A Flood of Scandal Sweeps Away a President

Americans like to give their scandals nicknames. Whitewater. Filegate. Iran-Contra. Billygate. Teapot Dome. But these catchy slogans never capture the complexity that lies behind the headlines.

Watergate, the mother of all 20th century political scandals, took its name from the clumsy burglary and bugging of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex. But the break-in, dismissed by a White House aide as a “third-rate burglary attempt,” was not what drove Richard Milhous Nixon from office in his second term. It was a plethora of other crimes committed before and after the break-in by various people that brought the country to the brink of a constitutional crisis.

John Mitchell, the former attorney general who served as Nixon’s campaign director and who would eventually go to prison for his part in the scandal, understood from the start where the danger lay. As he said in Senate testimony, his primary goal had been to choke off investigation of the burglary before it led to a Pandora’s box of “White House horror stories.”

Out of that box poured a staggering catalog of other burglaries, illegal intelligence operations, payoffs, schemes to obstruct justice, and abuses of power involving the FBI, the CIA and the IRS.

After an eight-month inquiry that began on a partisan note but ended in bipartisan agreement, the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment accusing Nixon of numerous offenses in connection with the Watergate cover-up, abusing presidential powers through the misuse of federal agencies, and refusing to comply with four committee subpoenas for tapes and other records of presidential conversations.

One of several tapes that Nixon did release under subpoena showed that he, like Mitchell, had worried that exposing the Watergate break-in would uncover other crimes. “You open that scab, there’s a hell of a lot of things. And we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further,” he cautioned an aide.

The transcript of a June 23, 1972, tape showed H.R. Haldeman, White House chief of staff, telling Nixon that campaign money had financed the Watergate burglary and then Nixon telling Haldeman to use the CIA to curb an FBI investigation of the money. This was widely referred to as “the smoking gun” tape because some Republicans had said they would have to see Nixon standing with a smoking gun in his hand before they would support impeachment.

That tape was the culmination of a meticulous inquiry by Judiciary Committee investigators, who also found tapes--secretly made by Nixon himself--on which he urged aides to “stonewall” and “cover up.” Meantime, a special prosecutor had pressed a criminal investigation that resulted in indictments against nine White House officials and two Nixon campaign officials in the Watergate cover-up. Other criminal charges ranging from bribery to illegal campaign operations had been brought against more than two dozen other political figures or businessmen.

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With the public turning against Nixon and his approval rating hovering around 25%, Republican congressional leaders and some of his own aides put him under enormous pressure to resign. Nixon repeatedly vowed to fight the charges.

As the pressure mounted, however, he finally went on television the evening of Aug. 8, 1974, and in somber tones announced that he would resign the next day “in the interests of the nation.” It was also in Nixon’s interest. Had he not resigned he would have faced certain impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate. He also would have forfeited a $60,000-a-year pension, a small government staff and other benefits.

Watergate dramatically altered the political landscape, ushering in an era of bitter partisanship that carried all the way to President Clinton’s impeachment by House Republicans. It emboldened Congress to challenge presidential authority even in such traditionally bipartisan areas as foreign policy. The media, newly aggressive after their role in bringing down Nixon, lowered their standards of proof and privacy in reporting on alleged presidential misconduct.

And a public that once revered the presidency came to view it with weary skepticism.

Some of the reforms spawned by Watergate caused their own problems. Efforts to prevent the fund-raising excesses of the Nixon campaign misfired. And the independent counsel law turned many political controversies into criminal prosecutions that damaged subsequent administrations of both parties. Even Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who investigated Clinton for five years and filed the report that resulted in his impeachment, said the law “simply does not work.” When the law came up for renewal this year, Congress allowed it to die.