Submitted by:

Jonathan Laldinsanga Fanai

MA (PISM)
School of International Studies
Enrol. No.: 18/40/HI/072

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY

 Presidential Intrigue: The Watergate Scandal

On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested for burglary in the Democratic National Convention
(DNC) Office in the Watergate Office Complex in Washington. What followed was the infamous
event in American Politics known as the Watergate Scandal, which ultimately led to the downfall of
the sitting President Richard Milhous Nixon. Richard Nixon resigned from office on August 9, 1974,
in face of an impending impeachment, when his involvement in the Watergate Scandal was
established. The Watergate Scandal was many things and it would be a mistake to view it through a
certain lens or paradigm only; for example, through the personality lens which would see Watergate
as a consequence of Nixon’s personality. Studies on the Watergate Scandal have been diverse and
revealing as to the many forces that were at play which culminated to the ‘event’ of the Watergate
Scandal. It would be best to see Watergate as Professor Kurland does, as ‘a confrontation of
philosophies of government, of constitutional notions as to how this country should operate.’ It was
an event in history when America confronts itself; a mirroring as the psychologists would say.

The significance of the the Watergate Scandal is too profound in American society with many
precedents made and many precedents checked. Watergate is a milestone in the history of the United
States of America when the system of governance the country was founded on, somehow managed to
work and removed an incompetent President, but it also revealed many flaws. Flaws which wouldn’t
have been in the open, in the public sphere, had Watergate not happened. This is a lasting legacy
from Watergate. In this sense, Watergate is not just a subject of history. Rather, it is the scandals that
help bring about stronger ethical standards and rules; however, for better or worse, one dare not say.
The Watergate Scandal was about the Separation of Powers, as enshrined in the U.S. Constitutions; it
was about individual rights, the individual right to privacy; and it was also about the function of a
Free Press. The Watergate Scandal also gave a glimpse of the role Televisions was going to play in
the American political life.

To see Watergate Scandal in all its richness, it is important to not focus oneself on the Scandal only
but also to open ourselves to the various forces that somehow brought about the Watergate Scandal.
It is important to see Watergate Scandal as a product of chance in the sense that the Scandal was
brought about by many forces, many agencies, in that very political climate, to that very president,
by those very ‘President’s Men’, with those very governmental instruments available, etc. This is not
at all an attempt to neither nullify nor discount the significance of the Watergate Scandal but to see it
as it as it really is, in that context, it was borne out of. This is an attempt at getting out of the ‘bias of
inevitability’ that most scholars of Watergate Scandal seem to have that the Scandal was an
inevitable outcome of, say, Nixon’s personality or the precedents of ‘Executive Overreach’. It was a
chance creation which could have been avoided but was not, again by chance. Watergate is not a
place, not a series of recent events, not a point in time. Watergate is a compendium whose most
important element is a state of mind, an attitude about how the American government should
function. Watergate is also a question whether these United States can survive as a constitutional
democracy.
What if the burglars need not return to the Watergate complex (the burglary was the second time), or
had the Washington Post not take a gamble in publishing the Woodward-Bernstein investigations
against journalism ethics, would we still have a Watergate Scandal? Had the complicit not perjured
themselves, would the investigations begin? As for the ‘smoking gun’ tapes, there is little
disagreement that it would have been easy to destroy the tapes before that option was closed legally
and politically. One need not recount all of the "if onlys" in Watergate that could have changed the
course of history. Indeed, one is struck by the mistakes and accidental factors without which there
might not have been a scandal: if Frank Walls had not noticed the tape; if the plumbers had not
bungled the job; if Alexander Butterfield had not been queried; or if Martha Mitchell had not
"distracted John." What if Nixon had died in office as Harding did before the scandals of his
administration were revealed? Or what if Nixon had died during the life-threatening surgery
immediately upon his return to San Clemente and had not had twenty years for rehabilitation? One
can endlessly speculate to no useful purpose, except to serve as a caution against succumbing to the
myth of inevitability in assessing institutions and processes for dealing with crises (Ruth P.Morgan,
1996). What if Watergate is, as the Nixon Apologists maintain, a grand conspiracy to take down
President Nixon? As Victor Lasky in his book, It Didn’t Start With Watergate (1977), argued: Nixon
did not do anything that had not been done previously; his mistake was in getting caught.

The Burglary

To put the Watergate Scandal in a more chronological order, this paper largely follows to the
narrative of the two Washington Post’s investigative journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
The investigative work of these two journalists was of monumental importance and became the main
narrative about the Watergate Scandal. Their work was called ‘"maybe the single greatest reporting
effort of all time" by Gene Roberts of the Philadelphia Inquirer. They set the precedent for
groundbreaking investigative journalism that would re-affirm the importance of the media as a
scrutinizer of American politics. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein though hailed as heroes also set
the precedent of ‘anonymous sources’ when they published reports citing one ‘Deep Throat’. Almost
all of the sources they quoted were on a non-attributable, off-the-record basis. It was them that that
linked the ‘Third-rate burglary’, as the White House Press Secretary brushed it off, to the White
House.

The Burglary happened in June, 1972 and on November, 1972 the incumbent Republican President
Richard Nixon from California was re-elected as the President of the United States of America.
Nixon won by such a landslide that it was the largest victory in a U.S. Presidential election until
1984. Of the five men that were caught in Watergate, four were anti-Fidel Castro revolutionaries and
one particular James McCord. James McCord was not only a retired CIA agent; he was also "the
salaried security coordinator for President Nixon's re-election committee", the Washington Post
reported. John Mitchell, the former Attorney General who resigned to manage the Committee for the
Re-election of the President (CRP), quickly denied any role of the CRP (or as they soon came to be
called by reporters: CREEP).

The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), within hours of the burglary, discovered Howard Hunt’s
name in the address books of two of the Watergate burglars. The Nixon Administration was
concerned because Hunt was part of another secretive group known as the White House Plumbers.
The White House Plumbers, or officially the White House ‘Special Investigations Unit’, was a covert
unit established by the Presidency of Richard Nixon within a week after the publication of the
‘Pentagon Papers’ in 1971. Its task was to stop and/or respond to the leaking of classified
information, such as the Pentagon Papers, to the news media.

The Pentagon Papers

The Pentagon Papers, officially titled Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task
Force, is a United States Department of Defense history of the United States' political and military
involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The Pentagon Papers revealed that the United States
had expanded its war with the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, coastal raids on North Vietnam, and
Marine Corps attacks, none of which had been reported by the American media. The papers were
released by Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study; they were first brought to the attention of
the public on the front page of The New York Times in 1971. The most damaging revelations in the
papers revealed that four administrations (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson), had misled
the public regarding their intentions.

The Pentagon Papers are relevant to the Watergate Scandal because of two things: the White House
Plumbers and the New York Times Co. v. United States, a Supreme Court of the United States
(SCOTUS) landmark judgment on the First Amendment. President Nixon at first planned to do
nothing about publication of the study since it embarrassed the Johnson and Kennedy administrations
rather than his. Henry Kissinger, Nixon's National Security Advisor, convinced the president that not
opposing the publication set a negative precedent for future secrets. When the New York Times first
started publishing the Pentagon Papers in June, 1971 it received an order to cease further publication
from a District Court judge, at the request of the administration.

The government claimed it would cause "irreparable injury to the defense interests of the United
States" and wanted to "enjoin The New York Times and The Washington Post from publishing the
contents of a classified study entitled History of U.S. Decision-Making Process on the Vietnam
Policy. (The Washington Post also began publishing its own series of articles based upon the
Pentagon Papers). The New York Times, after initially refusing, agreed to abide by the restraining
order and on June 19, Judge Gurfein of the District Court for the Southern District of New York
rejected the administration's request for an injunction.

Judge Gurfein rejected the administration's request for an injunction, writing that "[t]he security of
the Nation is not at the ramparts alone. Security also lies in the value of our free institutions. A
cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in
order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to
know. However, the Court of Appeals, after an en banc hearing, granted an injunction until June 25,
1971.

On June 18, the Washington Post refused the request of Assistant U.S. Attorney General William
Rehnquist to cease publication. After this, Rehnquist sought an injunction in the District Court for
the District of Columbia, but Judge Gerhard Gesell rejected the government's request, as did the
Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. This inconsistency between the courts of appeal led the
Supreme Court to hear the case. The Supreme Court heard arguments from the Executive Branch, the
Times, the Post, and the Justice Department on June 25 and 26, 1971. Along with the issue of how
the Times obtained the documents (which was being investigated by a federal grand jury elsewhere)
the real issue for the Court was whether there was a sufficient justification for prior restraint, which
would be a suspension of the newspapers' First Amendment rights to freedom of the press. The First
Amendment states that no federal law can be made abridging the freedom of the press, but a few
landmark cases in the 20th century had established precedents creating exceptions to that rule.

On June 30, with six Justices concurring and three dissenting, the Supreme Court upheld the right of
the newspapers to publish the material. In its decision, the court first established the legal question
with the use of precedents. It first stated that "Any system of prior restraints of expression comes to
this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity". The purpose of this
statement was to make the presence of the inherent conflict between the Government's efforts and the
First Amendment clear. The decision then stated that the government "thus carries a heavy burden of
showing justification for the imposition of such a restraint". This reinforced the idea that it was the
Nixon Administration's responsibility to show sufficient evidence that the newspapers' actions would
cause a "grave and irreparable" danger. New York Times v. United States is generally considered a
victory for an extensive reading of the First Amendment, but as the Supreme Court ruled on whether
the government had made a successful case for prior restraint, its decision did not void the Espionage
Act or give the press unlimited freedom to publish classified documents.

Journalist Jonathan Schell believed that the Pentagon Papers case, arising out of the war in Vietnam,
was the watershed when lawbreaking within the executive branch became indictable. The
‘credibility-gap’ between what the President says and what the Government does was established. It
created a desire among the American citizens, a ‘growing capacity and taste for political scandal
production’ as Suzanne Garment observed in her book Scandal: The Crisis of Mistrust in American
Politics. It also emboldened the press, raised its credibility among the readers, and elevated its role in
seeking accountability from the government.

The White House Plumbers

Fred Warner Neal wrote in his The Cold War: Road to Watergate, ‘the American system had
progressively been bent out of shape by the corrupting influence of executive power set up to direct
our Cold War foreign policy . . . which required secrecy, a vast 'security' apparatus, and greatly
expanded executive power’. When the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the media The Plumbers'
first task was the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's Los Angeles psychiatrist, Lewis J.
Fielding, in an effort to uncover evidence to discredit Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon
Papers. These White operatives were Nixon’s ‘fixers’ in the sense that they did the dirty work for
Nixon; the presidency or the person, this is never clear but they remain covert operatives.

President Nixon understood the importance of having ‘fixers’, people who get the job done for him,
and such was the political climate he found himself in. Republican President Nixon was confronted
with an unpopular war he inherited, a Democrat-controlled Congress, and an entrenched bureaucracy
over which he would have to assert his prerogatives if he were to accomplish his policy goals.
According to Michael Genovese, Nixon, in his determination not to let the demonstrators drag him
down as had happened to his predecessor, committed acts that were "to plant seeds of illegal and
immoral activities that would eventually lead to the President's downfall." It is thus important to
place the President in his milieu and try understanding the people he associated himself with during
his Presidency.

The staffing weakness in Nixon’s administration was acknowledged in a report to the Senate Select
Committee by the Panel of the National Academy of Public Administration, chaired by Frederick
Mosher, which read: “Very few of the top witnesses indicated any sense of understanding or
appreciation of democratic ideals or principles. Almost no one mentioned any special considerations
of public service for the public interest apart from the President's interest.” Nixon's White House
staff did not appreciate the responsibilities of governing and the restraints that must be exercised in a
democracy, and they did not have a proper respect for the institutions of government. One interesting
and rather ironical fact is that Nixon’s White House counsel John W. Dean once said that he counted
21 lawyers involved in Watergate wrongdoing; including President Richard M. Nixon, Duke University
School of Law, Class of 1937.

Sam J.Ervin, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, that
was established in 1973 to investigate the Watergate Scandal remarked in his book The Whole Truth:

If President Nixon had entrusted his campaign for reelection to the Republican National
Committee, there would have been no Watergate. Its members would have known that the
activities of Watergate were outside the political pale. He gave control of his campaign,
however, to close associates who were virtually without experience in politics or government
apart from their association with him.

The errors in campaign staffing were compounded when Nixon took his inexperienced campaign
support team into the White House in important staff positions. Scholars and participants have
pointed to the weaknesses in staffing the White House and to the problems caused by the president's
isolation from alternative channels of communication.

These people were in the administration not because of their track-record in holding public office but
because they are ‘fixers’. Their job was to protect the President; they were henchmen whose worth
was measured only in terms of efficiency and loyalty. John Dean writes in his memoir, “I thought I
represented Richard Nixon—the person—not the Office of the President. The confusion was not
mysterious. I was asked to play the role of intermediary in highly personal matters, like estate
planning, sometimes even meeting with the First Lady to discuss details.”

John Dean in his statement to the Senate Watergate Hearing, in June 25, 1973, reasoned, "To one
who was in the White House and became somewhat familiar with its interworkings, the Watergate
matter was an inevitable outgrowth of a climate of excessive concern over the political impact of
demonstrators, excessive concern over leaks, an insatiable appetite for political intelligence, all
coupled with a do-it-yourself White House staff, regardless of the law. However, the fact that many
of the elements of this climate culminated with the creation of a covert intelligence operation as a
part of the President's reelection committee was not by conscious design, rather an accident of fate”

The lack of appreciation of ideals, principles, public interests, etc is not so surprising given the
nature of their jobs which includes transgressing those very ideals and values. The Watergate
Scandal is a scandal precisely because it is perceived by the citizens to be against the values and
principles on which the United States was built as a nation and as a society. Free and Fair Elections
were at stake; an ‘Imperial Presidency’, abuse of power, Executive Overreach, and more, each of
which are scandalous for Citizens who pride themselves in their system of governance. The White
House knew exactly what they were doing and yet chose to do so. In 1977, journalist Frost asked
Nixon if, in hindsight, it wouldn't have been better to do legally that which Nixon chose to do
illegally, Nixon hesitated for only a second. "Well," he replied, "when the president does it, that
means that it is not illegal.” This privilege of being above the law was what comforted them and
validated their actions.

The White House Plumbers were loyal but when they question the perception of protection they
thought they had, as officials or operatives of the Presidency, "the parade of people trying to protect
themselves began” (Judge John Sirica). Deep Throat, the anonymous source of Woodward, put it all
in perspective. "These are not very bright guys”. This need to protect themselves continued on years
later, after serving their terms for their roles in Watergate Scandal, when they keep coming out with
books, each telling their narrative. Literature on the Watergate Scandal is a plethora of these
narratives making it difficult to pin point exactly what the facts were. Biographer Stephen Ambrose
has observed the following: One of the challenges of reading the Watergate transcripts is trying to
keep up with the daily reconstruction of history. These guys could move the pea under the walnut far
faster than the human eye could follow. They invented motives for themselves, or presented the most
self-serving rationalizations for what they had done and could not escape, or, when they would get
away with it, simply lied.

“Maximum John”

While Congress and the press traditionally have been the leaders in exposing government corruption,
the courts played a more significant role in Watergate than had been the case historically. The Five
Burglars and their two handlers, Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, were arrested in Watergate and
three months later on September 15, 1972 were indicted by a grand jury for conspiracy, burglary, and
violation of federal wiretapping laws. Hunt put pressure on the White House and the Committee to
Re-Elect the President for cash payments to cover legal fees, family support, and expenses, for
himself and his fellow burglars. Key Nixon figures, including Haldeman, Charles Colson, Herbert
W. Kalmbach, John Mitchell, Fred LaRue, and John Dean eventually became entangled in the payoff
schemes, and large amounts of money were passed to Hunt and his accomplices, to try to ensure their
silence at the trial, by pleading guilty to avoid prosecutors' questions, and afterwards.(John
Dean,1976)

On August 1, a $25,000 (approximately $150,000 in 2019 dollars) cashier’s check was found to have
been deposited in the US and Mexican bank accounts of one of the Watergate burglars, Bernard
Barker. It was the Washington Post duo of Woodward and Bernstein that reported this and The Post's
August 1 Watergate story began with these words:
 A $25,000 cashier's check, apparently earmarked for President Nixon's re-election campaign,
was deposited in April in a bank account of one of the five men arrested in the break-in at
Democratic National Headquarters here June 17.

The check was made out by a Florida bank to Kenneth H. Dahlberg, the President’s campaign
finance chairman for the Midwest. Dahlberg said last night that in early April he turned the
check over to "the treasurer of the Committee (for the Re-election of the President) or to
Maurice Stans himself."

(Maurice Stans resigned as Secretary of Commerce in Feb. 1972, to chair the finance
committee of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CRP/CREEP))

All five Watergate burglars were directly or indirectly tied to the 1972 CRP, thus causing Judge
Sirica to suspect a conspiracy involving higher-echelon government officials. "There were still
simply too many unanswered questions in the case. By that time, thinking about the break-in and
reading about it, I'd have had to be some kind of moron to believe that no other people were
involved. No political campaign committee would turn over so much money to a man like Gordon
Liddy without someone higher up in the organization approving the transaction. How could I not see
that? These questions about the case were on my mind during a pretrial session in my courtroom on
December 4."(Sirica, John J., 1979)

On September 29, the duo delivered a stunner:

John N. Mitchell, while serving as U.S. Attorney General, personally controlled a secret
Republican fund that was used to gather information about the Democrats, according to
sources involved in the Watergate investigation.

On October 10, 1972 Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reported that the FBI had determined that
the Watergate break-in was part of a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of
the Nixon re-election committee. Although Watergate had gathered enough public interest, the public
viewed Vietnam and the economy as more important. Nixon's Press Secretary, Ron Ziegler, had
brushed off the event as "a third-rate burglary attempt" and to most American voters viewed the
burglary as a mere ‘campaign caper’. Neither Richard Nixon nor his opponent, George McGovern,
gave the story priority in their attention. The revelations never really hurt Nixon’s Campaign and he
was re-elected with a landslide. The White House also sought to isolate the Post's coverage by
tirelessly attacking that newspaper while declining to criticize other damaging stories about the
scandal from the New York Times and Time Magazine.

With re-election, it was retribution time for Nixon Administration. The Washington Post found itself
excluded from all White House activities; this also meant that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
found themselves without Watergate stories. However, their lone-ranger coverage of the story was
ended when the trial of the five Watergate burglars and Liddy and Hunt began in Judge Sirica's
courtroom on Monday, January 8, 1973. Now, with an actual trial under way, with real people doing
real things, reporters from other newspapers and magazines and from radio and TV could finally get
their teeth into the story.

After the seven break-in defendants were convicted in January 1973, Judge Sirica meted out
conditional sentences of twenty to forty years, the maximum allowed by law, in a blatant announced
intended to make the defendants talk in exchange for lighter final sentences. James W. McCord, Jr.
was the first to respond to what legal scholar Philip Kurland called a form of "judicial blackmail."
Judge Sirica devoted a gleeful chapter to McCord's revelations and concluded that "the case would
never have been broken if McCord had elected to stand pat and had not written the letter to me."
"Once that letter was made public," he continued, "the parade of people trying to protect themselves
began."

On March 23, 1973, Judge Sirica read the court a letter from Watergate burglar James McCord, who
alleged that perjury, had been committed in the Watergate trial, and defendants had been pressured to
remain silent. In an attempt to make them talk, Sirica gave Hunt and two burglars’ provisional
sentences of up to 40 years. “When Judge Sirica finished reading the letter, the courtroom exploded
with excitement and reporters ran to the rear entrance to phone their newspapers. The bailiff kept
banging for silence. It was a stunning development, exactly what I had been waiting for. Perjury at
the trial. The involvement of others. It looked as if Watergate was about to break wide open”, wrote
Samuel Dash.

The Washington Post

The persistence of the two Washington Post Journalists had paid off and it was them that carry the
story of the involvement of the CREEP through to Nixon’s Second Term. There are, however, others
who argue that the journalist have been given too much applause than necessary since it is the
government agencies that did most of the investigation. What is clear is that the story was slow to
unfold and press coverage did not sweep other news aside until the televised Senate hearings began.
Even after The Washington Post linked John Mitchell to illegal campaign activities in October 1972,
and after the break-in trial ended in January 1973, Watergate remained largely a Post story.

The importance of the investigative journalism done by the Washington Post in the creation of the
Watergate Scandal was observed Frank Mankiewicz, a McGovern adviser, who believed that the
story would have died had it not been for the confluence of a crime, a judge (Sirica), and a
newspaper (the Post) in the same city. Credit must be given to the Washington Post Watergate team
because it was them that not only put the information together but also created the narrative, or rather
the imagination, that the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in June
17,1972 was more than a ‘third-rate burglary’ but much more. The possibility/imagination that it was
part of a much elaborate operation and subsequent cover-up by the White House was first posited, if
not at least popularized, by the Washington Post. Frank Mankiewicz also suggested that the Senate
would not have been so quick to set up the Select Committee had its members not read about the
burglary in their hometown newspaper.

When the facts of the investigations started conforming to the narrative, the investigations of Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein became the most famous and plausible narrative. The information flux
of data that is in the Watergate Scandal can be confusing and uncertain at times. President Nixon
commented in his book RN: “I had tried to grapple with the facts [of Watergate] only to find that
they were not like the pieces of a puzzle that could be assembled into one true picture. They were
more like the parts of a kaleidoscope: at one moment, arranged one way, they seemed to form a
perfect design, complete in every detail. But the simple shift of one conjecture could unlock them all
and they would move into a completely different pattern”. The literature on the Nixon/Watergate
story is the sheer volume of undocumented information, much of which came to be accepted as fact
through repetition. Without the Washington Post, we may conclude, the Watergate investigation
might have ended safely for Nixon-far from the oval office. The indispensability of a Free Press was
re-established by the role the newspapers and journalists played during the Watergate Scandal.
Ehrlichman in his Witness to Power, reported that shortly after the inauguration in 1973, Nixon
decided to take personal control of Watergate and clean it up. If this is what prompted him to ask
Dean to prepare a full statement dealing with all of the issues, then Dean misunderstood, with the
well-known damaging results. Stewing over his situation, Dean decided that the report was requested
in order to frame him, to make a scapegoat of him and so he returned from Camp David intent on
securing a lawyer and seeking immunity. To distance himself from the Scandal, Nixon on April 30,
1973 asked for the resignation of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, his White House Chief of Staff and
Chief Domestic Advisor. He then asked for the resignation of Attorney General Kleindienst, “with
no personal involvement whatsoever in this matter”, to ensure no one could claim that his innocent
friendship with Haldeman and Ehrlichman could be construed as a conflict. He also fired White
House Counsel John Dean, who had been cooperating with the U.S. Attorneys since April 17, 1973.

Nixon clearly knew the results of a cover-up. He told Ehrlichman on July 5 that "a cover-up is the
worst thing; cover-up is how I nailed Truman. It can hurt deeply." It appeared Nixon was effecting a
cover-up of the cover-up (John Dean, 2014).

Senate Watergate hearings

In January 1973 the United States Senate established a Select Committee on Presidential Campaign
Activities. On February 5, Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC) introduced a resolution calling for an
allocation of $500,000 to fund the operation of a Special Senate Committee to investigate Watergate.
The resolution passed 77 to 0 and Senator Sam Ervin was made Chairman the next Day. Established
primarily to investigate the circumstances related to the break-in at the Watergate complex, the
committee gradually expanded the net of individuals and issues that it pursued. To partially offset
that effort, the president set up the Watergate Special Prosecution Force under Archibald Cox in May
1973. The Committee began its hearings on May 17, 1973, and the Committee issued its seven-
volume, 1,250-page report on June 27, 1974, titled Report on Presidential Campaign Activities.

Congressional investigations seek to gather information, to identify and correct wrongdoing, and to
influence public thinking. In their opening statements, members of the committee explain what they
hope to accomplish and set the tone for the hearings that will follow. They and their staff counsel
then call witnesses, who usually make their own formal statements before undergoing cross-
examination. Witnesses try to make their case, seeking to defend themselves and their actions in
order to convince both the committee and national public opinion. The hearings held by the Senate
committee which, were broadcasted live from May 17 to August 7, 1973. The broadcasting of the
Senate Watergate Hearings made it a national interest. Never had American citizens or any citizen
for that matter, taken so much interest and participated in the investigations of its government.
Letters poured in from across the country, with questions and opinions, and flooded the offices of the
Committee.

The three major networks of the time CBS, NBC, and ABC agreed to take turns covering the
Hearings live. The fact that the three major networks of the time agreed to take turns live
broadcasting the hearings also shows that the Watergate Scandal was as much a Media creation as it
was a political crisis. Famous soap shows were paused to bring news update from the Watergate
hearings. The Media craze also shows the public desire for a political scandal, the mood of distrust
that was harbored by many, and the American anxiety of being ‘lied to’; as was established with the
leaking of the Pentagon Papers. As television fed the insatiable appetite of Washington and the
public with continuous coverage of the hearings and with the nightly recaps of the latest "revelation"
in the Watergate saga, publishers rushed to press complete texts of documents, hastily written
background reports prepared for congressional committees and records of court testimony. These did
not carry a needed consumer warning as to accuracy.

On 17 May 1973, Senator Sam Ervin began the Hearings with an opening statement: "If the
allegations that have been made in the wake of the Watergate affair are substantiated, there has been
a very serious subversion of the integrity of the electoral process, and the committee will be obliged
to consider the manner in which such a subversion affects the continued existence of this Nation as a
representative democracy, and how, if we are to survive, such subversions may be prevented in the
future.” Of those that were called to testify by the Senate Watergate Committee John Dean’s
testimony on June 26, 1973 proved to be most pivotal. John Dean’s testimony became a standard for
the hearings. After Dean, focus shifted from burglars to cover-up by the White House. John Dean
testified that he had been co-coordinating the cover-up, confirming for once that the White House
has been actively participating in the cover-up. Dean also followed orders and wrote memos
encouraging retribution against political enemies, and he helped set up and facilitate the payment of
hush money to the men who had been arrested for the Watergate break-in.

John Dean also revealed for the first time that there could be a taping system in the Oval Office, his
suspicion growing from the last conversation he had with the President there wherein the President
was asking him question in such a manner that he felt the President was trying to frame him as a
scapegoat. On July 16, 1973, Butterfield told the committee in a televised hearing that Nixon had
ordered a taping system installed in the White House to automatically record all conversations.
Special Counsel Archibald Cox, a former United States Solicitor General under President John F.
Kennedy, asked District Court Judge John Sirica to subpoena nine relevant tapes to confirm the
testimony of White House Counsel John Dean. Butterfield's revelation of the taping system
transformed the Watergate investigation. Cox immediately subpoenaed the tapes, as did the Senate,
but Nixon refused to release them, citing his executive privilege as president, and ordered Cox to
drop his subpoena. Cox refused.

On October 20, 1973 after being directed by the White House to make no further attempts to obtain
tapes, notes or memoranda of presidential conversations, Cox held a news conference to state that he
would continue pressing in court for the tapes, even if it meant asking that Nixon be held in contempt
if the White House refused to turn them over, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to
fire the special prosecutor. Richardson resigned in protest rather than carry out the order. Nixon then
ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox, but Ruckelshaus also resigned
rather than fire him. Nixon's search for someone in the Justice Department willing to fire Cox ended
with the Solicitor General Robert Bork. Though Bork said he believed Nixon's order was valid and
appropriate, he considered resigning to avoid being "perceived as a man who did the President's
bidding to save my job”. Bork carried out the presidential order and dismissed the special prosecutor.

Cox's firing kindled a firestorm of protest, was infamously portrayed in the media as ‘Saturday Night
Massacre’, forcing Nixon to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski. The House Judiciary
Committee, chaired by Peter Rodino, also began staffing in December 1973 for the impeachment
hearings, which began on May 9, 1974. Dagmar S. Hamilton has argued that without the confluence
of all three of these investigatory groups, ( The Senate Watergate Committee, the Special Prosecutor,
and the House Judiciary Committee Impeachment Inquiry Staff), "It is less likely that Article II [on
the abuse of presidential powers] would ever have been drafted and unlikely that President Nixon
would have resigned.” It also took an unpredictable set of circumstances-a maverick judge, John
Sirica, and enterprising reporters of a daring anti-Nixon news- paper, the Washington Post, to trace
the crime to the White House and bring down the President.
Richard Ben-Veniste argued that the lesson of Watergate is not that the system worked but that the
system nearly did not work and does not work by itself. What the system required were officials
who, unlike the Plumbers and all others involved in the Watergate Scandal, believed in the system
and were willing to act ethically to save that system. The fact that the Attorney General and the
Deputy Attorney General refused to ‘obstruct justice’ and fire the Special Counsel is an instance of
the system being kept working by officials who value the system more than the President, or their
own persons. The issue is not whether we have a government of laws or a government of men and
women, as was so frequently mentioned during Watergate, but whether we have a government of
public servants under the law who respect the law (Ruth P. Morgan, 1996).

The Supreme Court

On March 1, 1974, a grand jury in Washington, D.C., indicted several former aides of Nixon, who
became known as the "Watergate Seven"—H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John N. Mitchell,
Charles Colson, Gordon C. Strachan, Robert Mardian, and Kenneth Parkinson—for conspiring to
hinder the Watergate investigation. The grand jury secretly named Nixon as an unindicted co-
conspirator. The special prosecutor dissuaded them from an indictment of Nixon, arguing that a
President can be indicted only after he leaves office.
The Senate Committee had unsuccessfully attempted to obtain five tapes of Nixon’s White House
conversations. In the Presidential Campaign Activities v. Nixon that followed, the Court of Appeals
directed its attention "solely to one species of executive privilege-that premised on 'the great public
interest in maintaining the confidentiality of conversations that take place in the President's
performance of his official duties.’ "The court found such conversations "presumptively privileged"
and ruled that this presumption could be overcome only by a "strong showing" of need by the
governmental institution seeking the information, "a showing that the responsibilities of that
institution cannot responsibly be fulfilled without access to records of the President's deliberations."
The court concluded the Committee could not meet this threshold requirement: "Particularly in light
of events that have occurred since this litigation was begun and, indeed, since the District Court
issued its decision, we find that the Select Committee has failed to make the requisite showing. (The
principal "events" referred to by the court were the release of the five tapes to the House Judiciary
Committee and edited transcripts of those tapes to the public.) The tapes, the court indicated, were
not needed to meet Congress's informing function-its duty to tell the public about corruption in
government. The court went further: “While fact-finding by a legislative committee is undeniably a
part of its task, legislative judgments normally depend more on the predicted consequences of
proposed legislative actions and their political acceptability, than on precise reconstruction of past
events; Congress frequently legislates on the basis of conflicting information provided in its
hearings.”
The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, however, in Nixon v. Sirica, 487 F.2d
700, 717 (D.C. Cir. 1973), held that a grand jury's "uniquely powerful showing" of need surmounted
the presumption of presidential privilege. The court then distinguished Congress's factfinding role
from that of the grand jury. While the grand jury must have evidence to determine whether probable
cause to believe an individual has committed a crime exists, there is, the court said, "no comparable
need in the legislative process, at least not in the circumstances of this case.’ Although the Senate
Watergate Committee was not able to obtain presidential tapes, it did discover their existence and
publicly present the bulk of the evidence about White House corruption that led to Nixon's downfall.
In April 1974, Special Prosecutor Jaworski obtained a subpoena ordering Nixon to release certain
tapes and papers related to specific meetings between the President and those indicted by the grand
jury. Those tapes and the conversations they revealed were believed to contain damaging evidence
involving the indicted men and perhaps the President himself. Hoping that Jaworski and the public
would be satisfied, Nixon turned over edited transcripts of 43 conversations, including portions of 20
conversations demanded by the subpoena. James D. St. Clair, Nixon's attorney, then requested Judge
John Sirica of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to quash the subpoena. While
arguing before Sirica, St. Clair stated that:
The President wants me to argue that he is as powerful a monarch as Louis XIV, only four years
at a time, and is not subject to the processes of any court in the land except the court of
impeachment.
Sirica denied Nixon's motion and ordered the President to turn the tapes over by May 31. Both Nixon
and Jaworski appealed directly to the Supreme Court, which heard arguments on July 8. The stakes
were so high, in that the tapes most likely contained evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the
President and his men, that they wanted no dissent. Chief Justice Burger delivered the decision on
July 24 from the bench and the very fact that he was doing so meant that knowledgeable onlookers
realized the decision must be unanimous.
The Court's opinion found that the courts could indeed intervene on the matter and that Special
Counsel Jaworski had proven a "sufficient likelihood that each of the tapes contains conversations
relevant to the offenses charged in the indictment". While the Court acknowledged that the principle
of executive privilege did exist, the Court would also directly reject President Nixon's claim to an
"absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all
circumstances." The Court ordered the President to release the tapes to the special prosecutor. On
July 30, 1974, Nixon complied with the order and released the subpoenaed tapes to the public.
In United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683 (1974), the Supreme Court ruled that a claim of executive
privilege for presidential conversations "cannot prevail over the fundamental demands of due process
of law in the fair administration of criminal justice" where a "specific need for evidence in a pending
criminal trial" is demonstrated. The Supreme Court judges understood the significance of the case
and in a non-partisan manner, voted unanimously (8-0) on the case. (Justice William H. Rehnquist
recused himself due to his close association with several Watergate conspirators, including Attorneys
General John Mitchell and Richard Kleindienst, prior to his appointment to the Court).
Within the court there was never much doubt about the general outcome. Alan Westin was quoted as
saying, "U.S. v. Nixon was one of the most predictable rulings in the history of American
constitutional law . . . the political situation was not only hospitable to a ruling against the President
but almost irresistibly pressing for it” (Howard Ball, 1993).

Impeachment
On February 6, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee was authorized to launch a formal
impeachment inquiry against the president. The House approved the resolution 410–4. Up until that
time the only President to have ever been impeached was Andrew Johnson, the 17 th President of the
United States. In the United States of America, an impeachment at the federal level must undergo
through three procedures:
1. First, the Congress investigates. This investigation typically begins in the House Judiciary
Committee, but may begin elsewhere. For example, the Nixon impeachment inquiry began in
the Senate Judiciary Committee
2. The House of Representatives must pass, by a simple majority of those present and voting,
articles of impeachment, which constitute the formal allegation or allegations. Upon passage,
the defendant has been "impeached".
3. Third, the Senate tries the accused. In the case of the impeachment of a president, the Chief
Justice of the United States presides over the proceedings. Conviction in the Senate requires
 a two-thirds supermajority vote of those present. The result of conviction is removal from
office.
When the impeachment of Andrew Johnson was initiated on February 24, 1868 by the United States
House of Representatives, it was considered done not properly because it was very much on partisan
lines; Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, had came into conflict with the Republican-dominated
Congress. Johnson became the first American president to be impeached on March 2–3, 1868, when
the House formally adopted the articles of impeachment and forwarded them to the United States
Senate for adjudication. He however survived removal from office in Senate by a single vote. Lyman
Trumbull of Illinois, one of the ten Republican Senators whose refusal to vote for conviction
prevented Johnson's removal from office, noted, in the speech he gave explaining his vote for
acquittal, that had Johnson been convicted, the main source of the President's political power—the
freedom not to agree with the Congress without consequences—would have been destroyed, and the
Constitution's system of checks and balances along with it.

The precedent set by the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson episode was that it maintained the
principle that Congress should not remove the President from office simply because its members
disagreed with him over policy, style, and administration of the office. To prevent mistakes of the
past, the Judiciary Committee set up an impeachment inquiry staff, separate from its permanent staff,
to look into whether the charges against the president constituted impeachable offenses. As the
Judiciary Committee was preparing to begin a formal impeachment inquiry, the president tried once
more to contain the situation. At the end of his January 30, 1974 State of the Union address, Nixon
asked for an expeditious resolution to any impeachment proceedings against him, so that the
government could function fully effectively again. He told Congress straight out that "one year of
Watergate is enough" and asserted that he had no "intention whatever" of resigning.
John Doar, formerly a civil rights attorney in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, was hired in
December 1973 to be the lead special counsel for the inquiry staff. Doar shared with Rodino a view
that the Senate hearings had gone overboard with leaked revelations and witnesses compelled to
testify under immunity grants; they were determined to do things in a more thorough and objective
process. The first task assigned to the attorneys on the inquiry staff by John Doer was to ascertain
what constituted "high crimes and misdemeanors" – one of the grounds stated in Article II, Section
of the Constitution for impeachment of the president. This was a necessary first step as it had been
over a century since the only prior American presidential impeachment that of Andrew Johnson in
1868, and Judiciary Committee members desired guidance on the history, standards, and process of
impeachment.
The inquiry staff produced a guide for the Judiciary Committee, a 64-page report, entitled
"Constitutional Grounds for Presidential Impeachment." A key determination made in the report was
that there did not need to be a criminal act on the part of the president to justify impeachment. It
stated, "The framers did not write a fixed standard. Instead they adopted from English history a
standard sufficiently general and flexible to meet future circumstances and events, the nature and
character of which they could not foresee." It further concluded that impeachable offenses could fall
into three categories: "Exceeding the powers of the office in derogation of those of another branch of
government;" "Behaving in a manner grossly incompatible with the proper functions and purpose of
the office;" and "Employing the power of the office for an improper purpose or personal gain." The
document became a central component of the congressional effort to remove President Nixon from
office. The White House was quick to reject the report's central conclusion, asserting that only
criminal offenses of "a very serious nature" are grounds for impeaching the President.
 On April 11, 1974, by a 33–3 vote, the Judiciary Committee subpoenaed 42 White House tapes of
pertinent conversations. A week after this, Jaworski obtained a subpoena from Judge Sirica ordering
Nixon to release 64 additional recordings in connection with his case. Nixon announced on national
television that he was giving to the Judiciary Committee edited transcripts of the conversations they
wanted; though he refused to hand over the tapes and other documents requested by Jaworski. On
April 30, some 1,250 pages of transcripts were made public. The Judiciary Committee, however,
rejected Nixon's edited transcripts, saying that they did not comply with the terms of the subpoena
and insisted that the tapes themselves must be turned over.

The House Judiciary Committee opened formal impeachment hearings against the President on May
9, 1974. The first twenty minutes of that day's proceedings were televised on the major U.S.
networks, after which the committee switched to closed sessions for the next two months. During the
first phase of the hearings, May 9 – June 21, the committee's impeachment inquiry staff reported
their evidence on Watergate and the other topics within the scope of their earlier research. At this
time the committee also renewed its effort to obtain materials President Nixon had thus far refused to
surrender. Two subpoenas were issued on May 15 demanding that the President turn over the tape
recordings of 11 conversations believed to concern the Watergate case, and diaries of Nixon's White
House meetings during an eight‐month period in 1972 and 1973. As in the past, Nixon refused to
comply, stating in a letter to Chairman Rodino that "he had already submitted all material pertinent
to his role in the Watergate case." Nixon further declared that he would likewise reject any future
subpoenas.

On May 30 the committee responded to Nixon's determined refusal to turn over the information it
requested in a stern letter, Issued by a vote of 28–10, the letter also warned the president that his
continued refusal might lead committee members to draw "adverse inferences” concerning the
substance of the materials" (that is, whether they contained incriminating evidence), and that the
noncompliance itself might constitute grounds for impeachment. Eight Republicans voted across the
aisle and joined the committee Democrats in approving the letter. This was a significant moment in
the history of American politics, Congressmen acting in a non-partisan matter and reining in on an
unchecked President; in the true spirit Separation of Powers and Checks and Balances enshrined in
the Constitution by the Founding Fathers.
What was at display is also the American aversion to tyranny, given its birth as a nation against a
tyrannical power from the ‘Old World’. The United States of America is the ‘new world’ which they
have created as a society; a society where all the values of the Enlightenment are actually embraced,
unlike the monarchical societies of Europe. The history of governance in the United States of
America is incomplete if one does not see it as a chronology of attempts at preserving these values.
Equality, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, the Declaration of Independence sees as the ideals,
the rights of every of its citizens. The same Declaration of Independence also mentions: “But when a
long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce
them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to
provide new Guards for their future security."
The Committee primarily focused on Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution, which specifies the
grounds upon which a president can be impeached: "treason, bribery, and other high Crimes and
Misdemeanors". During the course of the hearings there was fervent debate about the nature of an
impeachable offense under Article II, whether only criminally indictable offenses qualified or
whether the definition was broader. Focus was also on allegations of misuse in a discriminatory
manner of the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies. On July 9, the Judiciary
Committee released its own version of eight of the White House tapes that Nixon had previously
issued his own transcript of. The Committee transcripts were both the beneficiary of superior
playback equipment and restored some of the potentially damaging statements that Nixon staffers
had removed or heard differently.
On July 24, 1974, in United States v. Nixon, the Court ruled unanimously (8–0) that claims of
executive privilege over the tapes were void. The Court ordered the President to release the tapes to
the special prosecutor and on July 30, 1974, Nixon complied with the order and released the
subpoenaed tapes to the public. . When the Supreme Court ordered the president to turn over
subpoenaed tapes to the special prosecutor investigating Watergate, support for the president in
Congress collapsed. The seven-month-long impeachment inquiry reached its climax July 27, 1974,
when the Committee voted on the first article of impeachment. As the Committee prepared to vote,
Chairman Rodino said, "We have deliberated. We have been patient. We have been fair. Now the
American people, the House of Representatives and the Constitution and the whole history of our
republic demand that we make up our minds."

Over the course of four days, July 27–30, the Judiciary Committee debated five articles of
impeachment against Richard Nixon. There was sharp disagreement during the proceedings about
what constitutes an impeachable offense, whether only criminal act qualify or whether non-criminal
activity could qualify as well. Three articles were approved by the Committee. This historic charge,
the first to be lodged against President by a House investigating body since 1868, set in motion the
constitutional process by which Mr. Nixon could ultimately be stripped of his office. On July 31,
1974 James M.Naughton reported on the first page of the New York Times:
WASHINGTON, July 30—The House Judiciary Committee voted narrowly today to charge
President Nixon with unconstitutional defiance of committee subpoenas, completing the draft of
the bill of impeachment.

… the 38‐member committee, after nine months of intensive investigation and a week of
anguished judgments; drew the following outline of the case on which the full House agreed, if
the House votes impeachment, the Senate will ultimately decide Mr. Nixon's fitness to complete
his second term in the White House:

Article I, approved Saturday by a 27‐to‐11 bipartisan committee vote, accused Mr. Nixon of
having personally engaged in a course of conduct designed to obstruct justice in the Watergate
case.

Article II, recommended to the House last night by a 28‐to- 10 roll‐call vote, charged the
President with a persistent effort to abuse his authority in violation of his constitutional oath to
uphold and defend the nation's laws.

Article III, added today to the bill of impeachment on a near‐party‐line vote of 21‐to‐17, alleged
that Mr. Nixon sought to impede the impeachment process by defying eight subpoenas for 147
recorded White House conversations and a variety of other evidence.

On August 20, 1974, the House authorized the printing of the Committee report H. Rep. 93–1305,
which included the text of the resolution impeaching Nixon and set forth articles of impeachment
against him. However these articles of Impeachment were never voted on by the House. On August
5, 1974, the White House released a previously unknown audio tape from June 23, 1972, which
became known as the “Smoking Gun” tape; for it made clear his complicity in the Watergate cover-
up. Recorded only a few days after the break-in, it documented the initial stages of the cover-up: it
revealed Nixon and Haldeman had conducted a meeting in the Oval Office where they discussed
how to stop the FBI from continuing their investigation of the break-in, as they recognised that there
was a high risk that their position in the scandal may be revealed. The contents of this tape persuaded
Nixon's own lawyers, Fred Buzhardt and James St. Clair that “the President had lied to the nation, to
his closest aides, and to his own lawyers— for more than two years". The ethical standard of these
two lawyers was high enough to report the crime while other lawyers in the White House Plumbers
maintained their silence or were actively involved.

In the ensuing national outrage following release of the "smoking gun" transcript Nixon's political
support quickly evaporated and it destroyed him politically. The ten congressmen who had voted
against all three articles of impeachment in the House Judiciary Committee announced they would
all support the impeachment article accusing Nixon of obstructing justice when the articles came up
before the full House. Of these, the announcement of Representative Charles Wiggins (R-CA) was
significant because he was, as the New York Times reported, “President Nixon's strongest defender
during the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment proceedings”. In a statement outlining his new
position, Mr. Wiggins said there was no longer any doubt that the president had agreed to a ''plan of
action'' to obstruct the Watergate investigation. ''These facts standing alone are legally sufficient in
my opinion to sustain at least one count against the president of conspiracy to obstruct justice,'' he
said.

Resignation

On the night of August 7, 1974, Senators Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott and Congressman
Rhodes met with Nixon in the Oval Office. Scott and Rhodes were the Republican leaders in the
Senate and House, respectively. The three lawmakers told Nixon that his support in Congress had all
but disappeared. Rhodes told Nixon that he would face certain impeachment when the articles came
up for vote in the full House. They did not pressure Nixon to resign, but simply made the realities of
the situation clear. Goldwater later wrote that as a result of the meeting, Nixon "knew beyond any
doubt that one way or another, his presidency was finished". For a period of several months,
Watergate circumscribed the president's freedom of action and occupied his attention. Kissinger, for
example, noted that "we were losing the ability to make credible commitments, for we could no
longer guarantee Congressional approval." Perhaps most symbolic of the state of affairs was the fact
that Kissinger was asked at a press conference whether the alert at the end of the war in the Middle
East in October 1973, was a Watergate maneuver. Watergate had become the only lens.

Realizing that he had no chance of staying in office and that public opinion was not in his favor,
Nixon decided to resign. In a nationally televised address from the Oval Office on the evening of
August 8, 1974 the president informed the nation of the decision, saying, "It has become evident to
me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that
effort" to say in office, and stating his hope that, by resigning, "I will have hastened the start of that
process of healing which is so desperately needed in America." He also expressed contrition saying,
"I deeply regret any injuries that may have been done in the course of the events that led to this
decision."

Nixon became the first, and so far only, president to resign. Following President Nixon's resignation,
the impeachment process against him was closed. On August 20, the House voted to accept the final
Judiciary Committee report by a vote of 412 to 3. The 528‐page document gives in detail the “clear
and convincing evidence” on which the committee concluded that Mr. Nixon had obstructed justice
in the Watergate case, had abused his Presidential powers for his personal and political benefit and
had defied Congressional demands for information. The Republicans who voted against
impeachment but who supported Mr. Nixon's removal from office after he produced new evidence
early this month declared in a signed statement that Mr. Nixon had not been “hounded from office”
by his critics. Rather, the Republicans stated, the former President had “imprisoned the truth about
his role in the Watergate cover‐up so long and so tightly within the solitude of his Oval Office that it
could not be unleashed without destroying his Presidency.”

On September 8, 1974, President Gerald Ford issued a full and unconditional pardon of Nixon,
immunizing him from prosecution for any crimes he had "committed or may have committed or
taken part in" as president:

"I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred
upon me by Article II, Section II of the Constitution, have granted, and by these presents
do grant, a full, free and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the
United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken
part in during the period from July 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974."

Ford meant to say January 1969, not July. In any event, the pardon covered all of Nixon's days in
the White House. President Gerald Ford, who was Nixon’s Vice President, was heavily criticized
for this pardon and even appeared to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on October 17,
1974; the first sitting president to testify before the House of Representatives since Abraham
Lincoln .

Watergate and the Constitution

Congress, responding to outrage, especially over the pardon, rushed to judgment with a series of
legislative measures, most of which have been either detrimental or ineffective. But the post-
Watergate legislative agenda demonstrated that the scandal did give Congress the opportunity to
reassert its power. For instance when Congress investigated the scope of the president's legal
powers, it belatedly found that consecutive presidential administrations had declared the United
States to be in a continuous open-ended state of emergency since 1950. Congress enacted
the National Emergencies Act in 1976 to regulate such declarations. There are now committees in
both Houses specifically charged with overseeing intelligence operations. After Watergate,
congressional committees are not willing to take "no" for an answer when they call for executive
records.

Watergate focused the nation's attention on problems whose origins preceded the Nixon
Administration: the growth of an "Imperial presidency," the corrupting influence big money has on
the electoral process, the extent to which government secrecy fosters illegal and immoral behavior,
and the threat our intelligence agencies can pose to civil liberties. Watergate forced the nation to
define terms such as "executive privilege" and "national security," and to decide what constituted an
“impeachable offense.” Watergate highlighted the power wielded by un-elected staff, and it
foreshadowed the important force television would become in the political life of the nation.

The Scandal itself involved many things: Congress's investigatory and impeachment powers, the
executive's privilege to deny information to Congress, the role of the federal courts in arbitrating
disputes between the two other branches, the difficulties in criminally prosecuting a sitting President,
and the diminished vitality of separation of powers principles in the modern day. Four years after
Mr. Nixon's resignation in 1974, Professor Kurland summed up his views in a book titled "Watergate
and the Constitution." As a professor of law, Dr. Kurland was a consultant to the Senate Judiciary
Committee at the time of Watergate and one of 12 legal scholars who said the transcripts contained
material that would support an impeachment charge against the President.
Professor Kurland's central theme is that, starting with the New Deal, presidential power has
burgeoned to unacceptable extremes. No longer is the Chief Executive sufficiently restrained by the
concepts of separation of powers and checks and balances carefully written into the Constitution by
the Framers. We have, Professor Kurland contends-borrowing a phrase made popular by Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr.-an "imperial Presidency." In his chapter entitled "Separation of Powers and Checks
and Balances," Professor Kurland states: "The primary evil revealed by the events of Watergate was
the presidency: not the man but the office. It was and is bloated with unrestrained power, available
for use for good or evil, with little or no accountability for the use to which it is put." However,
Kurland adds that, “this is usurpation but more largely by the abdication of responsibility by the
Congress.”

Kurland complains of the tolerance of this Presidential power, “The tragedy of Watergate lies not in
the pitiful character of the man exiled from the White House; it lies rather in the continued failure of
the nation to take steps first to cabin and then to dissipate that accumulated power, the failure to
revive our constitutional notions of limitations on authority.” One of his dominant themes is that our
national welfare would be better served, and protection against future misuses of power better
secured, if Congress would play a more prominent role vis-a-vis the other two branches. Kurland
correctly recognizes that the increased power of the Presidency is neither a Nixonian nor a
Republican phenomenon, and that the Democratic occupants of the White House over the past half
century have also contributed their fair share to this trend. The Watergate-related legislations have
not improved confidence in government nor has it averted corruption. This should not be surprising,
since historically reform movements that have been reactions to specific events and failings have
been short-lived. If corruption and abuse of power did not start with Watergate, neither did it end
with Watergate (Ruth P. Morgan, 1996).

Watergate also gave an impetus to the legal profession to address its ethical standards given that 12
lawyers were involved, including the President, Richard Nixon. John Dean in his testimony to the
Senate Watergate Committee remarked “That was just a reaction to myself to the fact that how in
God’s name did so many lawyers get involved in something like this?”. Legal profession has
struggled with the astonishing tension between the sacred duty of confidentiality and the public good
in reporting incipient fraud or crime. Although the standards of legal ethics have allowed, and
seemingly required, lawyers to report a client's intention to commit a future crime or fraud, the
reality is that the profession has frequently defaulted to a nearly absolute protection of client
confidentiality; as was evidenced by the Watergate Scandal. The American Bar Association (ABA)
was appalled by the Watergate events and the public outcry against the involvement of so many
lawyers. The ABA constituted the Kutak Commission, in response, which became known for
creating the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct.

Anomalies

There have been anomalies too, in the Watergate narrative that seem to conform all too well to the
Manichean triumph of good over evil. There has been a contestation, especially among the Nixon
apologists, that Watergate was a Democratic conspiracy to take down a popular Republican
President, who had just got re-elected in the biggest landslide till that time. In spite of a landslide
election in 1972, Republican President Nixon was confronted with an unpopular war he inherited and
a Democrat-controlled Congress. Robert Smith, the chief counsel of the Senate Committee on
Government Operations, had predicted that with an anti-Republican majority in both Senate and
House, it was only a matter of time before the legislature would use its powers of subpoena and
impeachment to break an unpopular president. Maybe just what they needed was to make the
President unpopular and it was what they did; by chance or by design. The President’s arrogance also
did not help his cause in this circumstance.

"While it may be easy to delete characterization from the printed page, we cannot delete
characterization from people's minds with a wave of the hand", remarked Vice President Gerald Ford
when the call for Nixon’s impeachment or resignation came from the public, media and political
community. The United States of America is a Democracy and in a Democracy, public opinion,
discourse and mood does matter; all of which were unfavorable to Nixon in his Second Term. Nixon
seemed to model his administration along what Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. calls, in his book The
Imperial Presidency, a Plebiscitary Presidency. In a "plebiscitary Presidency" the Chief Executive,
once elected, is considered to embody the will of the people: his official judgments are infallible and
to oppose him is antidemocratic because the President represents the democratic majority.

Nixon made no hiding of his belief in the powers of the executive. He made his lawyer tell the Grand
jury that he is like a king; you get to remove only every four years. For Nixon it was not an abuse of
power, as mentioned in the Frost interview, but a consequence of the power of the President. What
he did was allowed because he was the President; others before had also done things because they
were Presidents. If the President does it, it is legal. The revolutionary transformation to the
plebiscitary presidency is a presidency accountable only during elections or impeachment rather than
daily to the Congress, the press and the public. Public responses are limited to voting during
elections. This concept of a Plebiscitary President is used on Nixon not to absolve him of his volition
but to highlight the approach he had to the office of the President. The Psychological traits that have
been ascribed to him by those that rationalize on his behaviour are important but what also matters is
how he rationalizes his powers.

If in his understanding of how the Presidency works, the President is above the law like the monarch
of the past, then how he reacted to the circumstances in office, including Watergate, could be
justified; to himself. This approach was built from his years of running for public offices. After
serving on active duty in the Navy Reserve during World War II, he was elected to the House of
Representatives in 1946 and to the Senate in 1950. He was the running mate of Dwight D.
Eisenhower, the Republican Party presidential nominee in the 1952 election, and he served for eight
years as vice president, becoming the second-youngest vice president in history at age 40. He waged
an unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1960, narrowly losing to John F. Kennedy, and he lost a
race for governor of California to Pat Brown in 1962. In 1968, he ran for the presidency again and
was elected. Herbert S. Parmet pointed to the importance of Nixon's loss in the 1960 election to his
subsequent personnel selections and behavior in the White House.

The immigrants that came to America to settle and form the American society were mostly those that
escaped persecution in Europe from the State and the Church. This shared plight is to form the
American paranoia against monarchy and Church interference in governance. It was their
imagination of a system of government where everyone is equal before the law, where all those in
power are accountable before the law, even the President, which was to mobilize them in their
Declaration of Independence from the United Kingdom in 1776. When facts came to be revealed, in
the course of the Watergate Scandal, that the President was complicit in the cover-up of the burglary
and was acting in Obstruction of Justice, it fed the American fear and aversion of tyranny. The focus
of media, both print and television, on the Scandal is not so much a market strategy but more a
manifestation of the American desire of having a government that abides by the laws. The Scandal
did sell but what is at issue here is the desire, not necessarily for Scandals but, for the accountability
of the government to the people. There was a demand for accountability and the market rose to it
with the free press.
Or was the President just following precedents? Was his only mistake being caught? The
overreaching on the part of the President could also be the very apparatus of the Executive. The
Executive as the branch of the Government which addresses questions of national security has been
acceded power to it by the Congress to increase its effectiveness. There are circumstances when the
President, like the sovereign monarch of the Old World, has to overstep the boundaries of the legal
system and so the distinction between requirement and ethical becomes blurred. This lack of
distinction was also found in the ‘Plumbers’ for whom it was difficult to tell if they are doing the
President’s personal whims or acts of National importance. There is not a standard code of how a
President should act and the first President George Washington was careful not to set any precedent
and optimist enough to let his successors bring their own flavor to the Office. The Pentagon Papers
proved that the preceding Presidents of Nixon could very well then have been impeached along the
same charges that Nixon found himself indicted of.

It would not be wrong, then, to say that it all comes down to what the people think; the national
mood becomes more important than the question of legality and ethics, when it comes to
impeachment of a President. The Congressmen would not have made haste with the hearings and the
impeachment had the constituents they represent were not attentive to the unfolding of the
Watergate. The personalizing of the Office, to the detriment of Nixon, could very well have been a
ploy to attract the public’s attention to the Watergate Scandal. In The Crowd, A Study of the Popular
Mind, Gustave Le Bon talks about Prestige as a symbol of authority/power. He writes, “Prestige in
reality is a sort of domination exercised on our mind by an individual, a work, or an idea. This
domination entirely paralyses our critical faculty, and fills our soul with astonishment and respect.
The sentiment provoked is inexplicable, like all sentiments, but it would appear to be of the same
kind as the fascination to which a magnetized person is subjected. Prestige is the mainspring of all
authority. Neither gods, kings, nor women have ever reigned without it.”

The Prestige of an authority is not permanent but can grow and also vanish. Le Bon observed that,
“The hero whom the crowd acclaimed yesterday is insulted to-day should he have been overtaken by
failure. The re-action, indeed, will be the stronger in proportion as the prestige has been great. The
crowd in this case considers the fallen hero as an equal, and takes its revenge for having bowed to a
superiority whose existence it no longer admits.” Prestige can be lost by lack of success, especially
when it comes to crowd aspirations, or more slowly by acts of discussion. This latter decay, however,
is exceedingly sure. From the moment prestige is called in question it ceases to be prestige. The gods
and men who have kept their prestige for long have never tolerated discussion. For the crowd to
admire, it must be kept at a distance. President Nixon lost his prestige, his hold on the popular mind,
the moment his authority was questioned. As the lines above shows, once an authority is stripped of
Prestige, the retribution of a crowd is inevitable; and that is exactly what happened to President
Nixon with Impeachment.

Nixon failed to live up to the Prestige given to the Office of the President by the American people.
The overwhelming public attention to Watergate, magnified by Television and print media, was
manifested in the thousands of letters and telegram received by Congresswomen and Congressmen.
The personalizing of Watergate on the man Nixon as someone, who abused the power of the Office,
without attacking the institution of the President as such, also reveals the American reverence and
adherence to their system of government. This personalizing also, however, distracts the ‘popular
mind’ from the technical and institutional roots of the problem and focuses them on personalities.
The focus of the media and the people after Watergate has solely been on the personality of the man
in the office and not on the Office. A President came to be judged less on what he actually does in
term of policies and action but more on how he portrays himself in the public’s eye; what began was
an era of Approval Ratings.
The biggest question that remains is: what was the purpose of the break-in? It has been established
that it was a second break-in at the DNC Headquarters that was caught but the purpose of the break-
in of the DNC offices has never been conclusively established. Records from the United States v.
Liddy trial, made public in 2013, showed that four of the five burglars testified that they were told the
campaign operation hoped to find evidence that linked Cuban funding to Democratic campaigns.
This would have been a plausible case to be taken up by the ‘White House Plumbers’ whose job was
to prevent leaks and address security issues. Was the CIA involved as was originally claimed by the
White House? The hush money was traced to Committee for the Re-election of the President but was
the President complicit or was he just protecting the Office from public scrutiny? Did President
Nixon take the fall for the Office instead of compromising the national security apparatus? There are
speculations that Nixon would have survived the Senate trial, like Senator Howard Baker who said
that in the final analysis the Senate would not have convicted Nixon.

Did Nixon resign to stop the public scrutiny of the Executive? Imagine if he had rode through the
Senate trials and found himself acquitted, would the public scrutiny ended or be intensified? Why
was President Ford in such a hurry to pardon Nixon; like only a month later? President Ford paid for
this in his loss of the Presidential elections of 1976 but the pardon did draw an end to the Watergate
saga and the focus shifted from questions of Executive privilege to more important contemporary
issues of fall of South Vietnam and the economy. In the past half century, no other administration
has been subjected to such intensive investigative scrutiny as Nixon's and many of the ugly
disclosures about Franklin D. Roosevelt and his successors have emerged years after the events, as a
result of investigation.

Just as Nixon had not contested the electoral returns in 1960, nor stepped beyond any bounds of
propriety as vice president during Eisenhower's illnesses, he did not defy a court decision, did
relinquish the tapes. This shows his respect for the constitution and trust in the system of
government; this is an aspect of his personality often missed by those that study his behaviour. How
he rises to the occasions during his time in public office depends on his personality and also how he
rationalizes power; where he sees the limits and options. He acted like a monarch because the Office
was based on the monarchy. It is a monarchy but where the ruler is now a citizen bounded by law
with a system of governance to deter any abuse of power. Circumstances arise when the government
has to overstep the boundaries of the legal and thus is sometimes above the law. How much can the
Executive overstep is thus not defined and how much check the Legislature and the Court, as well as
the media, puts on it depends on the people; ‘the national mood’. For example, during a war the
Congress is more likely to give free rein to the Executive.

Nixon, as the Office demands, would also have to overstep the boundaries of the law in the best
interest of the country; for example in matters of national security and surveillance. This was not
something new and is more a job requirement than a precedent. President Lincoln, as Nixon also
knew, was reviled as "dictator" and "despot" for these acts. Nixon knew he can carry on as long as he
embodies the will of the people; which makes itself heard through polls, editorials, pressure on
Congress, demonstrations, and endorsements. When he realized the public was not in his favor he did
not stick with a failing course of action and resigned. In other words, this was not, as Barber
contended, "the story of our nearest brush yet with an American tyranny."

Conclusion

The Watergate Scandal is gaining significance again with the Impeachment Hearings of the current
President of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump. The same questions that came up during
the Watergate Scandal are being asked again: Did the President overstep his power? Was the
President involved in Obstruction of Justice? Why is the media so paranoid over the President? Is
there something called an Executive Privilege? Is the President above the law? Is the President being
over-personalized and scrutinized that it obstructs that the workings of the Executive? The articles of
Impeachment drafted in the Impeachment of Nixon are coming to relevance again, as to what
constitutes an impeachable offense. There are again the ‘fixers’ of the President, Special Counsel,
and Impeachment Hearings.

The media is personalizing the Presidency and is quoting anonymous sources again like how the
Washing Post did during the Watergate days. The effectiveness of these unproved yet intriguing
revelations in forming public interest was already proved during Watergate Scandal. Watergate with
its abundance of aberrant narratives and literature remains an important episode in American history,
a Pandora box of unanswered questions, with facts yet to be established with several classified
information still to be released to the Public. Till then, Watergate remains a mystery and a grim
reminder of the impending abuse of power by those in public office, if left unchecked.
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