50 Years Later, the Motive Behind Watergate Remains Clouded

One strange thing about Watergate, the scandal that led Richard Nixon to resign as president, is that 50 years later we still don’t know who ordered the core crime or why.

This was the crime: On June 17, 1972, a squad of five bagmen, all with at least past connections to the CIA, broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the Watergate office building. They were supervised by James McCord, director of security for Nixon’s reelection committee.

McCord made a series of baffling decisions that made being caught far more likely.

To start, he taped open locks on doors to ease the way for the burglars, who were delayed in breaking in because a staffer was working late to cadge phone calls on the DNC’s dime. A passing security guard easily detected the unsubtle subterfuge and re-locked them.

Despite this sign that they’d been made, McCord guided his men into the building anyway, retaping the locks the same way. They were quickly rediscovered the same way, and this time the guard called the cops.

The nation-shaking saga we call Watergate had begun.

The most obvious and common speculation is that the burglars were trying to steal political intelligence from DNC chair Larry O’Brien for the Nixon campaign’s benefit. But anyone knowledgeable about how presidential campaigns work would know that any political intelligence worth stealing had already moved to the headquarters of Democratic nominee George McGovern. The party’s national headquarters doesn’t have much to do at that point except to put on the convention, and O’Brien had already moved to Miami to take charge of that. His office in the Watergate was vacant and ghostly.

Besides, the burglars were caught bugging the telephone not of O’Brien but of a minor party official named Spencer Oliver, a man whose duties kept him out on the road most of the time and away from his phone—a fact that has engendered some fascinatingly strange speculation, as we’ll see.

Even Nixon administration figures who ended up doing time in prison due to the shock waves from that peculiar break-in, such as former White House counsel John Dean, former special counsel Chuck Colson, and former Attorney General John N. Mitchell, never seemed to understand themselves the whys behind the scandal that ended up with them disgraced and imprisoned.

Some of his notorious office tape recordings reveal Nixon himself seemingly unsure. Though the recordings show a ruthless president determined to protect himself at any cost, they also demonstrate a frequent bafflement about what his supposed subordinates are doing. “What in hell is this?” Nixon asked Dean, the chief architect of the cover-up, as they discussed the Watergate burglary itself. “What is the matter with these people? Are they crazy?”

Five decades later, despite 30,000 pages of declassified FBI investigative reports, 16,091 pages of Senate hearing transcripts, 740 pages of White House tape transcriptions, and scores of histories of the scandal and memoirs by its participants, we still know more about the cover-up than we do about the break-in.

We do know, thanks to the revelations that followed, a litany of what Mitchell would himself call “White House horrors”—not just the Watergate burglary and wiretapping, but blackmail, arson, forgery, kidnappings, hush money, and internal security measures that can, without the slightest hyperbole, be called fascist. The swirl of scandals also included events unconnected to the burglary and cover-up, from a coup in Chile to secret bombings in Cambodia.

Too many government-respecting liberals, in overrating both the uniqueness and the finality of these scandals, seemed to believe that by ousting Nixon and his minions, The Washington Post and Judge John Sirica and the Senate Watergate committee not only saved democracy but obliterated an entire epoch of war and corruption. But then how do we explain the Iran-Contra scandal that would follow 15 years later? Or the sexual and financial hijinx of the Clintons? Or, if we ever get it sorted out, whatever the hell was going on with the Russians and the Trump campaign or the Democrats and the FBI or maybe both during the past six years?

White House abuses of power didn’t start with Watergate either, as Martin Luther King Jr. (targeted for blackmail by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s FBI) or the Japanese citizens locked up by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt could tell you. The valorization of Watergate—the crime, the cover-up, and the exposure—warped America’s understanding of what we have to fear about government misbehavior and overreach, and led many people to overrate what can be expected from the American media when it comes to curbing power.

This misreading is rooted in a fundamental error: the idea that the government’s blunders and abuses are simply the result of evil men occasionally grabbing the levers of power.

Watergate’s Tortured Prehistory

The cluster of events that would become known as Watergate began in 1969, just a few months into Nixon’s presidency, when the White House began secretly bombing North Vietnamese and Viet Cong targets in Cambodia. (How secret? Even most members of the bomber crews didn’t know they were inside Cambodian air space.) When word of the bombing leaked to The New York Times, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger furiously demanded an investigation. He asked the FBI to wiretap 18 administration staffers, and the list soon expanded to include journalists as well.

The Nixon administration had a penchant for secrecy—and where there is secrecy, there are leaks. The White House counted more than 20 major leaks in the administration’s first four months. Blame it on Xerox: Photocopiers were just becoming standard office equipment in 1969, and both leakers and the reporters who treasured them soon realized that an illicitly copied document was a lot more convincing to editors and readers than a “sources said” story. The Pentagon Papers, soon to become the mother of all leaks, could never have happened without a photocopier.

Although the Pentagon Papers had nothing to do with Nixon—they indicted the foolish and criminal Vietnam policies of his predecessors—Nixon denounced the exposé as “treasonable” and went after the leaker, a former Pentagon and State Department consultant named Daniel Ellsberg. The White House not only employed its standard tactic of wiretapping but went a f