Had President Richard Nixon and his team foreseen how easy the re-election campaign would go they would probably have never chosen to burglar Democratic Headquarters. Pictured: Former U.S. president Richard Nixon.
In the introductory article to this series, the long public career of former US president Richard Nixon was examined. Some of Nixon’s experiences and past practices explained why he ended up in a mess like Watergate, but it remains the greatest unforced error in American political history. Nixon’s re-election campaign ended up being a lay-up. He never broke a sweat, leading his main opponent, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, wire-to-wire. Nixon’s electoral victory was all-encompassing. He scored 60.7 per cent of the popular vote, won 49 of 50 states, secured 520 electoral votes and embarrassed McGovern in his home state. But the victory was short-lived, especially when details emerged about Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President (spelling the unfortunate acronym CREEP).
Founded in 1971 as CRP, and described in the Smithsonian (a magazine produced in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institute), “The Committee to Reelect the President was organized to win a second term for Richard Nixon in 1972 and headed by former Atty. Gen. John Mitchell, CRP included many former Nixon White House staffers. As advertising and marketing plans for Nixon’s campaign moved forward in the spring of 1972, so did covert plans — wiretaps and other forms of harassment directed against the president’s opponents — that would eventually bring down the second Nixon administration.”
Since Nixon perceived he had many enemies, his team of advisors believed that gathering dirt on opponents, filtering unflattering stories about Democratic leaders, and creating an “enemies” list was required to protect Nixon’s record and ensure his victory.
Politics has not changed much in the last 50 years, as both parties still use these techniques to skewer the opposing party and justify their actions because democracy is at stake. In the case of Nixon, rivals became enemies, and adversaries became combatants.
On June 17, 1972, the Committee infamously broke into Democratic Headquarters at the Watergate Complex attempting to capture information needed to prevent Nixon’s enemies from taking down the president in his effort to win re-election. Along with stealing documents the team members bugged phones. In addition, the Committee, including G. Gordon Liddy, laundered money and used a slush fund to coordinate undercover political activities.
Along with all of these undertakings, the Committee also interfered in the Democratic Party primaries according to research conducted for VOX (a general interest news site) with the intent of helping McGovern win the party nomination because he was less electable: “CRP operative Donald Segretti was involved in many of the worst of these efforts, including fabricating multiple documents with stationery from Maine Sen. Edmund Muskie, the 1968 vice presidential nominee and a strong contender for the presidency that year.”
Regardless of all these Democratic Party miscalculations, their intra-party schism over Vietnam, and former Governor of Alabama George Wallace’s threats to stir trouble as a candidate from the Old South, Nixon’s plumbers believed they had a role to protect the president, balance the biased media, and intervene in the natural progress of a campaign.
McGovern’s policies shifted the Democratic Party sharply left. At a Federalist Society Symposium about Watergate Documents in 2022, Geoff Shepard said of McGovern, “He ran as a Progressive. He promised to raise taxes. His campaign was attacked as being in favor of acid, amnesty, and abortion. Acid was the scourge of psychedelic drugs, LSD in particular, affecting America’s college youth. Harvard professor Timothy Leary had famously urged his students to tune in, turn on, and drop out. Amnesty was forgiveness for all of the draft dodgers, deserters, and miscreants who had so vigorously opposed the Vietnam War. And there were tens of thousands of them leftover from the most unpopular war in American history. But they wanted more than forgiveness. They wanted reassurance that they had been right all along, and George McGovern was happy to oblige. Abortion was roughly the same issue as we find ourselves in today — an intense, state-by-state legislative battle — because Roe v. Wade had not yet been decided by the Supreme Court.”
Had Nixon and his team foreseen how easy the re-election campaign would go they would probably have never chosen to burglar Democratic Headquarters. The publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 had unnerved them. By creating this team of plumbers, leaks were to be prevented. The culprit was an anti-war activist and RAND Corporation employee, Daniel Ellsberg. With access to 54,000 more documents, Nixon’s plumbers wanted to know what might next show up on the pages of the Washington Post or the New York Times. They wanted to devise ways to obstruct this from happening and methods to discredit whoever was doing it.
As Shepard relates, the original break-in occurred in California in 1971. The Plumbers wanted to look at the files of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding. Presidential assistant John Erhlichman authorized Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt to hire ten Cubans and carry out the operation. This same team oversaw the 1972 burglary at Watergate. Shepard commented, “Now, in and of itself, the Fielding break-in was not connected to Watergate. But that very same team, Cuban Americans directed by Liddy and Hunt, conducted the later Watergate break-in ten months later, except this time they got caught. So there really was a break-in. There really was a cover-up. The issue, then and now, is who else knew. As Senator Baker so famously put it, ‘What did the President know, and when did he know it?’”
Summing it up, Watergate began when Bob Haldeman asked one of Nixon’s counsel, John Dean, to conduct “Opposition Research.” This kind of activity exists inside all campaigns. “You want to know all about your opponents: their positions on public issues, their sources and uses of campaign funds, their schedules, and especially any dirt in their background. You might even have one of your people volunteer on their campaign to gather dirt from the inside.” Sadly, for Nixon, Dean recruited Gordon Liddy who ended up committing several overtly criminal acts including mugging, bugging, kidnapping and prostitution. Dean, Liddy, and Jeb Magruder, a public relations staff member marched over to Attorney General John Mitchell’s office to get a million dollars approved to carry out these activities. This meeting exposed all these men to Liddy’s eventual crimes, initiating the next section of this retrospect, the cover-up and the investigation.
Dave Redekop is a retired elementary resource teacher who now works part-time at the St. Catharines Courthouse as a Registrar. He has worked on political campaigns since high school and attended university in South Carolina for five years, where he earned a Master’s in American History with a specialization in Civil Rights. Dave loves reading biographies.
