Welcome back to The Deep Dive. We are tackling
a subject today that it pretty much defines the
entire concept of a modern political scandal.
It really does. You know the suffix. You just
add deragate to literally anything. Deflategate,
pizzagate, you name it, and it instantly means
something. Right. It implies a cover -up, a conspiracy.
A hidden truth. Yeah. And we are, of course,
talking about the original, the Watergate scandal.
The one that started it all. Now, I know what
you might be thinking. Everyone feels like they
know this story. It's, you know, it's the foundational
myth of American political cynicism. Uh -huh.
You've got the basic building blocks, Nixon,
the tapes, the resignation. I am not a crook.
All the big lines. It's the high school history
version. Which is, I think, where most people
stop. They know how it ends. So they just assume
the story in the middle is, you know, a straight
line from a burglary to a helicopter lifting
off in the South Lawn. But looking at the source
material we're digging into today, which is this
incredibly comprehensive breakdown of the whole
timeline, not just the highlights, the reality
is so much weirder, so much messier. It is not
a straight line. Not at all. It's a jagged chaotic
line of frankly incompetence bizarre kidnapping
plots. I mean calm rational sounding discussions
about firebombing think tanks. Exactly. And a
level of paranoia that is it's honestly hard
to wrap your head around in what's supposed to
be a functioning democracy. And that's the word
right there. Paranoia. You really can't understand
Watergate if you just look at it as a single
event. You can't just call it a third rate burglary,
which was the famous line at the time. Right.
You have to see it as the, I guess, the inevitable
explosion of a pressure cooker that had been
building and building for years. So that's our
mission for this deep dive. We're going to try
to move past that dry textbook summary and really
unpack what they call the White House horrors.
We want to understand how a group of men who
were. On paper, the most powerful people in the
world ended up seriously debating whether they
should use a yacht full of sex workers to blackmail
their political opponents. It sounds like a bad
movie plot. It does. Or how a simple piece of
tape, just a standard piece of adhesive tape
on a door latch, managed to completely unravel
an entire presidency. The smallest detail with
the biggest consequence. So let's get into it.
The source material makes it really clear. We
can't start at the Watergate complex in June
of 72. We have to rewind. We have to go back
to the beginning of the Nixon presidency around
1969. And the atmosphere in that White House,
it seems. I mean, it seems like a fortress under
siege right from the very beginning. Absolutely.
You have to think about what Nixon inherited
when he came into office in 69. The Vietnam War.
The Vietnam War is absolutely raging. The country
is more divided than it's been since the Civil
War. And he'd campaigned on this promise to end
the war honorably. Very vague term. Very vague.
And the reality on the ground was a total stalemate.
So to try and break that stalemate, he authorizes
these secret bombing campaigns in Cambodia. A
neutral country, it's important to note. A neutral
country, exactly. And this was not something
he wanted the American public, or even Congress
for that matter, to know about. But secrets don't
stay secret for long in Washington. No. In May
of 1969, the New York Times breaks the story.
They expose the bombing. And this seems to be
the trigger. This is like patient zero for the
paranoia that follows. Nixon didn't just see
this as a news leak. No, he saw it as an act
of treason. He took it incredibly personally,
and he saw it as a structural threat to the power
of the presidency itself. This is that imperial
presidency idea taking root. It is. Nixon truly
believed that the executive branch had an absolute,
unquestionable right to conduct foreign policy
without any interference and that anyone who
leaked information was, in effect, committing
an act of war against his administration. So
his reaction isn't, OK, let's tighten up our
security protocols. Oh, no. His reaction is to
go on the offensive immediately. He's on his
wiretaps. Yes. And not just on the people he
suspects leaked it. He taps reporters. He taps
his own staff on the National Security Council.
He wants to know who is talking to whom. And
J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, was, what, not moving
fast enough? Well, Hoover was a complicated figure.
He had his own power base. And he pushed back
on some of the more aggressive. surveillance
requests. Sometimes he'd just slow walk them.
So Nixon's inner circle decides to just go around
the official channels. They decided to bypass
the FBI completely. This is the moment that always
gets me. You have the entire apparatus of the
U .S. government at your disposal. And John Ehrlichman,
the domestic policy chief, just decides now we'll
set up our own private investigation unit. It
speaks to a profound level of distrust in the
very institutions they're supposed to be running
deep. deep distrust. So they hire these two guys,
Jack Caulfield and Anthony Elasovich. And these
aren't like. seasoned CIA analysts? Not at all.
They were former NYPD detectives. They were street
guys. Their job was to dig up dirt, follow people
around, essentially act as the president's private
eyes. It feels less like intelligence work and
more like something out of a pulp detective novel.
That's a perfect way to put it. But things really,
really escalate with the Pentagon Papers. OK,
so that was the catalyst that pushed them from
shady private investigators into outright criminal
activity. It was June 1971. The New York Times
starts publishing the Pentagon Papers, this massive
7000 page secret history of U .S. involvement
in Vietnam. And it had been leaked by a man named
Daniel Ellsberg. Now, I was reading in the notes
here that Nixon's initial reaction was actually
kind of muted. He wasn't that worried. That's
right. His first political instinct was, well,
hang on. This report mostly covers the Kennedy
and Johnson years. This makes the Democrats look
bad, not me. But that's not how everyone saw
it. No. Henry Kissinger, his national security
advisor, absolutely lost his mind. He was furious.
Ellsberg had been a mentee of his, someone he
had brought into the inner circle. So for Kissinger,
it was personal. Deeply personal. And he went
to Nixon and essentially argued, if you let this
stand, if you can't control your own secrets,
the entire world will see you as weak. The Soviets
will see you as weak. The North Vietnamese will
see you as weak. He basically goaded Nixon into
a rage. He whipped him into what H .R. Haldeman,
Nixon's chief of staff, later described in his
diary as a frenzy. So they try to stop it legally.
They do. The administration goes to court to
try and block the publication. It goes all the
way to the Supreme Court and they lose. It was
a huge, humiliating public defeat for Nixon.
And at that point, they decide that the legal
route is a dead end. And if the law doesn't work
for you, you go outside the law. This is when
the order comes down from the top. Stop the leaks.
By any means necessary. By any means. That phrase
is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It is. And by
any means led directly to the creation of the
Special Investigations Unit. Better known to
history by the greatest, most perfect nickname
in all of politics, the plumbers. It really is
an incredible name. How did they even get it?
It's almost disappointingly simple. David Young,
one of the aides running the unit, was talking
to his grandmother on the phone. He told her
his new job in the White House was to stop leaks.
Oh, no. And she just said, oh, that's nice, dear.
So you're a plumber. He thought it was funny.
So he put a sign on his office door that said
the plumbers and the name just stuck. But the
men they hired for this unit were not plumbers.
They were very serious and very strange operators.
This is where we meet the two architects of the
whole disaster. E. Howard Hunt. And G. Gordon
Liddy. Okay. Tell us about them. Hunt was ex
-CIA. Yes. A real old school cold warrior. He
was a veteran of the Bay of Pigs invasion. A
bit of a washed up spy who was writing spy novels
on the side. He really lived in this world of
cloak and dagger. And Liddy? Liddy was. Well,
he was G. Gordon Liddy. He was almost a category
unto himself. He was ex -FBI, but he was this
incredibly flamboyant, intense personality obsessed
with Nietzschean ideas of will and power. The
source material describes him in a way that honestly
makes him sound like a Batman villain. That's
not far off. To give you a sense of his mindset,
he originally wanted to name their little group
Odessa. Odessa. What's that? It was the rumored
name of the secret network of former SS officers
who helped Nazis escape from Europe after World
War Two. Wait, wait. He wanted to name a White
House unit after a supposed Nazi escape network.
Yes. And the truly terrifying thing isn't just
that he suggested it. It's that nobody in the
White House immediately fired him for suggesting
it. That tells you everything you need to know
about the culture they were building. They valued
that kind of ruthless, amoral, can -do attitude.
And they didn't really care about the package
it came in. So the Plunners have their mandate.
Stop the leaks. Their first major target is the
man who started it all, Daniel Ellsberg. Right,
but they aren't trying to prove he leaked the
papers. Everybody already knew that. They wanted
to destroy him personally. They wanted compromise,
as the Russians would say. They were convinced
that if they could dig into his psychiatric history,
they could find something to discredit him as
a nutcase, a deviant, something to smear him
with. So they hatched a plan to break into the
office of his psychiatrist, a Dr. Lewis Fielding.
This is the fielding break -in, September 1971.
And you can really see this as the dress rehearsal
for Watergate. The same playbook. The exact same
playbook. And it was, by all accounts, a complete
disaster. They flew in a team of Cuban exiles
from Miami. The same guys who would later be
at the Watergate. The very same guys. Veterans
of the Bay of Figs who were fiercely loyal to
Hunt. They broke into the doctor's office in
Beverly Hills. They pried open the filing. cabinets
with a crowbar and they totally trashed the place.
I trash it. To create a cover story. They wanted
it to look like a robbery gone wrong like some
drug addict was looking for cash or pills. Did
they find anything on Ellsberg? It's a bit of
a mystery. Liddy in his memoir claims they found
absolutely nothing. Other accounts from inside
the unit suggest they did find Ellsberg's file
and that Hunt immediately sent it over to the
CIA. Which would be highly illegal. Highly illegal.
But either way, the operational result was a
total failure. They'd committed a federal crime.
They left a huge physical trail of destruction
and they gained zero political leverage from
it. Now, a normal person, a normal organization
would look at that botched burglary and think,
OK, let's let's pull back. This is too risky.
But they didn't. They did the opposite. Expanded
the scope of their operations. The list of what
came to be known as the White House horrors from
this period is it's just insane. It truly is.
Let's start with the big one. The proposed firebombing
of the Brookings Institution. Right. Let's just
pause on that for a second. The phrase firebombing
a Washington, D .C. think tank is a phrase that
should not exist in the annals of American politics.
Mind boggling. What was the plan? Why? Nixon
was convinced that a safe at the Brookings Institution
contained classified documents related to the
Vietnam War that he wanted. So he couldn't just
get them legally. Apparently not. So Liddy's
plan was to use firebombs to create a diversion.
You set the building on fire, and in the ensuing
chaos, you send your team in disguised as firefighters.
Oh, come on. I'm serious. They would rush in,
ostensibly to fight the fire, but their real
mission was to break open the safe and rescue
the documents before the real fire department
got there. It is literally the plot of a heist
movie. A really badly written heist movie. Thankfully,
even for them, that plan was ultimately rejected
as being a little too extreme. A little too extreme,
that's reassuring. But they had other projects.
They started digging into Ted Kennedy's Chappaquiddick
accident, trying to find more dirt on him. They
forged diplomatic cables. Yes, this one is just
incredible. They forged State Department cables
to try and retroactively linked President John
F. Kennedy to the 1963 assassination of the South
Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem. That's not
just dirty tricks. That's historical revisionism.
It's disinformation warfare against a deceased
president from your rival party. It's a level
of political poison that is hard to fathom. And
there was even another plan targeting Ellsberg.
Why now? Liddy proposed drugging him with LSD
right before he was scheduled to give a big public
speech. The idea was that he'd get on stage and
start rambling incoherently, and he'd be discredited
as a drug -addled lunatic on national television.
It's terrifying because it shows there were no
lines. There were absolutely no boundaries. They
weren't willing to at least discuss crossing.
None whatsoever. And this brings us into the
election year, 1972. The plumbers' unit is officially
dissolved. But the key personnel, Liddy and Hunt,
they don't go away. No, they just get a new job.
They're transferred over to the campaign. To
the Committee for the Re -election of the President.
CRP. Or, as it became affectionately known, CREEP.
The acronym that just keeps on giving. So Liddy
becomes the general counsel for CREEP. And our
source says he was introduced to the campaign
leadership explicitly as the man in charge of
dirty tricks. They weren't even hiding it. And
in January of 1972, Liddy walks into the office
of the attorney general of the United States,
John Mitchell. Who it's crucial to remember is
also the head of the CRP at this point. He's
wearing two hats. Exactly. And Liddy comes in
with these big, professionally prepared presentation
charts to pitch a massive program of covert operations.
Codename Operation Gemstone. Liddy and his code
names. So what was in Operation Gemstone? What
was he pitching to the attorney general? Okay,
so let's break down the options he presented.
First, there was Operation Diamond. Diamond.
Sounds glamorous. It was a plan to deal with
the anti -war protesters they expected at the
upcoming Republican National Convention in Miami.
And how are they going to deal with them? Liddy
proposed that they would identify the ringleaders
of the protest groups, kidnap them off the street,
drug them, and then transport them to a secret
safe house in Mexico and hold them there until
the convention was over. So casual international
kidnapping of American citizens. That's plan
A. That's plan A. Then there was... Operation
Sapphire. Okay. This involved chartering a high
-end yacht, staffing it with very expensive sex
workers, and equipping it with hidden cameras
and microphones. I think I see where this is
going. The plan was to lure prominent Democratic
officials onto the yacht, get them into compromising
situations, and film the whole thing for blackmail
material. It's a honeypot scheme. A literal floating
honeypot. What else was on the menu? Operation
Turquoise. Operation Turquoise was, in comparison,
almost comically petty. The plan was simply to
sabotage the air conditioning system at the Democratic
National Convention, which was also in Miami.
The goal was just to make the convention hall
unbearably hot and humid so that when the TV
cameras were rolling, all the delegates would
look sweaty, angry and uncomfortable. So the
plans range from kidnapping, which is a major
felony, to a high school prank. It's an incredible
spectrum of illegality and absurdity. And there
was one more, Operation Emerald, which involved
using a spy plane to intercept the communications
of the Democratic candidate's campaign jet. So
here's the moment. This is the pivotal moment
in the entire scandal. Liddy presents these options.
Kidnapping. prostitution sabotage to john mitchell
the chief law enforcement officer of the united
states and mitchell's response is not gordon
you are insane and you're under arrest no his
response and this is a near direct quote was
basically gordon this is not realistic and it
costs too much money It was a budget dispute.
He didn't object on moral or legal grounds. He
objected on budgetary grounds. Exactly. The initial
price tag for Operation Gemstone was a million
dollars. Mitchell balked at the price. He told
Liddy to go back to the drawing board and come
back with a scaled -down, more realistic version.
And that scaled -down, cheaper, more realistic
version was the Watergate break -in. That was
the compromise. They would target the Democratic
National Committee, the DNC headquarters at the
Watergate office complex. And what was the specific
goal? What were they looking for? The approved
plan had two main objectives. photograph any
interesting documents they could find in the
files, and plant bugs on two key telephones.
Whose phones? The phone of Larry O 'Brien, who
was the DNC chairman, and another DNC official
named R. Spencer Oliver. Why O 'Brien? Was there
some specific dirt they thought he had? Well,
there are a few competing theories on that. The
standard explanation is that they were just on
a general fishing expedition. They wanted financial
documents, campaign strategy, anything they could
use. But there are other theories. There is a
more salacious theory, one that Liddy himself...
pushed in his book later on, that they were actually
looking for evidence related to a supposed call
girl ring. The sexpionage angle again. Right.
The theory was that this ring was being used
by DNC staffers and they wanted proof to use
for blackmail. But it's worth noting that John
Dean and most of the other main figures have
always dismissed that as a self -serving fantasy
from Liddy. But whatever the specific motive,
the plan was approved. Gordon Liddy finally got
his go order for a black bag operation. He got
his budget, and he started assembling the team.
So let's meet the players who are actually going
to carry out this third -rate burglary. First
up, we have James McCord. McCord was the security
chief for the CRP, another ex -CIA guy, but he
was more of a technician. He was their electronics
and bugging expert. Then we have the guys who
did the physical breaking and entering, the Cubans.
Yes. Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio
Martinez and Frank Sturgis, who wasn't actually
Cuban, but he was an American soldier of fortune
who is deeply embedded in the anti Castro movement
in Miami. And for these men, this wasn't just
a simple burglary, was it? No. You have to understand
their mindset. They saw this as a patriotic duty.
They were told that the Democrats were secretly
taking money from Fidel Castro, that they were
communists in disguise. For them, this was a
legitimate operation in the ongoing war against
communism. They were true believers being manipulated
by Hunt and Liddy. Absolutely. And Hunt and Liddy
were supposed to be overseeing the whole thing
from a safe distance. From a command post across
the street. At the Howard Johnson's motel, watching
from a balcony. Now, the break -in on June 17th
is the one everyone knows. But the source material
really highlights that this was not their first
attempt. And the run -up to it was basically
a comedy of errors. Oh, they were shockingly
bad at this. They were the gang that couldn't
shoot straight. So walk us through the failed
attempts. Okay, so attempt number one is on May
26th. Hunt and Martinez go to the Watergate to
try and pick the lock on the DNC office door.
They fail. And somehow, in the process, they
manage to get themselves locked inside an adjacent
banquet room overnight. Wait, they got locked
in? They just had to sit there in the dark until
the hotel staff came and unlocked the doors in
the morning? That is just beyond humiliating.
So they regroup. Attempt number two is the next
night, May 27th. This time, they bring Virgilio
Gonzalez, who was supposed to be their master
locksmith. Okay, so this time it should work.
Except Gonzalez gets to the door and realizes
he brought the wrong set of lockpicking tools.
You cannot make this stuff up. They have to abort
again. But finally, on May 28th, attempt number
three, they get in. Success. Temporary success.
They get in, they plant the bugs, they use a
camera to photograph a stack of documents, but
the mission is still considered a failure. Why?
Two reasons. First, the photos they took were
all blurry and unreadable. John Mitchell later
supposedly complained that they were shitty.
And second, the bug they planted on Larry O 'Brien's
phone was defective. It wasn't working properly.
So the hubris just completely takes over. Instead
of counting their losses and walking away, they
decide they have to go back in. They have to
go back in to fix the equipment. And that fateful
decision brings us to the night of June 17, 1972.
The team goes back in. James McCord, the tech
guy, is responsible for setting up their entry
and exit route through the parking garage. And
this involves taping the door latches so they
don't lock behind them. And this is it. This
is the tiny detail that brings the whole thing
crashing down. The piece of tape. McCord makes
a critical, amateurish mistake. He places the
piece of tape horizontally across the latch bolt.
Which means it's visible. It's clearly visible
from the outside of the door. A professional
would have put it on vertically or it would have
been hidden by the door frame. Enter Frank Wills.
Frank Wills, a 24 -year -old security guard at
the complex making, I think, about $80 a week.
He's just doing his regular rounds. He comes
to the door and he sees the tape. He doesn't
immediately think international espionage. No,
of course not. He thinks it's a maintenance crew.
He assumes a cleaner taped the door open to take
out the trash or something. So he just... peels
the tape off, drops it in his pocket, and goes
to get a burger. And the burglars, what do they
do? They're already inside at this point. But
later, when they're leaving, they find the door
is locked again. And instead of aborting the
mission, which any sane operative would do after
realizing they've been discovered, McCord re
-tapes the door. He picks the lock and puts a
new piece of tape on the door in the exact same
way. Unbelievable. So Frank Wills comes back
from his break, he does his rounds again, he
gets to the same door, and he sees the tape is
back. And that's when he realizes, OK, this isn't
the maintenance crew. Something is wrong here.
So he calls the police. And here's the final
beautiful layer of irony in this whole Keystone
cops arrest. The police who respond, they don't
exactly look like police officers. Not at all.
The dispatcher sends the nearest available unit,
which happens to be an unmarked car from the
D .C. police vice squad. What were they doing?
They were undercover, dressed as hippies, long
hair, jeans, T -shirts, because they had been
in a nearby park looking for drug deals. So Alfred
Baldwin, the lookout in the Howard Johnsons across
the street, he sees this car pull up. Right.
He looks out his window. He sees these scruffy
looking guys get out of an old car and he doesn't
radio a warning. Because he thinks they're just
kids going to a party. Exactly. He completely
ignores them. By the time he sees lights flashing
on and off inside the DNC offices on the sixth
floor, it's far too late to warn anyone. The
police catch them red -handed. They catch all
five burglars hiding behind a partition in the
office. They're arrested at gunpoint. And when
the police search them? The entire conspiracy
begins to unravel almost immediately. It wasn't
just the sophisticated bugging equipment they
had that was bad enough. It was the cash. Right.
The sequential hundred dollar bills. Thousands
of dollars in crisp, brand new, sequentially
numbered one hundred dollar bills. But the most
devastating discovery of all, they had address
books on them. And in those address books were
the names E. Howard Hunt and W. House. It was
the smoking gun before the smoking gun tape.
The police and the FBI immediately had a direct
physical link from these five burglars to a consultant
working for the White House. The cover -up had
to begin before the sun came up. Okay, so let's
shift to the cover -up. It is the morning of
June 18th. The five burglars are in jail. What
is the immediate reaction inside the Nixon orbit?
It's a combination of panic and frantic destruction
of evidence. Liddy rushes to the CRP offices
and starts shredding piles and piles of documents.
And Jeb Magruder, the deputy campaign manager.
He takes the gemstone files, the charts Liddy
had used in his presentation home with him, and
literally burns them in his fireplace. But the
FBI is good at what it does. They don't need
the gemstone files. They have the money. This
is the real life follow the money. Those hundred
dollar bills all have serial numbers and the
FBI starts meticulously tracing them. And where
does that trail lead? It leads to a bank account
in Miami, an account controlled by Bernard Barker,
one of the burglars. OK, and where did Barker
get that money? Well, the FBI found that Barker's
account had received several checks from a man
named Kenneth Dahlberg. And who was Kenneth Dahlberg?
He was a Nixon campaign fundraiser from the Midwest.
He told the FBI. Yeah, I collected donations,
turned them into a cashier's check, and I handed
that check to the committee to re -elect the
president. So the chain is complete. The burglars
were paid with Nixon campaign funds. It's an
undeniable link. Now, while the FBI is methodically
following this paper trail, the White House is
trying to silence the human trail. And this brings
us to the really tragic story of Martha Mitchell.
We absolutely have to talk about her. Because
for so long, the media and the public treated
her like a joke, like this kooky alcoholic character.
But when you look at the source material, what
happened to her was it was extraordinary violence.
It was horrific. Martha was John Mitchell's wife.
And she wasn't just a political spouse. She was
a celebrity in her own right. She was famous
for being incredibly outspoken for these late
-night phone calls she'd make to reporters. She
was in California when the break -in happened.
Yes, she was there for a campaign event, and
she's watching the news, and she sees James McCord's
face on TV, and she recognizes him instantly.
He was her family's former bodyguard. Right.
And in that moment, she knows. She knows her
husband, the attorney general, has to be involved
in this. And John Mitchell knows that she knows.
And he knows she will talk. So he essentially
has her put under guard. He leaves her in California
under the watch of a security agent named Steve
King, a former FBI agent. And his orders are
explicit. Do not let her speak to the press.
And when she tries to. She manages to get Helen
Thomas, the legendary reporter, on the phone.
She starts saying things like, They don't want
me to talk. And Steve Kinn bursts into the room
and rips the telephone cord directly out of the
wall. That's assault. It gets so much worse.
The source describes how five men then held her
down on her bed while a doctor came in and forcibly
injected her with a powerful sedative. They drugged
her against her will. They held her prisoner
in that hotel room for days. When she was finally
allowed to leave, she had visible black and blue
bruises all over her arms. She told reporters
she'd been held captive. And what was the administration's...
response to these accusations. Pure and simple.
They launched a smear campaign. They told the
press she was an alcoholic, that she was having
a nervous breakdown, that she needed psychiatric
help. They systematically destroyed her credibility
to hide their crime. It's where we get the term
the Martha Mitchell effect. Exactly. When a medical
professional wrongly diagnoses a patient's true
accurate beliefs as being delusions, Nixon himself
later said on the tapes, if it hadn't been for
Martha Mitchell, there would have been no Watergate.
It's chilling. So while Marth is being held captive,
Nixon is in the Oval Office just six days after
the break -in. This is June 23, 1972. And he's
hatching the plan to shut down the FBI investigation.
This is the conversation that is captured on
what will become known as the smoking gun tape.
Right. Nixon and Haldeman are in the Oval Office.
They know the FBI is tracing the money trail
back to the campaign. They need to stop it. So
Haldeman comes up with what he calls the CIA
defense. What is that? The plan was to have the
director of the CIA call the acting director
of the FBI and tell him, essentially, stop investigating
this money trail from Mexico. If you keep digging,
you're going to compromise sensitive, ongoing
national security operations related to the CIA.
Was that true? Were there any CIA operations
at risk? Not at all. It was a complete and total
lie. But it was a very clever lie because it
played on the CIA's sensitivity about their past
failures, specifically the Bay of Pigs. So they
were using the CIA as a shield to obstruct justice.
They were using the specter of national security
to block a criminal investigation. And Nixon
signs off on it. You can hear him on the tape
telling Haldeman, play it tough. And that moment
right there. That is the crime. That's unambiguous
obstruction of justice from the president of
the United States. It is. But the crucial point
to remember is that at this time, nobody knows
this tape exists. It just goes into the vault,
a secret ticking time bomb. So for the moment,
the cover -up actually holds. The 1972 election
happens in November. And Nixon wins in one of
the biggest landslides in American history. He
wins 49 out of 50 states. The public, for the
most part, still sees Watergate as just some
weird minor caper that didn't involve the president.
They survived the election, but they couldn't
survive the legal system. In January 1973, the
trial of the seven Watergate conspirators begins.
And this is where the system starts to push back.
And it pushes back in the form of the presiding
judge, John Sirica. Maximum John, they called
him. Yes. And he was not a judge who would just
sit back passively. He was deeply suspicious
of the whole case. The prosecution's theory,
which was also the White House's official story,
was that Liddy and McCord were rogue agents,
that they had acted completely on their own.
And Sirica just didn't buy that. Not for a second.
He looked at these men, ex -CIA, ex -FBI professionals,
and he couldn't understand. what their motive
would be. Why would they risk everything for
this? He kept interrupting the trial, grilling
witnesses himself. He was actively digging for
the truth right from the bench. And all the while,
the White House is frantically trying to keep
the defendants quiet. They're paying them hush
money. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in secret
cash payments. Delivered by Anthony Ulasovich,
the ex -cop, in paper bags left in airport lockers
and phone booths. They were buying silence. And
for a while it seemed to be working. It did.
The burglars all pled guilty. Liddy was convicted.
Nobody talked. Until sentencing day. This is
where Sirica plays his trump card. It was a brilliant
legal move. He provisionally sentences the burglars
to incredibly long prison terms. We're talking
35, 40 years. But he says he will review those
sentences in three months. The message was crystal
clear. It was. Cooperate, tell me the truth,
and I can reduce your sentence. Stay silent and
you will die in prison. And that threat was enough
to crack James McCord. On March 23rd, 1973, just
before his final sentencing, McCord hands a letter
to Judge Sirica. Sirica reads it aloud in open
court, and it is an absolute bombshell. What
did it say? McCord admitted that perjury was
committed during the trial. He admitted that
political pressure had been applied to him and
the other defendants to plead guilty and remain
silent. And most importantly, he said that higher
ups were involved in the conspiracy and had not
been identified. The dam breaks. The dam breaks.
And that letter leads directly to the Senate
establishing an investigative committee. The
Ervin Committee. The Senate Watergate Committee
chaired by Sam Ervin, a Democrat from North Carolina.
He had this public persona of being a folksy,
simple country lawyer, but he was actually a
brilliant constitutional scholar. And these hearings
were televised? This became national event television?
It was. The whole country just stopped working
to watch them. It was the original must -see
TV. And the star witness, the man who blew the
whole thing open, was John Dean. White House
counsel John Dean. He's a tragic figure in some
ways. He is. He was this young, incredibly ambitious
lawyer who had been tasked with managing the
cover -up. But he began to realize that Nixon,
Haldeman and Ehrlichman were setting him up.
They were going to make him the scapegoat for
the whole affair. So he decides to flip to save
himself. He goes to the prosecutors and then
he sits in that hearing room for days in his
horn -rend glasses. And in this very flat, monotone
voice, he lays out everything. He talks about
the cancer on the presidency. Yes. He details
the hush money payments, the offers of presidential
clemency, the creation of the enemies list. directly,
personally implicates President Nixon in the
cover -up. But, and this is a huge problem for
the committee, it's still his word against the
president's word. And Richard Nixon is still
a very popular president in many parts of the
country. To them, Dean just looks like a disgruntled
employee, a rat trying to save his own skin.
The committee needed corroboration. They needed
hard proof. And that proof walked in the door
in the form of a minor aide named Alexander Butterfield.
Friday the 13th, July 1973, a date that will
live in infamy for Richard Nixon. Butterfield
is a deputy assistant to the president. He's
being interviewed by the committee staff behind
closed doors, just a routine interview. They're
asking him basic questions about how the White
House records conversations, meeting minutes,
things like that. Right. And then a staffer asks,
almost as a throwaway question at the end of
the day, is there any other system in place for
recording conversations? And Butterfield pauses.
He pauses and then he says, very quietly, I was
aware of listening devices. Yes, sir. the silence
in that room must have been absolutely deafening
it changed world history Butterfield revealed
that since 1971, Nixon had a secret voice -activated
taping system installed in the Oval Office. It
recorded everything. The meetings with Dean about
the cover -up, the meetings with Haldeman about
using the CIA, the meetings with Mitchell, it
was all on tape. All of it. Why? I mean, why
would a man so paranoid about leaks and secrets
tape himself committing federal crimes? A combination
of hubris and a misguided sense of history. He
wanted to write his memoirs. He saw himself as
a great statesman. on par with Churchill or de
Gaulle. He wanted a perfect secret record of
his own brilliance for future historians to study.
He never imagined that a court would force him
to release those tapes while he was still in
office. Never in a million years. So the entire
focus of the scandal shifts overnight. It's no
longer about who you believe. It's about getting
the tapes. The new special prosecutor, Archibald
Cox, immediately subpoenas nine of the tapes.
And Nixon immediately refuses. He claims executive
privilege. What's the argument there? The argument
is that a president needs to be able to get candid,
honest advice from his aides, and they won't
give it if they think their private conversations
will be made public. He argues that the separation
of powers means the courts simply can't compel
the president to release his internal records.
This standoff leads to probably the most dramatic
weekend in the history of the Justice Department.
The Saturday Night Massacre, October 20, 1973.
Nixon has had enough of Cox. He decides he wants
him fired. So he calls his attorney general,
Elliot Richardson. And Richardson is a man of
real integrity. He had promised the Senate during
his confirmation hearings that the special prosecutor
would have full independence. So when Nixon gives
him the order to fire Cox, Richardson refuses.
He flies to the White House and resigns on the
spot rather than carry out an order he believes
is wrong. So Nixon moves down the chain of command.
He calls the deputy attorney general, William
Ruckelshaus. You're the acting AG now. You fire
him. Ruckelshaus also refuses. So Nixon fires
him. Now the Justice Department is essentially
headless. We are down to the number three official,
the Solicitor General. Robert Bork. And Bork
agrees to do it. He does. He later said he did
it because he believed someone had to stay and
run the department to prevent total chaos. So
he wrote the letter. He officially fired Archibald
Cox. And the public reaction? It was an absolute
firestorm. The FBI was sent to seal off the special
prosecutor's offices. The news broke on a Saturday
night. It looked, for all the world, like a coup.
It looked like the president was dismantling
the Justice Department to save his own skin.
The public went ballistic. Allistic. Telegrams
flooded Washington. Western Union literally couldn't
keep up with the volume. Half a million messages
poured in. There were spontaneous protests. And
congressmen who had been defending Nixon suddenly
started using the word impeachment. He thought
firing Cox would end the investigation. Instead,
it guaranteed his impeachment would begin. So
he's forced to appoint a new special prosecutor.
Leon Jaworski, and he's forced to finally start
handing over some of the subpoena tapes, which
is where we discover the famous gap. The 18 and
a half minute gap. One of the key tapes, a conversation
between Nixon and Haldeman just three days after
the break -in, had this long, loud, buzzing sound
right where the conversation should have been.
And the official explanation was creative. Nixon's
loyal secretary, Rosemary Woods, took the blame.
She claims she must have accidentally erased
it while transcribing the tape. The Rosemary
stretch. Yes. She claims she was reaching for
the phone but accidentally kept her foot on the
transcriber's control pedal, erasing the tape.
They even had her pose for photographs, trying
to reenact this position. And it was physically
impossible. Completely impossible. And later,
a panel of audio experts analyzed the tape. They
found it wasn't one single accidental erasure.
The tape had been deliberately erased and rewound
at least five separate times. It was a clear,
intentional destruction of evidence. And everyone
knew it. Everyone knew it. By early 1974, the
walls are just closing in from every direction.
Nixon tries one last gambit. He decides to release
edited transcripts of the tapes to the public.
The famous blue book. His hope was this would
satisfy everyone and make the issue go away.
But this backfired. spectacularly. It was a catastrophe
for him. Even with all the swear words replaced
with the phrase expletive deleted, the content
of those transcripts was just shocking to the
American public. It wasn't the crime, it was
the character. Exactly. The tapes didn't show
a noble statesman struggling with a crisis. They
showed a petty, vindictive, bigoted man obsessed
with getting revenge on his enemies. His own
political base, the so -called silent majority
of moral conservatives, were horrified by his
language and his character. Then comes the final
fatal blow from the Supreme Court. United States
v. Nixon, July 24th, 1974. The court rules, 8
-0, that he must turn over the remaining tapes.
8 -0. His own conservative appointees voted against
him. They did. The court ruled that while executive
privilege is a real concept, it is not absolute,
and it cannot be used to withhold evidence in
a criminal investigation. He had no more legal
road to run. And that final batch of tapes included
the June 23rd smoking gun tape. The one where
he is heard clearly and unambiguously ordering
the CIA to be used to obstruct the FBI investigation.
Once that tape became public, his support on
Capitol Hill just stifled. It vanished overnight.
Which leads to that famous final meeting in the
Oval Office. Yes. Senator Barry Goldwater, the
conscience of the Republican Party, along with
the GOP leadership, goes to the White House to
meet with the president. And they deliver the
bad news. It's the end. Nixon asked them, frankly,
what his chances are in a Senate impeachment
trial. And Goldwater is brutally honest. He says,
Mr. President, you have maybe four or five votes
in the Senate and I am not one of them. He needed
34 votes to survive. He had maybe four. The game
was over. The next day, August 8th, 1974, Richard
Nixon goes on national television and announces
his resignation. On August 9, he gives that famous
wave from the helicopter door and Gerald Ford
becomes president. Our long national nightmare
is over. So he said, but there's a very controversial
coda to this story. A month later, President
Ford issues a full and unconditional pardon for
Richard Nixon. A decision that almost certainly
cost him the 1976 election. It destroyed his
political career. It did. Ford's argument was
that the country couldn't move on. It couldn't
heal if it had to endure a years long trial of
a former president. He wanted to close the book.
But for millions of Americans, it just looked
like a corrupt bargain. It looked like the elites
protecting one of their own. It felt like the
principle of equal justice under law didn't apply
to the man at the very top. Exactly. So as we
wrap this all up, let's just talk for a minute
about the legacy. Beyond the gate suffix being
attached to every scandal, how did this fundamentally
change the DNA of America? I think the biggest
casualty was trust. It absolutely destroyed public
trust in government. Before Watergate, despite
all the turmoil of Vietnam, there was still a
sort of baseline assumption that the president,
whoever he was, was at least trying to act in
the national interest. And after Watergate? After
Watergate, the baseline assumption for many people
became that the government is probably lying
to you. That cynicism became deeply embedded
in the culture. It also led to a wave of reforms.
New laws were passed. Oh, yes. We got the Privacy
Act, major amendments to the Freedom of Information
Act. The FISA courts were created to oversee
government surveillance. We tried to build institutional
guardrails to prevent something like this from
ever happening again. But those guardrails are
only as strong as the people who are supposed
to be enforcing them. That's the constant struggle.
And of course... It completely changed journalism.
Woodward and Bernstein became celebrities, folk
heroes. The idea of the adversarial press. of
the journalist's job being to hold power to account
became the dominant model. And the deep throat
archetype, the brave anonymous source leaking
secrets from inside the system, became the blueprint
for modern investigative reporting. I want to
leave our listeners with one final thought, a
kind of counterfactual that really struck me
while going through the source material. It's
about luck. Yeah. We tell this story as a triumph
of the American system. The press worked, the
courts worked, Congress worked, and they all
did. But what if Alexander Butterfield hadn't
been asked that one throwaway question? What
if he hadn't casually mentioned the taping system?
Without the tapes, there was no hard evidence.
The cover -up of the actual break -in had been
honestly pretty effective. Nixon had destroyed
most of the direct evidence. Without the tapes,
it was just John Dean's word against the presidents.
It's a terrifying thought the cover -up was holding.
Without those tapes, Richard Nixon almost certainly
would have finished his second term. The imperial
presidency would have been validated. And we
might be living in a very, very different constitutional
reality today. It suggests that our democracy
wasn't necessarily saved by the grandeur of the
system, but maybe by a single acts of almost
lucky admission in a closed door hearing. Which
is a very fragile thing to have to rely on. It
is indeed. Well, that is our deep dive on Watergate.
It's a story of burglars and bugs and a constitutional
crisis. But at its heart, it's really a story
about the absolute arrogance of power. And a
story about why you should never, ever tape a
door latch horizontally. Words to live by. Thanks
for listening. Stay curious, stay skeptical,
and we will see you on the next deep dive.