified.

Reagan didn't resign. No evidence was ever uncovered that he authorized diversion of arms profits to the Contras, and Reagan remained president through the conclusion of his second term in 1989.

Gallup has been measuring presidential job approval since the dawn of Franklin Roosevelt's second term in 1937, and, of the presidents who have been re–elected in the last 75 years, only Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton enjoyed comparable periods of popularity.

A year before North's testimony, in July 1986, Reagan's job approval stood at 63%, according to Gallup. His popularity dipped below 50% when the scandal became public knowledge, and, by the time North began giving his testimony 25 years ago today, Reagan was clinging to a 49–43 plurality in the Gallup poll.

But Reagan bounced back. By the end of 1988, he was back at 63% approval.

In the years ahead, in fact, the implementation of the arms–for–hostages plan seemed to get a certain amount of vindication.

The now 68–year–old North ran for the U.S. Senate from Virginia nearly 20 years ago and narrowly lost to Lyndon Johnson's son–in–law. He has written several books and is a popular commentator for Fox News.

Enforcement of the Boland Amendment, which had been passed in the early 1980s, seemed to restrict future U.S. aid to the Contras. Congress later repealed the Boland Amendment, however, and funding for the Contras resumed.

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