Considerable mythology has arisen about Watergate, and these myths are confusing the current discussion around why and how Nixon was driven from office—which in turn has muddled the conversation around the possible fate of Donald Trump, whom Democrats might move to impeach if they take control of the House in November. In any event, it’s worth separating myth from reality when it comes to Watergate and the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon.

One of the greatest misconceptions around Watergate is that it was the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, and the subsequent cover-up, that led to Nixon being forced to surrender the presidency. But, in fact, when Nixon returned to Washington from his vacation home in Key Biscayne, Florida, three days after the break-in had been discovered, he and chief of staff H.R. Haldeman had another matter on their minds. The two men were worried that if the burglars—a group of “plumbers,” established ostensibly to ferret out the source of leaks that upset the Nixon White House led by E. Howard Hunt, a former C.I.A. operative who’d participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion, and G. Gordon Liddy, a former F.B.I. G-man—talked to federal investigators, their other activities on behalf of the White House might come to light. The real role of the plumbers was to “destroy” (Nixon talked that way) Nixon’s real and perceived “enemies,” meaning that, as Haldeman put it to the president when they met three days after the discovered break-in, “the problem is that there are all kinds of other involvements.” (This conversation was recorded on the tape of which 18 and a half minutes was later discovered to have been erased—a revelation that set off one of a number of explosions in the Watergate story. John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s head of domestic policy, wrote in his memoir that Nixon had done the erasing at Camp David.)

The “other involvement” that Nixon and Haldeman were most worried about being discovered was a break-in on September 3, 1971, more than nine months before the famous Watergate intrusion. This earlier break-in occurred at the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who, in June 1971, leaked the Pentagon Papers, a Johnson-era analysis of the Vietnam War, to The New York Times, The Washington Post,and The Boston Globe. Although the report had nothing to do with the Nixon administration directly, it did raise serious questions about the rationale for the war. Nixon, egged on by national-security adviser Henry Kissinger, was enraged at the study’s leak, and wanted Ellsberg “crushed” and any further unwonted leaks stopped. And so the Office of Special Investigations—the plumbers unit—was established, and Nixon’s obliging top aides drew up “Hunt/Liddy Special Project No. 1,” the goal of which was to recover damaging intel on Ellsberg.

Once it was revealed, the break-in at the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding was considered by observers—as it had been by Nixon himself—to be far more serious than the Watergate break-in. Even conservative members of Congress were shocked. During hearings by a special Senate committee in the summer of 1973, Georgia’s conservative Democratic Senator Herman Talmadge (southern Democrats hadn’t yet gone red) asked Ehrlichman if he recalled the English principle in which “no matter how humble a man’s cottage is, even the king of England cannot enter without his consent.” Ehrlichman replied chillingly, “I am afraid that that has been considerably eroded over the years.”

As it happens, the burglars found no medical papers about Ellsberg in Dr. Fielding’s files. Nevertheless, that particular raid had far-reaching consequences. It remained secret until Ellsberg’s 1973 trial, when the Justice Department was obliged to disclose it. Citing this stunning news, the presiding judge dismissed the case against Ellsberg, saying that the administration’s behavior “offend[s] a sense of justice.” The Fielding break-in was incorporated into the articles of impeachment against Nixon.

Another oft-repeated Watergate myth, which arose from those Senate hearings, is that the committee vice-chair, Tennessee Republican Howard Baker, asked Nixon administration witnesses a particularly penetrating question: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” This question was considered so clever that it’s been applied to determine whether Trump played a direct role in collaborating with the Russians in the 2016 presidential election. In fact, Baker was working with the Nixon White House, and the point of the question was to narrow the grounds for holding Nixon to blame for the Watergate break-in; unless a witness could pinpoint precisely that Nixon knew, for example, about the Watergate break-in ahead of time, he was blameless and couldn’t be held accountable for the acts of his aides and hired thugs.

The question of whether to hold a president accountable for the acts of his aides was a critical question facing the House Judiciary Committee in the summer of 1974, as it considered articles of impeachment. The most important of the three that it adopted, which it approved on July 30, was Article II, which accused Nixon of various abuses of power—wiretapping, using government agencies against his “enemies”—and also suggested that the president could be held responsible for a given “pattern or practice” on the part of his aides, meaning that simply winking and nodding would not insulate him from their untoward acts. The president determines the climate of the White House, and his aides can often ascertain what he wants done without receiving specific instructions. In effect, it didn’t matter whether Nixon knew about the Watergate break-in beforehand—according to Article II, he was implicated in it regardless.

A third widely misunderstood and highly important event that occurred shortly before the end of the Nixon presidency was the discovery of an excerpt from three tapes that Nixon, under pressure from his staff and the public, released belatedly on August 5. The tapes captured conversations between Nixon and Haldeman on June 23, three days after their initial meeting following the discovery of the Watergate burglars. The president admitted that he had withheld the recordings from even his own lawyers and staff, though in a seeming contradiction, he added that he hadn’t realized the “implications” of their contents. An unusually contrite Nixon admitted that it is “clear that portions of the tapes of these June 23 conversations are at variance with certain of my previous statements.” In a key passage, Nixon could be heard instructing Haldeman to tell the C.I.A. to tell the F.B.I. to halt its investigation into the Watergate case, for the sake of protecting matters pertaining to national security—a well-worn excuse for all sorts of misuses of power.

Here was indisputable evidence that the president was obstructing justice. And this, the myth goes, is why Nixon was forced to resign. In fact, by the time the missing piece of tape was released, the House Judiciary Committee had already approved, on a bipartisan basis, its three articles of impeachment (one was about obstruction of justice), and Nixon’s political position was so weakened by now that it was widely assumed he would be impeached and convicted. The scrap of tape only hastened his departure.

As it turns out, Trump isn’t the only president whose aides occasionally saved him from himself by disregarding his orders. Nixon was often drunk at night (a condition exacerbated by Dilantin, an anti-convulsant that he’d been erroneously advised would help with depression), and he’d telephone aides at all hours to bark out instructions, once ordering the firing of an entire floor of State Department officials the next day. Those who received the calls were forced to use their (questionable) judgment to determine which orders to carry out, and which to ignore. One of the most infamous examples of this phenomenon was when Nixon instructed the plumbers to firebomb the Brookings Institution, where two former Johnson administration officials who’d worked on the Pentagon Papers were believed to be keeping unreleased portions of the report. In the confusion that was to be caused by the fire, the plumbers were instructed to break into said files and retrieve the unpublished papers. But someone on Nixon’s staff headed off this harebrained scheme. As it happened, neither man’s office contained even a file cabinet.

The events involving the break-ins and Nixon’s attempts to avoid prosecution—milquetoast in contrast to Trump’s—were more than a series of simple criminal acts. They were, in essence, a constitutional crisis. For some time, the question was whether the president could be held accountable to the Congress or the courts, as intended by the Constitution. But the situation was still more alarming than that: the Watergate break-in, as well as other activities perpetrated by Nixon’s goon squad, were parts of an effort by a sitting president to affect—if not determine—his Democratic opponent in the next election. Faced with a slate of possible opponents, including Ted Kennedy and Edmund Muskie, Nixon and his aides concluded that these potentially formidable candidates should be knocked out of the race, and that by contrast, Nixon believed, George McGovern, an anti-Vietnam War liberal (though he was a World War II hero), would be easy pickings in the general election. Ultimately, McGovern was chosen as the Democratic nominee, thanks in part to the machinations of the current governing party—an effort that veered dangerously close to fascism.

What may ultimately have saved the country was the fact that the plumbers botched every operation they undertook. In an act of carelessness that came to define their leadership, Hunt and Liddy had their picture taken in front of Dr. Fielding’s office door using a C.I.A.-supplied camera. (They then asked the C.I.A. to develop the pictures when they returned to Washington, which meant the agency had a copy of the two men at the site of their first and most serious misdeed.) The famous Watergate break-in was actually the plumbers’ fourth attempt at, in Nixon’s terms, “getting the goods” on D.N.C. chairman Lawrence O’Brien, whose office was in the Watergate complex. During their first attempt, they staged a dinner in the building as a pretext for a raid, but somehow ended up locked in a closet overnight. On their second try, they reached the D.N.C. offices, but discovered that they lacked the right equipment for breaking the lock. After one of the burglars returned to Miami to acquire said tool, they managed to break into the D.N.C.’s Watergate offices on their third attempt, over Memorial Day weekend of 1972. There, they bugged phones and photographed certain documents. But the tap on O’Brien’s phone didn’t work, and John Mitchell, formerly Nixon’s attorney general and now the chairman of his re-election committee, was said to have denounced the fuzzy pictures as “junk.” (Though it’s doubtful that that’s the exact word he used.) He instructed the plumbers to return.

Finally, the details around why a group of Republican leaders urged Nixon to resign have been misrepresented. The widely held belief, then and now, has been that the G.O.P. eminences from Capitol Hill, who told Nixon that his support among their colleagues had evaporated, acted courageously, out of patriotism. In truth, Nixon still had pockets of support around the country. These supposed courageous statesmen were hoping to avoid an inconvenient vote against the president. Nixon, anxious to keep his pension and to be granted the staff accorded presidents after they leave office voluntarily, agreed. He needed to pay off his sizable legal bills, and he wanted a staff to help write his memoirs and plot a return to public life—a scheme in which he succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. And so, on August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first president in our lifetime to resign from office. Before long, we may find out whether he will be the last.

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“Summer of ’73” — the Senate Watergate Hearings — when my wife Cathy and I arrived in Washington, D.C. and settled down across the river in Alexandria, VA. Alexandria was then home to the notorious Presidential Counsel John Dean who once testified that Nixon’s Chief Domestic Affairs Adviser, the equally notorious John Ehrlichman, suggested that he could use his short commute across the Potomac to “deep six” potentially incriminating evidence by throwing it in the river!

That led my cousin’s husband to (jokingly, of course) suggest that my job prospects in the Nixon Justice Department would be greatly improved by my Alexandria address!

Gotta give Trumpie credit for making “slimeballs of the past” like Ehrlichman & Dean “relevant” again.

PWS

10-15-18