Richard Nixon, Watergate, and the Press: A Historical Retrospective

160 Pages·2003·8.101 MB·English

by  Louis W. Liebovich

RICHARD NIXON,
WATERGATE,
AND THE PRESS
A Historical Retrospective
Louis W. Liebovich
PRAEGER Westport, Connecticut
London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Liebovich, Louis.
Richard Nixon, Watergate, and the press: a historical retrospective/Louis W.
Liebovich.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
ISBN 0-275-97915-6 (alk. paper)
1. Nixon, Richard M. (Richard Milhous), 1913—Relations with journalists.
2. Nixon, Richard M. (Richard Milhous), 1913—Public opinion. 3. Watergate
Affair, 1972-1974—Press coverage. 4. Watergate Affair, 1972-1974—Public
opinion. 5. United States—Politics and government—1969-1974. 6. Press and
politics—United States—History—20th century. 7. Presidents—United States—
Biography. 8. Public opinion—United States. I. Title.
E856.L54 2003
973.924'092—dc21
[B] 2002029770
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright © 2003 by Louis W. Liebovich
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002029770
ISBN: 0-275-97915-6
First published in 2003
Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.praeger.com
Printed in the United States of America
&
The paper used in this book complies with the
Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 32
This book is dedicated to my father, Albert Liebovich.
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Contents
Prologue ix
Acknowledgments xv
Chapter 1. The Missing Honeymoon 1
Chapter 2. Media Confrontations 21
Chapter 3. The Break-In 31
Chapter 4. The 1972 Election 45
Chapter 5. A Cancer on the Presidency 59
Chapter 6. The Tapes 73
Chapter 7. Twisting in the Wind 93
Chapter 8. After the Resignation 109
Appendix A. Cast of Nixon Characters 125
Appendix B. Nixon Administration Timeline 127
Appendix C. Major Newspaper Coverage of Watergate,
June 17-December 31,1972 131
Selected Bibliography 133
Index 139
This page intentionally left blank
Prologue
Richard Nixon's inauguration in 1969 marked one of the strangest and most
unexpected comebacks in political history and the turning point in America's
tumultuous social rebirth. It accompanied a shift in political values and served
as a prologue to the most tragic episode in American presidential politics. These
obvious themes are yardsticks by which most scholars have measured the
Nixon presidency.
Yet, a generation later, evidence points to trends that have carried beyond the
dysfunctional 1970s. The Nixon legacy includes deteriorating press-president
relations and the loss of public confidence in the Washington news-gathering
process. Documenting that evolution will be the goal of this book as it examines
the press structure of the Nixon White House, a prototype for modern White
House-reporter antagonism. The break-in at the Watergate hotel and office
complex launched a drama that deposed a president and changed American at
titudes about government, but the break-in was only a minor manifestation of
a long-range strategy outlined by a White House clique who never grasped
their primary responsibilities and who approached their obligations with un
paralleled vindictiveness. Watergate was ordained by marred White House
logic, evident in the earliest Oval Office conversations and lasting until the
president's farewell speech in 1974 on the White House lawn. It was not so
much the nature of the underhanded malfeasance that led to the administra
tion's destruction as it was the underlying convictions that justified them. As
part of the White House's siege mentality, Nixon and his subordinates created
a communications structure in January 1969 that signaled a changing press-
president relationship and almost guaranteed a tragedy.
Indeed, what followed were wholesale violations by men who understood
that they were breaking the law. We have been reminded repeatedly of the con
sequences: imprisonment of some of the nation's most powerful leaders, a di-
X Prologue
minished presidency, shared embarrassment, public cynicism, lost government
initiatives, and eventual voter indifference. As those memories fade into the
twenty-first century, however, one legacy may survive: implacable press rela
tions and shallow reporting. Washington journalism changed after Watergate.
From Gerald Ford to Bill Clinton, the quality of news and the interrelationship
between the White House and the press corps steadily diminished.
How did the Watergate mentality develop? What led to the illegal acts and to
the paranoia that propelled those deeds? Who planned the public denigration of
reporters and the spying? Who developed the policies that would alienate re
porters for the sixty-seven months of the Nixon presidency and for years to
come? How did the Nixon press apparatus differ from previous presidencies',
and was it a model for the ones that followed? What does this mean to the pres
idency a generation after Nixon's resignation? Did the press corps need to be
curbed, and were the administration's actions understandable, if not condon-
able, as a defense against a wholly unfair group of correspondents? Why does
Watergate still reverberate in the twenty-first century ? These questions will be
addressed, as we stir the ashes thirty years later. This book will explore not so
much the events but the strategy, especially as it related to the news media.
The catalyst for this book was my conversation with a radio talk show host in
1999 during President Bill Clinton's impeachment hearings. Were the causes of
the Nixon resignation and the Clinton impeachment similar? he asked. Of
course they were not, and I sensed that he felt obliged to ask on behalf of his au
dience, which probably had forgotten or had never known about Watergate. Few
events in American history were more dramatic and more traumatic. Yet, a gen
eration later, a majority of Americans either are ignorant of the details of Wa
tergate or fail to understand the causes of the scandal and role the press played.
They understand that something in Washington is amiss and that reporters do
not cover the White House in the tradition of past years, but few comprehend
why this is so. There are at least five reasons for this: (1) the natural forgetting
process; (2) a tendency to omit from memory a tragedy that embarrassed and
disgusted the entire country; (3) the complexity of Watergate; (4) the intricacies
of White House press relations; and (5) obfuscation by the Nixon people.
No ex-presidential family has gone to such lengths to block access to files and
historical documents as the Nixons have. A generation after Watergate and
years after an agreement was reached to release thousands of hours of White
House documents and taped conversations, scholars were still wrestling with
the federal government and Nixon family lawyers for the right to allow the
public to review those recordings and papers. The Nixons screened all the ma
terials and then demanded $200 million in compensation from the government
for papers and tapes seized by authorities when Nixon resigned in 1974. Nixon
died in 1994. Finally, in 2000, in exchange for a government payment of $18
million, the Nixon family agreed to release the tapes and papers. Nearly all of
them were to have been made public by 2003. Some interesting conversations
were made public in the tapes released in 2002. In March of that year it was re-
Prologue XI
vealed that Nixon in 1971 had discussed with Henry Kissinger, his foreign af
fairs advisor, the possibility of using nuclear weapons in Vietnam. It was a pass
ing remark in a lengthy conversation, but it chilled even the most ardent Nixon
supporters. In a tape also released in March 2002, it was revealed that Nixon
and Billy Graham, a popular evangelist minister, had both expressed their dis
gust with liberal Jews. Graham said in 2002 that he did not remember making
the remark but apologized anyway.
Nixon had tried to keep that kind of exchange private. Until the tapes were
released, little of that kind of exchange became public. Documents released to
the public at the National Archives II in College Park, Maryland, are suspi
ciously bereft of damning personal comments and exchanges. The Presidential
Materials Review Board, for reasons other than national security, has removed
thousands of texts from files, and many thousands of files have never even been
considered for public scrutiny because of legal restraints put in place by the
Nixon family. For instance, in Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler's papers, a docu
ments withdrawal notice placed in a folder advises that all documents from
August 2, 1973, to the end of the file (during the height of the Watergate
investigation) had been removed from public scrutiny at Nixon's behest be
cause "the contents of this [entire] folder are objectionable."1 In another exam
ple, a Presidential Materials Review Board certificate in a folder in Chief of
Staff H. R. Haldeman's papers has been inserted as a replacement for most of
Haldeman's notes from February 7, 1973, to March 31, 1973, during the Wa
tergate cover-up. The certificate declares that public release of twenty-three
documents was contested by Haldeman, and so the board decided to remove all
but six pages from public access—three for national security reasons, eleven for
invasion of privacy justifications, and three for both invasion of privacy and na
tional security justifications. No supporting explanation as to why the docu
ments were removed was offered, so the public will never know Haldeman's
thinking and planning during those crucial days.2 His widow published Halde
man's daily notations from his four years in the White House in 1993, but even
that material actually represents only "a balanced condensation" of Halde
man's memos.3 A match with the original daily ledger at National Archives II
indicates some fairly selective judgment on the part of the Haldeman family.
The Nixons were paid $18 million in exchange for documents, files, and tapes
seized by the government after the president resigned. For a generation the dis
pute prevented the release of thousands of documents and more than 3,000
hours of taped conversations. Finally, through the efforts of a University of
Wisconsin legal scholar, Stanley I. Kutler, copies of the 201 hours of Abuse of
Power and Cabinet Room tapes were released in 1996 and then were put on sale
to the public in January 2000. The family finally settled for $18 million in June
2000, sending most of the money to the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba
Linda, California.
Meanwhile, Watergate participants, including journalists who covered
Washington, have never been reluctant to place their spin, pro or con, on his-