From a Washington Post review by Leonard Downie of Garrett Graff’s book titled “Watergate: A New History”:
The answer turns out to be yes — this one: Garrett M. Graff’s “Watergate: A New History.” It is a remarkably rich narrative with compelling characters, who range from criminal and flawed to tragic and heroic. As someone who played a small role in the drama while I was editing many of The Washington Post’s Watergate stories, I found that Graff convincingly populates and re-creates an extraordinary time in the history of the country and this city.
To do so, Graff, a prolific journalist, historian and author, waded through scores of previous books, plus countless pages of oral histories, news stories and Nixon’s Oval Office tape transcripts, as well as FBI, court and congressional records, among other documentation in various archives. “My goal was not to re-investigate,” Graff writes, explaining that he “purposefully chose not to conduct fresh interviews.” Instead, he decided “to tell the story based on the documentary archival record,” which has been steadily expanding over the decades.
His story encompasses not just the Watergate burglary and coverup, but “a dozen other distinct but related scandals” during the Nixon administration, including illegal wiretaps, campaign “dirty tricks,” possible treason, attempted misuse of the FBI and CIA, and the bribery conviction of Vice President Spiro Agnew, “plus a little bit of presidential tax fraud.” It makes for a challenging read at nearly 700 pages of text, detailing fast-paced, interlocking events over six years.
Yet, Graff succeeds in his stated mission to tell “a more human story, one not filled with giants, villains, and heroes, but with flawed everyday people worried about their families, their careers, and their legacies.” The book is filled with apt sketches of its many characters, major and minor, from all the president’s men, and some of their spouses, to journalists, investigators, lawyers and members of Congress. It vividly re-creates all the key events, from Nixon’s overreaction to the revelation of the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War in June 1971 to his resignation in August 1974.
Graff surprisingly focuses often in the book on Mark Felt, the FBI’s No. 2 official at the time, who became a key unnamed source of information for several reporters, especially The Post’s Bob Woodward, who identified him only as Deep Throat until Felt was unmasked by his own family decades later. Graff appears to identify as Felt’s motivation his loss in a rather unseemly competition to succeed J. Edgar Hoover as FBI director.
Graff sprinkles his book with readable anecdotes and asides, some of them in the many footnotes dotting the bottoms of pages. For example, when Nixon wanted someone to break into the Brookings Institution to find possibly embarrassing information about himself, Tony Ulasewicz, a former New York cop hired as a White House staff gumshoe, was assigned to the job. But he had to go to a public library to find what and where Brookings was. Eventually, that burglary plot was abandoned.
Graff writes that the $100 bills the burglars were carrying when they were arrested inside the Watergate were intended to bribe any building guards who might find and confront them. Instead, the guard on duty, Frank Wills, famously called the police when he twice found tape keeping a garage door open.
Each morning during the Senate Watergate hearings, chaired by Democrat Sam Ervin, the avuncular senator could be seen briefly studying a book held open in front of him by an aide. Graff notes that Ervin was perusing a Senate cafeteria menu placed inside the book, before he pointed to the sandwich he wanted to order for lunch.
Graff also seeks to correct conflicts, errors and evasions that he found in previous books, including many of “the more than thirty memoirs by key participants” in the scandals and the investigations of them. He credits Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and their editors at The Post for their investigative work on Watergate, but he also dwells on a few mistakes they made and discrepancies he believes he has found in their descriptions of their work. Graff also rightly credits significant Watergate scoops by a few of their competitors. And he expresses skepticism about some of the “cinematic drama” of the “All the President’s Men” movie, which frames much of people’s knowledge of Watergate today.
Interestingly, in his day-by-day narrative of the final week of Nixon’s presidency, Graff notes that “accounts and recollections get muddy; across the half-dozen central memoirs, including Nixon’s and [White House chief of staff Alexander] Haig’s, and the books that record this moment, like Woodward and Bernstein’s ‘The Final Days,’ there are conflicting accounts of who said what in which meeting.”
More important, after presenting all his prodigious research and analysis, Graff concludes that “we’ll never really know the full truth of Watergate” because its “remaining mysteries are spread among too many people, many of whom are now dead, their secrets buried alongside them.” Who ultimately ordered the Watergate break-in and why? Just to bug the offices or phones of the Democratic National Committee? Or to find something embarrassing that could be used against the Democrats during the 1972 election? Or to discover whether the Democrats had dirt on the Nixon campaign? Graff finds multiple theories in the memoirs of the president’s men.
His book is weakest on the long-term impact of Watergate. Much of the ensuing campaign finance reforms and elections of “Watergate baby” reformers to Congress have gradually washed away over the last half-century. Perhaps the most lasting impact has been in the news media, where investigative reporting that holds power accountable in all walks of American life emerged from Watergate and has endured, even as the media is being reshaped in the digital age. Graff recognizes the change, but he also appears to disparage it and to minimize the importance of today’s investigative reporting as Watergate’s legacy. “After a generation of journalists that had probably trusted government too much,” he writes near the end of his book, “came a generation of journalists who seemed to believe that Watergates existed inside every government office and corporate headquarters.”
I’ve read a couple dozen books about Watergate, and I’ve written chapters about The Post’s Watergate investigation in two of my own books. I found “Watergate: A New History” to be engaging, informative and thought-provoking, more than earning its place on bookshelves alongside the old histories.
Leonard Downie Jr., a former executive editor of The Washington Post, is a journalism professor in D.C. at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School. His most recent book is “All About the Story: News, Power, Politics and The Washington Post.”
—
Also see the New York Times review by Douglas Brinkley headlined “Watergate: The Scandal That Never Goes Away.” The opening grafs:
Seldom had a White House event been more meticulously planned than the June 12, 1971, wedding of President Richard Nixon’s daughter Tricia to Edward F. Cox, the 24-year-old scion of a prominent New York family. A who’s who of celebrities and notables attended, including Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale and J. Edgar Hoover. The 87-year-old Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who herself had been married at the White House in 1906, shakily dug her invitation out of her handbag to present to security. Cameras clicked madly when the newlyweds cut their seven-tier wedding cake. Yet when the stories hit the news, the Rose Garden gala was portrayed as Squaresville, U.S.A.
Nixon was livid. “If it were the Kennedys,” he complained to his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, “it would be rerun every night for three weeks.” He found the smugness of The Washington Post particularly infuriating. “I just don’t like that paper,” he grumbled to his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, demanding that The Post be banned from future White House social events.
As the journalist and historian Garrett M. Graff details in his dazzling “Watergate: A New History,” the White House’s anti-press escalation began the very next day when The New York Times ran Neil Sheehan’s eye-popping “Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces Three Decades of Growing Involvement.” It was the initial volley describing what came to be called “The Pentagon Papers,” a classified 7,000-page Defense Department study, leaked by the defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg, that traced the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. “The Pentagon Papers contained all the right ingredients for an explosion,” Graff writes. “They played to Nixon’s conspiratorial paranoid nature, to his antipathy for the press in general and The Washington Post and The New York Times in specific; moreover, they focused on a government cover-up, catnip to reporters, that stemmed from the thing Nixon hated most next to perhaps antiwar protesters — leakers.”
Nixon had been the first president since 1848 to enter the White House without control of either congressional body, which forced him to triangulate with Democratic senators to pass laws like the Clean Air Act and the Occupational Health and Safety Act — both landmarks of the liberal era of American governance. But his refusal to immediately pull troops out of Vietnam, coupled with his administration’s illegal incursions into Cambodia and Laos, had earned him a villainous reputation. Seething that the media, the Democrats and the counterculture were all out to destroy him, Nixon fought back.
Treating politics as a blood sport, he disregarded the protocols and proprieties of the executive branch, putting himself above the law. Beyond suing The Times, he recruited a team of former F.B.I. and C.I.A. operatives for clandestine operations intended to plug the Pentagon Papers leak. On Sept. 3, 1971, that team — nicknamed “the plumbers” — broke into the Los Angeles office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, seeking evidence to discredit the whistle-blower. They found nothing, but the file cabinet they pried open is now on display at the Smithsonian.
As Nixon’s 1972 re-election effort gained steam, one of those plumbers, G. Gordon Liddy, was transferred to the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), where he obtained approval from Attorney General John Mitchell for a wide-ranging plan of espionage. On May 28, 1972, Liddy’s men staged their first break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at Washington’s Watergate complex, bugging the telephones of staffers. During a subsequent incursion on June 17, they were discovered and apprehended — touching off the scandal that would ultimately take down the administration.
A lively writer, Graff explores the dramatic scope of the Watergate saga through its participants — politicians, investigators, journalists, whistle-blowers and, at center stage, Nixon himself: power broker extraordinaire, five-time fixture on Republican presidential tickets between 1952 and 1972, and holder of the record for most appearances on the cover of Time magazine, at 55 issues. For all his accomplishments, the 37th president was a man of deep contradictions: a law-and-order candidate who flouted the law, an insecure man with a deep reservoir of hubris, a traditional-values president who drank to excess and cursed like a sailor….
With granular detail, Graff writes about the white-collar criminals, hatchet men and rogues who populated the outer circles of Nixon’s covert operations. The deputy campaign manager, Jeb Magruder, arguably comes off the worst, “an empty vessel of a man, all too ready to fulfill others’ ambitions, taskings and visions.” Though competent enough to help devise Nixon’s winning 1972 re-election slogan, “Now More Than Ever,” he displayed a carelessness that saw him nonchalantly introducing Liddy to Washington reporters as CREEP’s “man in charge of dirty tricks.” This caused Liddy to beg the White House counsel, John Dean, to fire the preppy loudmouth. “Magruder’s an asshole, John,” Liddy pleaded, “and he’s going to blow my cover.” Magruder stayed on, then flipped to federal prosecutors in exchange for reduced charges.
The heroes of “Watergate” are predictable: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post. Charting their trajectory from the arraignment of the Watergate burglars on June 17, 1972, until Vanity Fair revealed the identity of Deep Throat in 2005, Graff celebrates their tenacity while also documenting dramatic embellishments in their best-selling memoir “All the President’s Men.”
Watergate studies can be a rabbit hole of hard-to-decipher tapes and half-baked theories. As a former Politico Magazine editor, Graff chafes at hunches and internet misinformation. Therefore, it’s notable that he suggests the C.I.A. might have set up the voice-activated system that sank Nixon’s ship. The mysterious figure of Alexander Butterfield looms large in this regard. According to Graff, Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s secretary, believed that Butterfield, who installed the White House taping system, was a C.I.A. operative. “I have to agree,” Haldeman is quoted as saying. “She may have a point.”…
Speak Your Mind