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

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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. This page intentionally left blank 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-

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.