resident Richard Nixon would have loved
the coverage of the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in
last week. The scandal that drove him from office has been
pretty much reduced to a little guessing game about who did or
didn't whisper in the ear of a young Washing- ton Post
reporter that there were some bad things going on in the White
House. Who was Deep Throat? Who cares? The press cares, that's
who.
Nixon wanted Americans to think of Watergate as a
third-rate burglary just another White House melodrama, like
Bill and Monica and he may get his wish. Journalists'
predilection for putting ourselves at the center of history
and tacking "gate" onto the names of later scandals, great and
small, is gradually trivializing the events of the late 1960's
and early 1970's.
Watergate was not just a burglary. It was not about
personal finances like Whitewater. It was not about a
president's knowledge of clandestine foreign operations as in
the U-2 affair or Iran-contra. Watergate was a clandestine
domestic operation in which a determined president secretly
plotted what amounted to a coup d'ιtat against American
constitutional government.
The real story and lessons of Watergate are in peril of
being lost or forgotten. Thirty years of research, scholarship
and confession millions of documents, thousands of tapes
have made it perfectly clear that the botched break-in of June
17, 1972, at the Democratic National Committee offices was
actually a small incident in Nixon's deliberate, if sometimes
clumsy, effort to secretly create a new kind of all-powerful
presidential government that reflected his own contempt for
democracy and for the Constitution's checks and balances
designed to restrict the power of presidents.
Richard Nixon was a strange and gifted man and, in his own
words, an introvert in an extrovert's business. In his years
at the White House, he spent more and more time alone, writing
out his thoughts and frustrations late at night on yellow
legal pads or scheming with the two men he saw most, his chief
of staff, H. R. Haldeman, and his national security adviser,
Henry Kissinger. He was not kidding when he said that he
envied Mao Zedong because the Chinese Communist dictator could
rule a vast country with only two or three other men involved
in critical decision making.
If Nixon's personal desire was to be alone with his
thoughts, his presidential goal was to decide and act alone.
One of the more amazing documents uncovered in recent years
was the secret contract he forced Cabinet members to sign
after he was re-elected in 1972. He retreated to Camp David to
craft a plan to reorganize the executive branch. One of the 15
clauses of the contract read: "No policy-making resides in any
Policy Council, Policy Group, Assistant to the President,
Counselor to the President, or Cabinet Secretary, except as
expressly designated by the President. . . . A Cabinet
Secretary should not be encouraged to anticipate either free
access or frequent consultation with the President."
He operated behind screens of secrets and layer upon layer
of lies, big and small, a strategy that worked in his first
term. Nixon was able to make great decisions, world-changing
decisions, without the advice or interference of Congress, the
courts, the federal bureaucracy, the press and certainly
without the knowledge or consent of the governed.
Take two of the great milestones of the Nixon years: the
opening to China in 1972 and taking the United States dollar
off the gold standard in 1971, which changed the economy of
the world. Both of those momentous initiatives were created on
his yellow pads or in secret meetings involving fewer than two
dozen people. There was no public debate or discussion. Both
were presented to the American people as faits accomplis in
television announcements by the president.
Nixon had learned to govern by surprise. His most important
role model was Charles de Gaulle, another antidemocratic
elected president, who governed more or less by edict. But
surprise in the American system required enormous secrecy.
Protecting the secrecy required lies so many that some of
the most important officials of the country had no idea what
the truth was and neither, it could be argued, did Nixon at
the end. By then the military was tapping White House
telephones and sending its own operatives to the building at
night to empty wastebaskets, steal documents and photograph
National Security Council records.
The baffles of deceptions began not with a burglary, but
with a murder in June 1969. Nixon dictated lies to the Central
Intelligence Agency to prevent the court-martial of six Green
Berets for murdering one of their own spies. It happened that
the man, Thai Khac Chuyen, was involved in target selection
and damage evaluation for secret bombing in Cambodia. Any
legal process would have revealed the bombing, which was being
kept secret from Congress and the public by phony Air Force
record-keeping ordered by the president.
A year
later, Nixon approved a secret plan, the so-called Huston
Plan, authorizing domestic electronic surveillance and lifting
restrictions on surreptitious entry. He had to back down on
that plan because the F.B.I. director, J. Edgar Hoover,
refused to cooperate, saying the press or Congress would
eventually discover what was happening. Then Nixon decided to
do the same thing from inside the White House in 1971,
creating an extra-legal secret operation that included the
unit called the Plumbers. By early 1972, Nixon, his
re-election committee and the Republican National Committee
were using illegally collected cash to pay the Plumbers, a
group of low-lifes capable of breaking into offices and
embassies to plant telephone taps and to photograph
papers.
Three years after the Green Beret cover-up, the Plumbers
were caught in the Watergate building. Whether Nixon himself
ordered that particular operation may never be known, but he
tried to use the Central Intelligence Agency to cover up the
incident. The details of what he knew don't matter that much
now. He was the one who made the decision to pay off the
burglars for their silence in court, committing the crime that
eventually crushed him.
There will always be political scandal revealed in a
country with a healthy free press. But Watergate was unique as
the climax of a presidency that believed that governance
required lies and deception. Though Nixon was pardoned, his
legacy was the destruction of American faith in government and
its elected leaders. And that not the heroics of the press
is what should be remembered about the episode called
Watergate.
Richard Reeves is the author of, most recently,
``President Nixon: Alone in the White
House.''