Mini-Review: Watergate

Late in the summer of 1974, as the nation suffered through the final days of the Watergate scandal, President Nixon made a last-ditch attempt to salvage his presidency. He called Governor George Wallace of Alabama and implored him to put pressure on Alabama representative Walter Flowers. Flowers sat on the House Judiciary Committee; Nixon hoped that Wallace could persuade the congressman to vote “nay” on the impending articles of impeachment against the president.

But by this time, everything was going against Nixon, and Wallace’s response was simple: no. On hearing this, a crushed Nixon hung up the phone, turned to chief of staff Al Haig, and sighed “Well, Al, there goes the presidency.”

This sorry scene, with the president reduced to dialing for support like some county commissioner, appears near the end of Keith Olson’s wonderful book “Watergate.” Olson’s book is the story of a powerful man who utterly destroyed himself. In his tidy two-hundred page volume, Olson shows how Nixon committed suicide by a thousand cuts, his presidency dissolving into a haze of stupidity and venality.

The scandal did not spring from the empty air. John Dean famously described the Watergate cover-up as “a cancer on the presidency.” Perhaps malaria would have made a more fitting comparison. The Nixon White House was a fever swamp, where corruption flourished and cover-ups were accepted as part of the culture. In the basement of the White House lurked the Plumbers, frantically trying to plug the leaks oozing from the Oval Office. Up above, H.R. Haldeman, John Dean, and other Nixon cronies schemed to wiretap the phones of hostile reporters.

Other, more sinister horrors stalked the corridors of power. Perhaps the most frightening was the so-called Huston plan. A not-so-half-baked scheme proposed by White House aide Tom Huston, it called for a massive program of electronic surveillance against Nixon’s “enemies.” And Nixon treated nearly everyone like an enemy. The Huston plan even called for the internment of troublemakers like those who protested against the Vietnam War. The Huston plan never went into effect, but its very existence is chilling.

Among all this, a “third-rate burglary” at the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel hardly seemed noteworthy. Indeed, Olson notes how the White House went in cover-up mode almost reflexively. It was business as usual in the ultra-paranoid, ultra-suspicious Nixon administration. Nixon’s operatives simply assumed a cover-up was in order. For them, telling the truth was never even an option.

That lit the fuse that would end up blowing Richard Nixon and all his men sky-high. Olson’s book is a story of missed opportunities. Nixon had many, many chances to simply come clean. Had he stepped forth at the very beginning of the scandal, admitted wrongdoing, and fired a couple of his aides, he might have survived. Yet he refused to give up anything willingly. The press, the courts, and Congress had to force every admission out of him. This amounted to a steady drip-drip-drip of damaging stories, a political form of Chinese water torture for the president.

First, he refused to say anything about the matter. Then, he acknowledged the existence of the White House taping system, but rejected calls to release the tapes. Eventually he relented and published the transcripts. But that wasn’t enough; he had to release the tapes themselves. And still he held back. It wasn’t until late in 1974 that he released all the tapes, including the infamous “Smoking Gun.” He could have released the tapes in one fell swoop, but instead dragged out the painful process for months and months. Not even the hardiest presidency could survive the strain.

Nixon, in Olson’s book, remains a fairly enigmatic figure. That is not at all surprising. Great historians have devoted thousands of pages to our thirty-seventh president and have never succeeded in pinning him down. One can hardly expect Olson to capture the essence of Nixon in a book the size of a paperback detective novel. He sketches out the essentials of Nixon: a very intelligent man, certainly, but solitary to the point of reclusive, and bitter to the point of paranoia.

More disappointing is Olson’s failure to explore the peripheral characters of Watergate. Each receives only a few sentences of description. This makes it difficult to fathom their motivations. Why, for instance, was Haldeman so devoted to Nixon? Why did Dean turn on the president? Why didn’t John Ehrlichman do the same? And why, oh why did anyone allow G. Gordon Liddy to do anything? Again, we have to take into account Olson’s purpose. This is not the definitive book on Watergate, nor does it claim to be.

It simply offers a succinct overview of the whole case from beginning to end. Olson arranges everything meticulously, chronicling names, dates, and places with the precision of a Rose Mary Woods. The book’s greatest strength is the attention it gives to the media. Each White House action is paired with a reaction from the press. Over time, the reader watches the last traces of support for Nixon fade away. Many newspapers defended him at the beginning of the scandal. By the end, even the rabidly right-wing Manchester Union Leader called for his head.

Watergate defies an easy explanation. Can you capture it in one sentence, one paragraph, one book even? No. Not at all. But you can try. And Keith Olson had made an excellent try in his book “Watergate.”