Watergate - 25 years on - 20 June 1997

Americans seem to be celebrating, or at least recalling, more anniversaries than anybody these days, and I think it must have much to do with the never-ending increase in television channels and the constant problem of filling them with programmes throughout the day.

Most stations, like most newspapers, employ somebody to consult every day one of those big books like The Timetables Of History, which record in parallel columns what was happening around the world in government, science, the arts, sport, literature, inventions, exploration, medicine and so on from pre-history to only yesterday.

A more ambitious use of the historical reminder is done by a television network called The History Channel. That opens up endless possibilities. It had better if you’re going to sustain programmes about history, which it does, 24 hours a day.

But last Tuesday, there fell an anniversary that all the networks seized on because they had whole libraries of tape, film, about it: the outstanding American scandal of our time, certainly the greatest constitutional crisis since the American Civil War.

Like most viewers, I suppose I hadn’t noticed anything particularly significant about the date: 17 June 1997. It flashed on my retina with the opening shot of the evening news a late middle-aged man standing on airplane steps, swarthy, grinning, arms spread-eagled like a new dictator just arrived to a thunderous welcome. But this man wasn’t coming. He was going.

A student in his early 20s watching said simply the incredible sentence, “Who is he?” He was Richard M Nixon, the only president in American history to resign in disgrace.

I suppose the young man might be forgiven. Tuesday was the 25th anniversary of the event that brought Mr Nixon down, which was a year or two before this young man was born. I myself at his age would have had a hard time recognising General Botha, Britain’s enemy in the Boer War, which had also happened to me in the very distant past, namely six years before I was born.

It occurred to me that since this otherwise bright young man didn’t recognise the famous, the infamous President Nixon, 25 years might also have dulled the memory of a lot of people who were alive and sentient at the time. The event was to be forever known as Watergate, and this week many Americans dated their distrust of Washington and their cynicism about government itself from Watergate.

So I think it’s worth looking back and retelling as simply and clearly as possible the tale of the rather ridiculous burglary that began on 17 June 17 1972.

Two o’clock on a hot morning then, in Washington in June, at a large apartment complex, a block of flats, known as the Watergate building. A guard was making his nightly rounds. As he passed by the offices of the Democratic National Committee, he noticed a tape on the lock of their door. He thought this odd and he smelled a rat, five rats. He called the police and they hot-footed it over and caught, inside the Democrats’ office five men, two of them Cubans. They had cameras and electronic gear for bugging telephones. It looked like, it was, a clumsy attempt to bug the Democrats’ phones.

It drew only comical attention in the papers, but naturally the press guessed that the raid must have been staged by some Republicans, maybe by enthusiastic Nixon fans. It was a presidential year and the campaign was hotting up.

Next day, on the Wednesday, the White House announced that the burglars were operating “neither on our behalf, nor with our consent”. That word came from Mr Nixon’s reelection campaign manager, his attorney general, later a convicted felon sent to jail.

For a week or two facetious references continued to be made about what the papers called ‘The Watergate Caper’, and then the silly story was forgotten.

But not by two reporters on the Washington Post, later to become nationally, if not world famous as a brilliant investigative team: two reporters in their late 20s, Woodward and Bernstein.

After about six weeks of mooching around, digging into lots of apparently irrelevant documents, reports, memoranda and interviewing all sorts of people – they worked on an average about sixteen hours a day – on 1 August they published a piece in their paper asserting that the Watergate break-in was not (as everybody had come to take for granted) not a wild partisan escapade by a couple of loony Cubans and helpers who feared that if Mr Nixon’s democratic opponent was elected in November, Fidel Castro and the Communists would take over the United States. The break-in, they said, was linked financially to a committee to reelect the president, known later as CREEP, which of course was a proper legitimate organisation.

Political parties must report the source of their campaign contributions, but the Democrats, with the help of the two reporters, discovered that $114,000 were missing from President Nixon’s reported contributions. It was, the reporters said, the exact amount paid out by the committee, CREEP’s finance chairman, to guess who? The leader of the burglars’ gang. And they went on to reveal it as a down payment on what was meant to be a massive campaign of espionage and sabotage against the Democrats, and even against reporters secretly listed as Nixon enemies.

The day after the discovery of the secret fund, President Nixon denounced the Washington Post for “mud-slinging” and “shabby journalism”. But Woodward and Bernstein had picked up a scent, which led from the break-in and the secret fund and the laundering of great sums of money in Miami and other places, and the trail led nearer and nearer to the president’s men in the White House.

By the spring of 1973, a former CIA official and several Republican Party officials pleaded guilty as co-conspirators in this whole plot, and the president’s two senior advisers (who by now must have known that Woodward and Bernstein had their number) decided to resign.

We would hear much more from them at a special Senate investigating committee that was set up as the Woodward-Bernstein plot grew thicker and murkier.

The chairman of that committee was a courtly old southern lawyer, Senator Ervin, but his roguish charm did not soften his legal jabs or his curiosity in wondering what did the president know and when did he know it.

At one of these hearings, a minor White House official testifying in answer to a question said, “Oh that was all on the tapes.” “The tapes? What tapes?” Oh didn’t they know? The president secretly taped all and every conversation in his White House office.

The committee at first gasped and then rejoiced. They requested the tapes from the White House. Mr Nixon claimed executive privilege. Senator Ervin retorted, “Executive poppycock. I could send the sergeant-at-arms up to the White House and say with Shakespeare, ‘what meat doth this Caesar eat that he grows so fat?’”

The Supreme Court ordered the tapes to be surrendered, first a batch that Mr Nixon had edited and then another batch, unedited. The tapes were an appalling revelation. Apart from showing up Mr Nixon as a remarkable practitioner of foul language, there were masses of conversations about the secret fund, about paying off the burglars so they wouldn’t blow the whistle on the White House people involved.

But in all the thousands of discussions and private plotting and arguing about the whole smelly business, there was no single speech or confession from the president’s own lips that he’d known about the raid early on and tried to cover up the consequences.

By the spring of 1974, the Watergate scandal had grown so serious and Mr Nixon’s part in it so conspicuous, if still not specific, that the House Judiciary Committee met to consider articles of impeachment against him.

At the beginning of August, 1974, Mr Nixon was forced by the Supreme Court to release one last, very early, tape; and there, as gross as a manacle, was the missing link: the president himself telling an aide to “get busy at once and stop the CIA and the FBI investigating the break-in.”

That sentence was spoken only six days after the break-in itself. It showed that Nixon had known all along, had relentlessly managed the cover-up, and had lied steadily and unblinkingly to the Congress, the press, the people for two years.

The committee voted for his impeachment, mainly on the charge of obstruction of justice; and rather than stand trial before the Senate, on 8 August 1974, he resigned.

Looking back on it now through all the torturous complexity of the conspiracy, I believe there were two fateful moments, fatal for the conspirators. One was the moment the Watergate guard saw the Democrats’ office door lock taped.

The other was the offhand remark of that minor White House official that the President taped everything talked about in his office and forgot to turn off the machine. The guard’s name was Frank Kelly. The White House official was one Alexander Butterfield. Kelly and Butterfield will have their names permanently inscribed as footnotes to the historical record.

The only other consequence of the whole business that strikes me as having had a lasting influence on journalism is the fame of Woodward and Bernstein. They were pioneers of investigative reporting – diligent, serious and extremely careful.

Unfortunately, they have inspired a whole generation of reporters in the English-speaking countries who take very little interest in the movers and shakers of their time, but are brought up on the idea that unveiling a personal, preferably a sexual, scandal is the whole purpose of good journalism. It’s true and it’s awful.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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