Watergate Part 3

In the last month of 1973, Congress confirmed the appointment of Gerald Ford as Vice President.  He was considered a compromise candidate, seen as not being in Nixon's camp but also being too weak willed to seek the presidency for himself.  By the start of 1974, the pressures of the continued Watergate investigation were beginning to take their toll on Nixon.  He was losing sleep and drinking heavily, and many of his aides were privately discussing what to do if Nixon had a mental breakdown.  To make matters worse, the new Special Prosecutor was even more willing to play hardball against Nixon than his predecessor, opening lines of investigation into Nixon's accepting of gifts while president and possible tax evasion.  

In March, seven former Nixon aides were indicted by a grand jury based on evidence collected by the Special Prosecutor.  The indictment included a sealed document that named Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator.  In the end, the Special Prosecutor had persuaded the grand jury not to indict Nixon, claiming that a President could only be indicted after leaving office.  Instead, the sealed document was delivered to the House Judiciary Committee which sat on it for more than a month as they reviewed its contents.  Though the House was majority Democrat at the time, many of the committee’s members felt that there was not enough evidence to overwhelm Nixon's support.  

Things changed in April.  The Special Prosecutor was finally able to get the courts to order Nixon to hand over the White House tapes.  However, instead he released 1,200 pages of transcripts edited for curse words, of which there were plenty.  As the battle raged on, the American media and public poured over the released transcripts.  Though they contained no smoking gun, they did create a picture of a devious and immoral man who was contemptuous of his own country, its institutions, and its people.  Nixon's public support collapsed, the House Judiciary Committee began impeachment hearings, and prominent members of Nixon’s own party began suggesting that he should resign.  The battle over the tapes and Nixon's executive privilege stretched all the way to the Supreme Court, which by the end of July, in a unanimous decision, ordered Nixon to release all of the tapes.  It proved to be the end for the beleaguered president.  Amongst the tapes were recordings that showed that not only had Nixon known about the break-in since just a few days after it had happened, but that he had also personally okayed legal payments to the five burglars in exchange for their silence.  

Soon after the release of the tapes, the House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach the president on the grounds of obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress.  If it was passed by the full House, then the Senate would be able to impeach the president by a two-thirds vote.  Republican leaders met with the president and told him he most certainly would be impeached if he didn't resign.  Drunk and tired, Nixon took their advice and resigned on August 9, the first president to ever do so. 

With Nixon's resignation, the impeachment hearings came to an end, but possible criminal investigations continued.  However, these were ended when Gerald Ford granted Nixon a presidential pardon in September.  Though Ford claimed he did it so the country could move on, critics argued that Ford had promised the pardon to get Nixon to resign.  The whole mess resulted in a new investigation by the House Judiciary Committee, but in the end nothing came of it.  In total, 69 members of the Nixon administration and re-election campaign were indicted, of which 48 spent time in prison.  The whole episode soured the public on the Republican party, allowing the Democrats to increase their majorities in both the House and Senate.  The Democrats would maintain their majority in the Senate until 1981 and in the House until 1995 (though to be fair they had held majorities in both since 1955).  The Democrats used their greater majorities to pass several bills limiting executive power, all of which would later be walked all over or ignored by both Republican and Democratic presidents.  Due to the unpopularity of his pardon of Nixon, Gerald Ford lost the 1976 presidential election to Jimmy Carter.  Prior to Nixon, both Kennedy and Johnson had recorded many of their conversations.  After Watergate, not a single president has supposedly taken back up the practice.  Nixon spent the rest of his life claiming his innocence, dying in 1994.   

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Watergate Part 2

By the start of 1973, old Tricky Dick Nixon was feeling pretty damn good.  Not only had he managed to win re-election by one of the biggest landslides in American history, but he had also managed to contain the damage caused by the Watergate break in to a couple of bungling burglars and few idiotic members of his re-election campaign, all of whom had either plead guilty or been convicted by January without a single one implicating anyone within the Nixon administration.  With the scandal firmly behind him, he could get back to concentrating on leading the country forward.  Oh wait, that's not right, things actually blew up in his fucking face.  

Nixon's problems began again in February when he attempted to reward the acting head of the FBI by having him made into the permanent head of the FBI, a process that required a series of confirmation hearings before the Senate.  Not really being all that good at such things, the acting head let it slip that he had been providing the White House Counsel, a man named John Dean, with daily updates throughout the Watergate investigation and that Dean had probably lied to the FBI.  Unsurprisingly, the acting head of the FBI did not get confirmed.  This was soon after followed in March by one of the convicted White House Plumbers writing a letter to the case's judge claiming that he had committed perjury on the orders of high level Nixon administration officials.  As a result, the Justice Department began looking deeper into the whole mess, quickly finding more Plumbers that were willing to implicate White House officials, key amongst them Counsel John Dean and the Chief of Staff. 

It was at this point that Nixon in effect began a cover up of the cover up.  At the time nobody was sure how high things went and there was no evidence to connect the president to the dirty dealings of the past year.  To save his own ass, Nixon began setting up several of his aides as scapegoats.  This didn't sit well with sacrificial lamb numero uno, John Dean, who began secretly working with Justice Department investigators.  However, this was far from being a smoking gun since Dean refused to tell all he knew, hoping to use his information as leverage to avoid prosecution.  By the end of April, the Justice Department informed Nixon that they had enough evidence to implicate seven of his aides, including John Dean, in a cover up.  Nixon responded by firing the seven aides.  However, his trouble was far from over.  At the same time, the acting head of the FBI let it slip to a Senator he was friends with that he had been ordered by Dean to destroy evidence.  The Senator, not being a piece of shit, leaked this to the press.  

Throughout all these shenanigans, the source in the FBI known as Deepthroat continued to leak information on the investigation to the Washington Post.  As a result, the Democrat majority Senate created a special investigation committee in mid-May, and two days later the Justice Department appointed a Special Prosecutor who would work outside the normal Justice Department hierarchy to investigate possible crimes by Nixon.  The Democrats turned the Senate committee's investigation into political theater, televising every meeting for all the world to see.  By June, John Dean was willing to admit that he had discussed the cover up with Nixon on numerous occasions, but other than his testimony, which Nixon's allies claimed was just Dean trying to get himself out of trouble, there was no evidence.  The hearings dragged on with no progress.  

Things finally changed in July when a former low level Nixon aide revealed that all conversations and phone calls in the Oval Office had been tape recorded since 1971.  Both the Senate and the Special Prosecutor subpoenaed the tapes, but Nixon refused to hand them over, citing executive privilege.  With no other options, the subpoenas started grinding their way through the court system and gradually the public began to lose interest.  Even as all this was going on, a separate investigation was taking place concerning Vice President Spiro Agnew for taking bribes nearly a decade ago while an official in Maryland.  Under mounting pressure, Agnew resigned in October, leaving the Vice Presidency vacant.  Seeing an opportunity, Nixon went to his Attorney General and demanded that he fire the Special Prosecutor.  In what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre, the Attorney General refused, instead choosing to resign, as did his second in command.  The third in command did as he was told.  The move outraged Nixon's opponents and the majority of the public.  To try and smooth things over Nixon went to Disney World and gave his famous "I'm not a crook" speech.  When that didn't work, he was forced to tuck his tail between his legs and allow the appointment of a new Special Prosecutor just eleven days after firing the first. 

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nixon_edited_transcripts.jpg  

Watergate Part 1

In 1971, the New York Times and the Washington Post released a set of documents known as the Pentagon Papers, which showed that the both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had lied extensively to both Congress and the U.S. public concerning the Vietnam War.  For the then sitting president, Richard Nixon, the smearing of the reputations of the past two Democratic presidents was a god send.  However, it was also a little problematic given that for any president the widespread publishing of classified documents was not really a good precedent to have set.  As a result, Nixon attempted to block the further release of the papers via a court order, though ultimately he failed when the Supreme Court ruled against him.  Having tried the legal method, Nixon then switched to illegal tactics, putting together a crack team of ex-investigators which he tasked with the job of discrediting the source of the Pentagon Papers leak.  This group called themselves the White House Plumbers, because they were tasked with plugging leaks.  The Plumbers were so proud of their name that they put up a sign in their office, though they soon after took it down when someone pointed out that maybe advertising their existence was pretty dumb.  So you know, maybe crack team wasn't exactly the best description for them.  

Anyhow, the Plumbers basically failed at their assigned task and by the spring of 1972 all of them had been reassigned to Nixon's re-election campaign, which compared to doing illegal espionage was pretty fucking boring.  However, being go-getters, they decided that the best way they could help their boss get re-elected for a second term was to break into the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate Building and put some illegal wiretaps on the phones.  Not wanting to get their own hands dirty, the Plumbers hired a rag tag group of five Cuban Freedom Fighters to do the break in on May 28, paying them with campaign funds.  Amazingly enough the breaking in portion of the plan went off without a hitch.  Unfortunately, the planting of the bugs didn't go so well.  As a result, a second break in took place on June 17, which ended with the five men getting arrested after a security guard found duct tape on all the door latches.

Given the whole illegal wiretapping thing, the FBI soon after began investigating the crime.  It didn't take them long to connect things to the Plumbers given that one of the Cuban freedom fighters had their names in his address book.  Given that the Plumbers were all working for the Nixon re-election campaign and were using campaign funds for illegal activities, this caused a bit of a panic that worked its way to the senior levels of the Nixon administration and clear to the president himself.  This panic wasn't helped by the fact that within days of the break in the Washington Post started reporting that the arrested men had connections not only to the Plumbers and the Nixon re-election campaign, but also some higher level Nixon administration officials.  This information came from a source that the paper called Deep Throat, after a popular porno movie of the time, who in actuality was a high level member of the FBI.  

Nixon, not known for being the most level headed of men in the best of times, shit his pants with panic.  Not only could a connection between the burglars and his administration and campaign risk his chances of re-election, but it also threatened to bring to light all the other less than legal activities the Plumbers had done over the years.  With straight up murder not really being an option, Nixon instead went with trying to derail the investigation by having the head of the CIA imply to the acting head of the FBI that the whole thing was a clandestine CIA operation and a matter of national security.  The head of the FBI thought this was bullshit, but wanting to keep his job, personally destroyed some evidence connecting the five burglars to the Plumbers and began giving daily updates of the investigation to the White House.  Nixon then had his aides promise to pay the legal fees of the five burglars and the Plumbers in return for keeping their damn mouths shut and lying under oath if necessary.  Where did this money come from?  Campaign funds of course.       

The summer of 1972 was a strange one.  As the FBI investigation continued, making greater and more complex links between the burglars and the Nixon re-election campaign, all dutifully reported to the Washington Post via Deep Throat, Nixon and his aides worked over time to distance themselves from the criminal activity.  However, the bad news kept rolling in.  In September, the FBI reported that the Watergate break in was part of a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of the Nixon campaign.  The five burglars, several Plumbers, and several key members of the Nixon campaign were all indicted.  However, none of it mattered at all due to the fact that Nixon's opponent in the 1972 election was a man named George McGovern, a far to the left wingnut, at least for the time, whose running mate had been hospitalized for depression on numerous occasions.  When faced with deciding between a man who surrounded himself with crooks and a crazy man who surrounded himself with more crazy people, the American public went with the man surrounded by crooks.  In November, Nixon won re-election by the widest popular vote margin in American presidential history, winning all but one state. 

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