Forty years ago this summer, the series of scandals popularly called
Watergate came to a climax. The Supreme Court ordered the
release of several Oval Office tapes that President Richard Nixon,
citing Executive Privilege, had refused to release. The
now-public tapes implicated the President in covering up the
investigation of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee
office in the Watergate Building. In light of these
revelations, most of the President's support even within his own
party evaporated, and Nixon resigned from office on August 9.
Though the Watergate scandals first came to public attention with the
arrest of five burglars at the DNC headquarters in June 1972, their
origins lay in the Nixon administration's efforts to carry on the
Vietnam War while painting opponents of the war as un-American.
When Nixon assumed office in January 1969, he led Americans to
believe he would bring the war to a quick conclusion. But in March,
he undertook a major expansion of the war by launching a secret
bombing campaign against enemy strongholds in the neutral country of
Cambodia. The bombings were so secret Nixon had to establish an
ad-hoc command system that excluded some high-level military
officials. For instance, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
knew about them, but the Secretary of the Air Force did not.
In the words of historian Loren Baritz, "The
bombing [of Cambodia] continued for over a year. The President
finally had authorized 3,600 flights, while the Pentagon calculated
that 110,000 tons of bombs had been dropped on that neutral nation.
The enemy's headquarters were not hit and not found, the sanctuaries
were not 'knocked out,' but a metastatic rot had now infected the
American government."
Of course, the bombings were not kept secret from the North
Vietnamese, but from Congress and the American people. As Baritz
says, “If the President and [National
Security Advisor Henry] Kissinger had allowed Americans in on the
secrets they shared with the North Vietnamese, their countrymen would
have raised hell. To avoid this, they both became increasingly
secretive, increasingly manipulative, and, perhaps, slightly mad."
When the New York Times printed a story in May revealing the secret
bombings, Nixon ordered the FBI to install warrantless wiretaps on
several reporters and members of his own administration in an effort
to find the leak. This fear of leaks continued to grow, reaching a
crescendo in 1971 when former Defense Department consultant Daniel
Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers—the Defense Department’s own
classified history of the war—to the Times.
Furious, Nixon and his aides set out to prevent further leaks and
discredit those they saw as hostile to the administration. In the
words of White House assistant Egil Krogh, “Anyone who opposes us,
we'll destroy. As a matter of fact, anyone who doesn't support
us, we'll destroy." To this end, a secret organization
within the White House, the Plumbers, was formed to collect damaging
information on Ellsberg and others deemed Nixon’s enemies, by legal
or illegal means.
Americans at this time were badly divided over issues of the war and
civil rights. The strategy of the Nixon administration aimed to split
the country even further, creating what Vice-President Spiro Agnew
termed a “positive polarization.” Thus the administration
attempted to vilify the anti-war movement, civil rights activists,
the media and, by implication, the Democrats.
During this period there emerged a mindset within the administration
that Nixon represented the country’s best interests. Therefore,
anyone who opposed Nixon was deemed un-American and, having been so
labeled, Nixon and his aides believed his opponents were not entitled
the rights of American citizens. In the words of a 1971 memo from
White House Counsel John Dean, “we can maximize the fact of our
incumbency in dealing with the persons known to be active in their
opposition to our administration. Stated a bit more bluntly—
. . . we can use the available federal machinery to screw our
political enemies." Emboldened by this idea, the administration
employed a variety of tactics ranging from the use of federal
agencies—like the Justice Department, IRS or FCC—to intimidate
opponents to illegal break-ins and wiretaps.
If one views Watergate as epitomized by the arrest of five burglars
in the DNC headquarters, it is possible to dismiss it as a nearly
comic affair—as, in the words of Nixon’s press secretary, “a
third-rate burglary.” But if one traces the scandal to its origins
in the secret bombing of a neutral country, then it becomes the stuff
of war crimes.
Oftentimes, as journalist Michael Kinsley has remarked, “the real
scandal is what’s legal.”
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