A couple of personal notes. As the Ervin committee was getting going, I was in Washington, DC, as an unpaid intern in the office of Senator Hubert Humphrey. Having lost in 1968 to Nixon, Humphrey ran for the Senate and won. I was assigned to a legislative assistant who worked on economic matters (Humphrey was on the Joint Economic Committee). I was taking off the second semester of college. There was not a clear end date for my internship, but I decided in April that economic matters were not going to be important. So I went home to my summer job, working in a factory that made speakers for office buildings, hotels, and restaurants. Its name was Soundolier.
In 1976, when I was briefly a research assistant at the Fed, the section where I worked was in an annex at the Watergate. Every day, I walked through the same garage basement door where security guard Frank Wills found the suspicious tape that led him to call the police on the burglars. I did not realize that until later, when the film “All the President’s Men” recreated the scene in the garage basement.
Guilty, Guilty, Guilty
The Seventies — Lecture One: The Fall of Nixon
Opening: The Spiked Strip
On the twenty-ninth of May, 1973, readers of a few hundred newspapers turned to the comics page and met a young radio broadcaster named Mark Slackmeyer — Megaphone Mark to his listeners, a campus radical grown into a disc jockey — delivering one of his running Watergate profiles over the airwaves of station WBBY. The subject that morning was John Mitchell, the former Attorney General of the United States and the manager of the President’s reelection campaign, a man not yet charged with anything. Mark ran through the accusations piling up against him, conceded cheerfully that nothing had been proved, and then, unable to contain himself, arrived at his verdict: guilty. Guilty, guilty, guilty. The strip was called Doonesbury, its author a twenty-four-year-old named Garry Trudeau, and in a good many of the papers that carried it that morning the panel did not appear at all. The Washington Post had pulled it. So had the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, and others, on the principle that a man’s guilt is settled in a courtroom and not on the funny pages, and that to print the word over a breakfast comic was to convict before trial. That Saturday Trudeau ran the same broadcaster reaching one rung higher, up past Mitchell toward the President himself, and the same papers pulled that one too.
Hold the whole small episode in view, because it is a map of everything that follows. On one side stands Megaphone Mark, and behind him a great part of the American left, who had never for a moment doubted Nixon’s character and needed no tape and no testimony to reach the end of the story; for them the verdict had been in since before the crime. On the other side stand the institutions — the newspapers that were themselves breaking the story, running Herblock’s editorial cartoons that traced the scandal straight into the Oval Office on one page while refusing to let a comic strip name Mitchell guilty on another, drawing with great care the line between an accusation the system had licensed and one it had not. And hovering over the joke is a third irony, which is that Trudeau always insisted he had not been calling Mitchell guilty at all but mocking the certainty of the people who were so sure — a satire of the rush to judgment, spiked by editors anxious about the rush to judgment, aimed at a man who would in fact be convicted and sent to prison two years later. Mark was right. Mitchell was guilty. And being right settled nothing, because the whole question of the next fourteen months was never whether the thing was true. It was how a nation of laws could be brought, link by proven link, to act on a truth that half of it already assumed and the other half would not credit until it heard the President say it in his own voice.
[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]
The Fuse, Relit
For a president with forty-nine states in his pocket was not going to be turned out of office because a cartoonist and a college radio host had made up their minds. Six months before that spiked strip, in November of 1972, Richard Nixon had won reelection in one of the largest landslides in the country’s history, carrying every state but Massachusetts, the silent majority delivered whole. The men who despised him despised him no less for it, but they were a minority, and the machinery of removal — the grand jury, the special prosecutor, the Senate committee, the impeachment power sleeping in the House — answers to evidence and to votes, not to conviction. Nothing about the burglary that had given the scandal its name reached him. Five men had been caught in the dark inside the Democratic headquarters in June of 1972; the President’s press secretary had waved it away as a third-rate burglary, and in the roar of the landslide the country had agreed and thought no more about it. To bring Nixon down from that height would take more than certainty. It would take a slow accumulation, each month carrying the thing a little nearer his own door, until the distance between what everyone suspected and what could be proved had closed to nothing.
The fuse for that had been lit two years earlier, in a back room on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, at a copier. Daniel Ellsberg feeding the secret history of the Vietnam War through the glass one page at a time had frightened Nixon not for what it revealed of dead administrations but for what it threatened of his own secret diplomacy, and out of that fear the White House had built a small off-the-books unit to stop the next leak — the Plumbers, the men named E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, who broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in the autumn of 1971 and found nothing worth having. The unit did not disband. It went looking for other work, and in June of 1972 five of its men were arrested inside the Watergate. The instrument Nixon had forged to guard his secrets had committed the crime that would, by slow degrees, expose them all. The fire was already running back along the fuse toward the hand that struck the match. What remained was for the country to watch it travel.
[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]
[ ON-SCREEN: THE TIMELINE ]
A single spine, held on the screen through the hour, advanced one mark at a time as the narrative reaches it.
June 17, 1972 — Five men arrested inside Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate.
November 7, 1972 — Nixon reelected, forty-nine states.
January 1973 — The burglars tried before Judge John Sirica; McCord and Liddy convicted, the others plead guilty.
February 7, 1973 — The Senate votes to create the Ervin Committee.
March 21, 1973 — John Dean warns Nixon of “a cancer on the presidency.”
March 23, 1973 — Sirica reads James McCord’s letter in open court. The seal cracks.
April 30, 1973 — Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean depart; Kleindienst resigns.
May 17, 1973 — The Ervin Committee hearings open, gavel to gavel on television.
May 18, 1973 — Archibald Cox named special prosecutor.
June 25, 1973 — John Dean begins five days of testimony.
July 16, 1973 — Alexander Butterfield reveals the taping system.
October 10, 1973 — Vice President Agnew resigns.
October 20, 1973 — The Saturday Night Massacre.
November 1973 — The 18½-minute gap; “I am not a crook.”
April 1974 — The edited transcripts; “expletive deleted.”
July 24, 1974 — United States v. Nixon: the tapes must be surrendered.
July 27–30, 1974 — The House Judiciary Committee votes articles of impeachment.
August 5, 1974 — The smoking-gun tape is released.
August 9, 1974 — Nixon resigns.
Act One: The Long Quiet (June 1972 – March 1973)
Begin where the country began, which is with a story too small to believe in. In the small hours of the seventeenth of June, 1972, a security guard named Frank Wills found a strip of tape holding a stairwell latch open in the office complex on the Potomac, pulled it off, came back to find it replaced, and called the police. What the police found inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee was five men in business suits and surgical gloves carrying cameras, lock picks, bugging equipment, and several thousand dollars in sequential hundred-dollar bills. One of them, a soft-spoken man named James McCord, turned out to be the security coordinator of the Committee to Re-Elect the President — an outfit whose initials, CRP, the press could not resist pronouncing as CREEP. In the address books of two of the burglars was the name of a man at the White House, E. Howard Hunt, and beside it the notation W. House. A thread ran from the burglars into the President’s own campaign and toward the President’s own staff, visible from the very first morning to anyone willing to pull it.
Almost no one pulled it, and the reason is worth dwelling on, because it is the whole meaning of the long quiet. The country in the summer and autumn of 1972 did not want the story. It was ending a war, it liked its President or at least preferred him overwhelmingly to the alternative, and the notion that a landslide winner would risk everything to burgle an opponent he was about to bury by eighteen million votes struck most sensible people as absurd on its face. Two young reporters at the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — a Republican and a college dropout, an odd pair thrown together and half distrusting each other — kept the thread in their hands through the autumn, tracing the sequential bills back to campaign accounts and the campaign accounts back to men close to the top, guided in Woodward’s case by a source he would meet in a parking garage in the dark and would name, after a pornographic film then playing in the theaters, Deep Throat. The stories they printed were real and they were brave and they moved almost nothing. Nixon carried forty-nine states with the reporting already on the record. A legend would later grow that two reporters brought down a president; the truer and more useful account is that the press kept the coal alive through a season when the country was determined to let it go out, and that the fire itself would be lit elsewhere.
For inside the White House the cover-up had begun within days of the arrests and was working beautifully. The burglars were paid to stay silent, their legal fees carried in envelopes of cash, their loyalty bought against the promise of executive clemency down the road. The money moved, the men held their tongues, and when their trial came before Judge John Sirica of the federal district court in January of 1973, all but two pleaded guilty and the two who did not, McCord and Liddy, were convicted without breathing a word about anyone above them. It looked like the end. It looked like the system had done its work and reached the bottom of the thing — a handful of overzealous operatives, tried and convicted, the President untouched a thousand miles above them.
The one man it did not satisfy was the judge. Sirica was the son of an immigrant Italian barber, a former amateur boxer, a Republican appointee with a reputation for handing down the maximum the law allowed — Maximum John, the courthouse called him — and he did not believe for a moment that five burglars and two managers had dreamed up and financed an operation like this on their own with no one to answer to. He said so from the bench, openly, that he was not satisfied the whole truth had come out. And he held a lever the cover-up had not reckoned with: he had not yet passed final sentence. He let the convicted men understand that the length of their imprisonment might depend a great deal on whether they chose, even now, to tell him who had sent them. Then he waited. Through the second inaugural, through the swearing-in of a President at the height of his power, the seal held and the quiet held. But a crack had opened in it, and a man was sitting inside the prison walls doing arithmetic about the rest of his life.
[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]
Act Two: The Unraveling (March 1973 – October 1973)
The arithmetic came due on the twenty-third of March, 1973. As the burglars filed into Sirica’s courtroom for sentencing, the judge announced that he had received a letter, and he read it aloud. It was from James McCord, and it said the things the cover-up had spent nine months and a great deal of money to keep unsaid: that the defendants had been pressured to plead guilty and keep silent, that perjury had been committed at the trial, that others higher up had been involved and were going unnamed. It was a short letter and it changed everything, because it came from inside — not from a reporter or an enemy but from one of the burglars himself, sworn and specific, in open court. The seal did not merely crack now. It gave way.
What the country could not yet see was that the pressure had already broken through on the inside two days before McCord’s letter was read. On the morning of the twenty-first of March, the young White House counsel John Dean had sat with the President in the Oval Office and told him, in a phrase that would outlive them both, that there was a cancer growing on the presidency and that it was growing daily. Hunt was demanding more money to stay quiet — a hundred and twenty thousand dollars at once, and by Dean’s reckoning the silence of all of them might run to a million dollars over the coming years — and Dean had come to say that the thing could not be contained, that the paying and the perjury were themselves crimes now compounding the first, that the men around the President were guilty of obstruction and he among them. It is one of the strange mercies of this story that we can hear that conversation, because it was being recorded, though not one of the men in the room that morning yet grasped what that would come to mean.
From March the dominoes went over in a rush that the country watched almost in real time. Dean, seeing where the arithmetic pointed, went to the prosecutors and began to talk. On the thirtieth of April the President went on television to announce the departure of his two closest aides, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman — the disciplined chief of staff and the domestic counselor, the Berlin Wall the press had called them, the men who had stood between Nixon and the world — and the firing of Dean, and the resignation of his Attorney General. He accepted responsibility, he said, while accepting no blame, and named a new Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, a Boston patrician of unbending rectitude, with instructions to appoint an independent special prosecutor who could pursue the thing wherever it led. Richardson chose Archibald Cox, a Harvard law professor and former Solicitor General, a man of crew cut and bow tie and glacial integrity, and by choosing him lit a second fuse that would burn back toward the President from a different direction entirely.
Then came the summer of the hearings, and here the culture of the moment shows itself in a way ours can scarcely imagine. On the seventeenth of May the Senate Select Committee opened its investigation in the great marble Caucus Room, and the three television networks carried it gavel to gavel, taking turns, and public television rebroadcast the whole of each day again at night. There were three channels. A nation of housewives and shift workers and the retired and the merely transfixed sat before them through the long afternoons of that summer and watched their government take itself apart under oath. The chairman was Sam Ervin of North Carolina, seventy-six years old, who played the ambling country lawyer — I’m just an old country lawyer, he would say, dropping his eyelids — and who was in fact a Harvard-trained constitutional scholar with the whole of the Bible and a good deal of Shakespeare at his tongue’s end and a genius for the devastating question wrapped in a folksy story. Beside him sat the vice chairman, Howard Baker of Tennessee, a young Republican who had come to the committee half meaning to protect the President and who framed, in that hope, the question that would instead become the hunting cry of the whole affair: What did the President know, and when did he know it? He asked it to establish the outer limit of the damage. It became the measure by which the damage would be taken.
The hearings gave the country John Dean. For five days at the end of June the former counsel sat at the witness table, thirty-four years old, pale and flat and unhurried, his wife Maureen in a blond chignon behind him, and read a two-hundred-page statement in a monotone and then answered questions from memory with a recall so precise it unsettled the room. He accused the President of the United States, calmly and in detail, of directing the cover-up. And here the affair reached the wall it could not climb, because it was one man’s word against the word of a President, the disgraced counsel against the reelected chief, and no committee and no prosecutor could resolve a standoff of that kind. Half the country believed Dean and half believed Nixon and there the matter would have stuck, unprovable, indefinitely — but for a question asked, almost as an afterthought, of a witness so obscure that the committee had summoned him chiefly to fill a slow Friday.
The witness was Alexander Butterfield, a former deputy assistant who had since moved on to run the Federal Aviation Administration, and in a routine staff interview he was asked whether there was, by any chance, some system for recording conversations in the President’s offices. There was. Nixon, wishing to fix his own record for history, had installed a voice-activated taping system that captured, in the President’s own voice, everything said in the Oval Office and elsewhere — and Butterfield, asked a direct question under oath, saw no way to do anything but answer it. He said so publicly on the sixteenth of July, and in that instant the whole shape of the thing changed. Dean’s word against Nixon’s word was a standoff. Dean’s word against the tapes was a fact waiting to be checked. From that Monday forward there was only one question in Washington, and it was who would get the tapes.
Cox subpoenaed them. Nixon refused, pleading executive privilege, the President’s right to confidential counsel — a real principle stretched now over an unlovely purpose. The courts began to order production; the President offered instead to provide summaries, their accuracy to be verified by an elderly and famously hard-of-hearing senator, and Cox, quietly and immovably, declined the substitute and insisted on the tapes themselves. And so on the evening of Saturday, the twentieth of October, 1973, Nixon resolved to be rid of him, and ordered his Attorney General to fire the special prosecutor. Richardson refused, and resigned rather than do it, having given the Senate his word that Cox would be independent. The order passed to the deputy, William Ruckelshaus, who also refused and was gone within the hour. It fell at last to the third man in the Justice Department, the Solicitor General Robert Bork, who carried it out. In one night the President had fired the prosecutor investigating him and lost two law officers who would not be party to it, and the country, which had been watching all summer, understood the meaning of the Saturday Night Massacre without needing it explained. Western Union nearly buckled under the weight of telegrams to Washington. For the first time the word impeachment was spoken not as a fantasy of the left but as a sober possibility by sober men, and the House of Representatives began, in earnest, to stir.
[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]
Act Three: The Fall (October 1973 – August 1974)
Ten days before the Massacre, a separate disaster had quietly removed the last thing protecting Nixon from all the rest. Vice President Spiro Agnew, who had made his name flaying the President’s enemies in alliterative scorn, turned out to have taken envelopes of cash from contractors going back to his years in Maryland politics, some of the payments delivered to him in the Vice President’s own office. On the tenth of October he resigned and pleaded no contest to a tax charge to stay out of prison. His fall had nothing to do with Watergate, but its effect upon Watergate was enormous, and it is the kind of institutional accident this whole story turns on. So long as removing Nixon meant installing Agnew, removal was very nearly unthinkable to the men who would have to vote for it. Now, under the new Twenty-Fifth Amendment, whose machinery for filling a vacant vice presidency was being used for the first time in the nation’s history, Nixon named the House Republican leader Gerald Ford — decent, plodding, unfrightening, a man the country could imagine in the chair without a shudder. The price of getting rid of Nixon had just come down. There was now a tolerable morning after.
The fall from here was a matter of the tapes doing, slowly, what tapes do. In November came the revelation that one of the subpoenaed recordings held a gap of eighteen and a half minutes precisely where the President and his chief of staff had first discussed the break-in, three days after it happened — an erasure the White House explained by producing the President’s loyal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, who demonstrated for the cameras how she might have caused it by stretching to answer a telephone with her foot still on the transcription pedal, a posture so unlikely that the photograph of her contorted at her desk entered the language as the Rose Mary Stretch. Experts would later find the gap to be the work of several separate deliberate erasures. That same month the President stood before a convention of newspaper editors and, in a sentence meant to reassure that did the opposite, told the country: I am not a crook. A president had been reduced to insisting on it.
In the spring of 1974, cornered by the demand for the tapes and hoping to satisfy it without surrendering the things themselves, Nixon released twelve hundred pages of edited transcripts, bound in blue, and they did him more damage than silence would have. The country had revered the office if not always the man, and it opened the blue volumes to find the President of the United States scheming in the ugly, circling, foul-mouthed idiom of men arranging a cover-up, the profanity so constant that the editors had replaced it, again and again, with the notation expletive deleted — a phrase that became a national joke and a national disillusionment at once. It was not the crimes alone. It was the smallness, the pettiness of the talk in rooms the public had imagined filled with statecraft. Ministers denounced the moral tone from their pulpits. Nixon’s own supporters read the transcripts and grew quiet.
Then the institutions closed, each in its turn. In July the Supreme Court, including three men Nixon had himself appointed, ruled against him without a single dissent: executive privilege was real but it was not absolute, and it could not be used to withhold evidence from a criminal trial. He would have to give up the tapes, all of them. Within days the House Judiciary Committee, under the patient chairmanship of Peter Rodino, debated articles of impeachment before the same gavel-to-gavel cameras, and the country met, among the thirty-eight members, a first-term congresswoman from Texas named Barbara Jordan, whose slow, magnificent, organ-toned voice framed the stakes as no one else had. She recalled that the Constitution’s opening words, We, the people, had once by every original understanding left a Black woman like herself entirely out, and said that she had come nonetheless to take that Constitution as her own, that her faith in it was whole, and that she was not prepared to sit and watch its diminution. The committee voted three articles of impeachment. Enough Republicans crossed over to make it plainly bipartisan, though a core of the President’s defenders on the committee voted no and meant it.
They meant it until the fifth of August, when the last tape did its work. Under the Court’s order, the White House released the recording of the twenty-third of June, 1972 — a conversation six days after the burglary, before the country had given it a thought, in which Nixon is heard approving a plan to have the Central Intelligence Agency lean on the Federal Bureau of Investigation and shut its inquiry down on a false claim of national security. Here at last was the thing the whole long process had been reaching toward: the President himself, in his own voice, directing the cover-up from the very beginning, two years before he had sworn he knew nothing of it. It was called the smoking gun, and it left no room to stand. The ten Republicans on the Judiciary Committee who had voted to defend him announced, one after another, that they would now vote to impeach. His support in the Congress did not erode. It vanished in forty-eight hours.
On the seventh of August three of the most respected Republicans in the Senate came to the White House to tell the President the truth about his position — Barry Goldwater, the conscience of the party’s right, at their head. Goldwater, blunt as a hammer, told him he had perhaps fifteen votes in a Senate that would need thirty-four to acquit, and that his own was not among the certain ones. The party had withdrawn its protection. On the evening of the eighth Nixon went on television and announced that he would resign the presidency at noon the following day, the first man ever to do so. On the morning of the ninth he stood in the East Room before his staff, sweating, unscripted, veering between his mother and his failures, and left them with a line that was truer of himself than he seemed to know — that others might hate you, but that they do not win unless you hate them in return, and then you destroy yourself. He walked to the helicopter on the South Lawn, turned at the top of the steps, and threw up both arms in the two-fingered victory sign he had made his own, and was gone. Gerald Ford took the oath and told the country that its long national nightmare was over. One month later, judging that the spectacle of a former President in the dock would keep the wound open for years, Ford pardoned him — fully, unconditionally, for all offenses against the United States — and paid for it with his own standing, and very probably with the election he lost two years later.
[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]
The Language It Left Behind
An affair this long leaves its residue in the language, and the residue is a fair index of the thing. The scandal took its name from a building, and then lent that name, in the little suffix -gate, to every controversy that followed it for the next half century, so that no American public figure could be caught at anything without the press reaching for the ending Watergate had coined. From the tapes and the testimony came a whole vocabulary of evasion and concealment that passed straight into ordinary speech. To stonewall was to refuse all cooperation and admit nothing. The hangout route, and its refinement the modified limited hangout, meant a partial and managed confession got up to look like full candor, a controlled release of some truth to protect a larger lie. To deep-six a thing was to make it vanish, as evidence was proposed to be dropped into the Potomac. John Mitchell gave the affair the White House horrors, his own phrase for the catalog of dirty tricks he had labored to keep from surfacing, which told the country the cover-up was guarding sins worse than the break-in. John Ehrlichman supplied the big enchilada for the biggest target and, of the abandoned acting FBI director left to hang, the image of a man twisting slowly, slowly in the wind. John Dean gave the language a cancer on the presidency. The witnesses gave it the endlessly qualified at that point in time, the sound of men declining to be pinned to a fact. The transcripts gave it expletive deleted. Howard Baker gave it what did the President know and when did he know it. And Nixon himself, meaning to end all doubt, gave it I am not a crook.
The strangest survivor of all is a name. Bob Woodward’s secret source, the man who confirmed the reporters’ leads in a parking garage in the dark, was known within the Post by a nickname borrowed from a pornographic film then improbably at the center of American popular culture: Deep Throat. For more than thirty years his identity was among the best-kept secrets in the country, guessed at endlessly, and it outlived nearly everyone with a stake in it. Only in 2005 did the source reveal himself, an old man of ninety-one — W. Mark Felt, who in 1972 had been the Associate Director of the FBI, the second-ranking official in the Bureau, a man with a view of the whole investigation and, it turned out, motives of his own tangled up in his passing over for the top job. That the most romantic figure of the drama, the deep source in the shadows, should turn out to have been the Bureau’s own number two, working the press against a White House he distrusted, is a fitting last irony for an affair in which the machinery of government kept turning against the men who thought they controlled it.
[ PAUSE FOR QUESTIONS ]
Closing: The Fuse Reaches the Hand
Come back now to Megaphone Mark at his microphone in the spring of 1973, shouting a verdict the newspapers would not print. He was right, and his rightness was worth nothing, and the fourteen months that followed are the whole reason. A president who had won forty-nine states could not be removed by the certainty of the people who had always despised him, however sound that certainty proved. He could be removed only by the slow, reluctant, legitimate arrival of everyone else at the same place — the judge who would not believe five men acted alone, the burglar doing arithmetic in his cell, the counsel who saw the cancer and turned, the obscure deputy who would not lie about a tape, the prosecutor who would not take summaries, the law officers who would not fire him, the Court that would not shield the recordings, the committee that voted the articles, and at the last the leaders of his own party climbing the White House stairs to tell him it was finished. Each was a link, and the chain was forged one link at a time, in the open, under oath and under law. That is why it held. Conviction is cheap and proof is dear, and the distance between them is the space a free country’s institutions exist to cross.
And the instrument that carried them across it was the President’s own. Nixon had built the taping system to master his own record, to hold the goods on every man who sat across from him, to fix history in his favor before history could be written against him — and the machine he made to own the story became the evidence that convicted him out of his own mouth. Trace the whole line one final time. The leak of the Pentagon Papers had frightened him for his secrets and driven him to build the Plumbers to stop the next leak; the Plumbers, idle after their failure at the psychiatrist’s office, had gone looking for other work and been caught inside the Watergate; the cover-up of that had drawn him, week by week, into the crimes that mattered; and the tapes he had installed to guard himself had recorded every step of it and been pried from his hands by a court he could not overrule. The secrecy that carried him to Peking was the secrecy that ruined him. The tactical genius that turned every trap his enemies laid into an advantage met, in the tapes and the law, a trap of his own making that no tactic could turn. He stood at the summit of American power in the winter of 1972 with more of it in his grip than any president in a generation, and the fuse was already burning back along the floor toward his hand, set going by that hand, in answer to a leak that had threatened only his secrets and shamed only his foes.
The country he left behind was a warier one, and it built its wariness into law — a new special-prosecutor apparatus, restraints on campaign money, an act to force ethics into the open, a Congress newly jealous of the war power and the purse. It had learned to distrust the office it had revered, and the distrust would color everything in the decade the resignation opened. But the deepest lesson of the affair was the one Megaphone Mark could not have taught, shouting his verdict into a microphone in a strip the papers spiked. A system of laws does not run on certainty, however righteous. It runs on proof, patiently gathered, and it moved against the strongest president since Roosevelt only when the proof left it no choice — and it moved, in the end, on the strength of a machine the President had built with his own hands to make himself safe.
[ END OF LECTURE ]
End of Lecture One — Guilty, Guilty, Guilty
Prosecuting Richard Nixon after his resignation in the face of certain impeachment and conviction would have meant a rapid descent into a third-world system of political maneuvering via criminal charges. We're already in a bad enough place after the three failed impeachments since Nixon's resignation and the expanding use of state courts as a means of attack.
I'm old enough to remember Watergate, but was too young to follow what was going on at the time; so I'll ask this of people who know more about the subject.
I'm curious about McCord's role in all of this. According to the text, he was CRP's "security coordinator", which sounds like a higher-up position: like the sort of person who should've been giving orders to the people who gave orders to the burglars, and not a member of the burglary team himself. Am I misreading his status in the hierarchy, and was he much closer to a foot soldier? I'd thought that the burglars were there chiefly to bug the place; were they actually after something specific, so McCord had to be along to identify it? Or did he go along with the whole thing as a sort of frat-boy lark, with no thought that he might be caught and tried?