THE ORIGINAL “NO KINGS” PROTEST: The Real Watergate Scandal.
With the help of a secret source nicknamed “Deep Throat,” Woodward and Bernstein exposed further White House interference with the Watergate investigation. In July 1973, the White House tape recording system was revealed to the Senate Committee and the battle for the tapes began. Cox was fired when he tried to get hold of them. Public outcry led Nixon to turn over some tapes and accept the appointment of a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, in November.
Arthur Schlesinger’s book The Imperial Presidency, released the same month, capitalized on the shifting sands of this political crisis. The book was a brilliant polemic, a tract for republicanism by a royalist who had had a change of heart. Schlesinger had been one of the cheerleaders of FDR’s plebiscitary monarchy; he had hoped his hero Kennedy would govern along similar lines. But the monarchy had outlived its usefulness. Now that the age of Roosevelt had come to an end and Kennedy’s Camelot was cut short by tragedy, Schlesinger wanted to bring the epoch of American kings to a close. To do so required a brazen neutralizing of the office of the presidency at all costs. The Senate Committee’s final report, issued June 27, 1974, described an authoritarian, paranoid president who produced an “atmosphere of fear” in the White House. According to the report, Nixon’s unconstitutional power grab via the Huston Plan was only stopped by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
Nixon was ordered to hand over more tapes, and in July 1974 the Supreme Court declared he must comply. The tapes exposed that Nixon knew about the Watergate break-in earlier than he had told the public. On August 7, Republican congressional leadership told Nixon that he had insufficient support to stop impeachment. The next day, Nixon announced his resignation. Upon taking office on August 9, Gerald Ford delivered the summary judgment: “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men.”
Deliberate Sabotage
Four forces worked to achieve this symbolic murder of presidential authority, driving Nixon from office and enshrining the mythology of Watergate in America’s collective psyche. In the bureaucracy, it was the national security apparatus; in culture, rising anxiety over authoritarianism; in media, the hegemony of network television; and in law, the fanaticism of the college-educated elites.
When we dig into the origins of the Watergate affair, we see not an “imperial presidency” controlling the national security agencies, but an institutional conflict between the White House on the one hand, and the military, CIA, and FBI on the other. In this conflict, the president was not winning.
That was the atmosphere that prompted the creation of the Special Investigative Unit, first run from the White House, then from CRP. After the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Defense Department study on America’s involvement in Vietnam, were leaked to The New York Times in June 1971, Nixon, mistrustful of the other national security agencies, directed his domestic advisor John Ehrlichman to create this special unit. Members were called “Plumbers” because they were tasked with stopping leaks.
Nixon wasn’t wrong to mistrust the agencies. From at least November 1970 to December 1971, the Joint Chiefs of Staff ran a spy ring against the president. Led by Admiral Thomas Moorer, the military was worried about Nixon’s foreign policy shifts and his planned withdrawal from Vietnam. Collecting documents from the White House via Navy yeoman Charles Radford, they leaked to the press to compel the White House to change course. The Moorer-Radford affair, as it’s called, was wartime espionage on the commander-in-chief. It was, as a furious Nixon put it, “a federal offense of the highest order.” The president, however, opted not to publicize this scandal or to open prosecutions.
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