Almost forty years after the Watergate arrests on June 17, 1972, three myths about it are still pervasive. First, that the scandal only concerned âa third-rate burglaryâ of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. Second, that the âcover-up was worse than the crime.â And finally, that two reportersâBob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Postââbrought downâ President Richard M. Nixon.
Not one of these is true.
The three myths of Watergate have been demonstrably false for decades. President Nixon had his spokesman minimize the scandalâs importance by calling it âa third-rate burglary,â and Nixon was initially successful: Watergate was not a factor inâor even widely reported duringâthe fall 1972 Presidential campaign between President Nixon and Democratic candidate George McGovern. Richard Nixon was reelected in a landslide.
Whatâs wrong with the âthird-rate burglaryâ claim? To begin with, even the singular term âburglaryâ is misleading, since Congressional and Justice Department investigations showed that four burglaries were actually attempted at the Watergate. Additionally, in the weeks before the final Watergate break-in, Nixonâs Watergate operatives committed several other burglaries. Their targets ranged from Democratic offices (including those of McGovern, Gary Hart, and Sargent Shriver) to journalists to the Chilean embassy in Washington.
Was the âthe cover-upâ worse than âthe crime?â Noâthatâs another completely inaccurate myth, since Nixonâs own words prove that there wasnât just one âcrime.â From February 1971 to July 1973, Nixon secretly recorded his conversations at the Oval Office, and his other offices away from the White House. Only a handful of his closest aides knew about the taping system, and Nixon never intended for the tapes to become public. On those tapes, many released only in recent years, Nixon discussed many dozens of serious felonies, ranging from illegal political espionage (surveillance, bugging, wiretaps, beatings) to massive corporate bribes and illegal slush funds. In the early 1970s, evidence of Nixonâs clear culpability for those crimes was known only to a few dozen officials and investigators at the Justice Department and in Congress. With that proof now more widely available, it clearly shows the pervasive criminal culture of Nixonâs White House.
Finally, itâs true that The Washington Post played a leading role in reporting the crimes that led Nixon to resign rather than face impeachment. However, for decades Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and The Post have been trying to point out that their reporting was not what âbrought downâ Nixon. Instead, it was the huge range of proven felonies that Richard Nixon and his men committed that resulted in Nixonâs resignation, and the convictions of more than thirty of his officials and associates.
Yet these three basic myths have kept the public and most journalists from looking at the tremendous amount of important new information about Nixon and Watergate that has emerged in recent years.
While Richard Nixonâs culpability for the Watergate break-ins has long been established, most recently by PBS in 2003, whatâs truly remarkable is that after almost forty years, conventional accounts of the scandal still donât address Nixonâs motive. Why was President Nixon willing to risk his reelection with so many repeated burglaries at the Watergate, and at other Washington offices, in just a few weeks? What motivated Nixon to jeopardize his Presidency by ordering the wide range of criminal operations that resulted in Watergate? What was Nixon so desperate to get at the Watergate, and how does it explain the deeper context surrounding his crimes?
What were the Watergate burglars after? And why was Nixon willing to risk his Presidency to get it?
Many people think the Watergate burglars broke in just to bug the DNC, yet why were the burglars caught with enough film to take photos of over fourteen hundred pages of documents? Why were all of the Watergate burglars current or former CIA agents? And why were most of those agents Cuban exiles, veterans of the CIAâs anti-Castro operations of the early 1960s?
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