Spilling the Beans

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A pretty convincing case can be made that what happened 40 years ago today was what marked the beginning of the end for Richard Nixon.

Three weeks earlier, Nixon's claim to have been uninvolved in — in fact, to have been unaware of — either the planning of the Watergate burglary or its coverup took a severe (but hardly lethal) blow when his former counsel, John Dean, spent a week testifying before the Senate Watergate Committee.

Nixon's defenders insisted that it was the word of only one man against the words of everyone else. Had it remained that way, Nixon might well have weathered the storm and limped through his second term. I'm sure there would have been lingering suspicions about Nixon's guilt or innocence — but no evidence to elevate those suspicions from whispered rumors to criminal accusations.

But what happened 40 years ago today changed things.

I'm speaking of Alexander Butterfield's revelation of the existence of a White House taping system that had been recording all of Nixon's meetings and phone conversations. Butterfield was a deputy assistant to Nixon, having gotten that position through an old college friend of his, Bob Haldeman, the president's chief of staff.

(I always thought that was historically significant, but the only mention I have seen of it — other than an opinion piece that, appropriately, ran in the Washington Post a month ago — has been in the form of rather brief entries in "Today in History" type columns.)

Butterfield's job in the White House never struck me as being particularly glamorous — but his duties did differ from those of his colleagues in at least one important regard. He was responsible for maintaining the taping system, and very few people knew about that.

But everyone knew about it on this day in 1973.

Butterfield was called in to testify in public after undergoing pre–testimony questioning from the committee's staff three days earlier.

In his testimony three weeks earlier, Dean had suggested that Nixon's behavior had led him to believe conversations might have been recorded, and the committee had been following up on that in routine pre–testimony questioning of witnesses. Butterfield later said that he had decided not to voluntarily disclose the existence of the system, but he would truthfully answer any direct question that was put to him.

It turned out that Butterfield was asked a direct question in that pre–testimony session — by the counsel for the minority, Donald Sanders — and he confirmed that such a system did exist. This put him at the head of the line for witnesses who would be called the following Monday — when the chief counsel for the minority, Fred Thompson, asked him the now–famous question, "Are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president?"

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Butterfield replied that, when he was working at the White House, he had been aware of the presence of listening devices and that they had been installed about three years earlier.

After describing the extent of the taping system and identifying who had knowledge of its existence, Butterfield was asked if either John Ehrlichman or John Dean would have known about it.

"It would be very unlikely," Butterfield replied. "My guess is they definitely did not know."

As I have written here before, my family was out of the country in the summer of 1973 so I do not have any firsthand knowledge of what the atmosphere was like on that Monday in July. But my guess is that, after watching extensive testimony from the former attorney general and the former counsel to the president, viewers couldn't have been enthusiastic when Butterfield, the former deputy assistant to the president, was called to testify.

He sounded like something of a nuts and bolts guy when he described his duties in the White House.

"I was in charge of administration," Butterfield told the committee, "that is to say that the staff secretary, who is the day–to–day administrator at the White House, reported directly to me. And, of course, I reported to Mr. Haldeman, as did everyone.

"I was responsible for the management and ultimate supervision for the Office of Presidential Papers and the Office of Special Files ... I was in charge of security at the White House insofar as liaison to the Secret Service and the Executive Protection Service is concerned and insofar as FBI background investigations for prospective presidential appointees is concerned."

Even after hearing a rundown on his duties, viewers had to wonder who this guy was and what he could possibly contribute to the discussion. They were about to find out.

It was a critical moment in the evolution of the Watergate scandal. Of that, there can be no doubt.

But it seems appropriate at this point to mention something.

I have heard some people complain that it is an urban myth that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters responsible for the early coverage of the scandal, brought down the Nixon presidency. I'm willing to concede that point to a certain extent.

Woodward and Bernstein alone did not bring down the Nixon presidency. It was the accumulated weight of the various investigations, like the proverbial snowball rolling downhill, that brought Nixon down — along with his own hubris and paranoia.

Woodward and Bernstein kept the story alive when virtually no one else in the Fourth Estate was willing to take the chance. Nixon, after all, enjoyed approval ratings in the upper 50s, even lower 60s, in the summer of 1972, and he wielded enormous power. No one wanted to offend him. No one wanted to challenge him. The existence of the "enemies list" was not acknowledged publicly until after Dean testified, but many in the press had long suspected that there was such a thing — if not on paper, certainly in the minds of Nixon and his minions.

By this day in 1973, plenty of questions had been raised but practically no answers had been given. In the minds of most — and in spite of mountains of apparent evidence to the contrary — it was still seen as one man's word against another's.

But when Butterfield told the Senate Watergate Committee 40 years ago today that a taping system had been recording every Oval Office meeting and conversation that involved the president, everyone knew that there was a witness, a silent witness, that would verify whether Nixon or Dean was telling the truth.

In short, it was now possible, everyone knew, to get an answer to Sen. Howard Baker's memorable question: "What did the president know and when did he know it?"

This witness was not vulnerable to accusations of faulty memory, but it could be tampered with — as America would discover in a few months.

A Cancer Growing on the Presidency

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"We have a cancer within, close to the presidency, that's growing."

John Dean to Richard Nixon
March 21, 1973

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When the Senate Watergate Committee convened in mid–May 1973, wrote Theodore H. White in "Breach of Faith," the committee's vague objective was to investigate 1972 presidential campaign activities.

In five weeks of hearings, the committee had heard some intriguing testimony but nothing that could directly link Richard Nixon to the crimes that had been committed in his name.

That started to change 40 years ago today when former White House counsel John Dean began a week of testimony.

Well, actually, the tide began to shift a couple of weeks earlier when Jeb Magruder, a former special assistant to the president and deputy director of Nixon's re–election campaign, testified that the former attorney general and campaign director, John Mitchell, had authorized him to burglarize the Democratic headquarters.

That certainly ratcheted up the interest in Dean's testimony. Mitchell and Nixon were close. Mitchell, after all, had directed Nixon's campaigns in 1968 and 1972. In between, he had been Nixon's top law enforcement officer.

There was nothing very exciting about the testimony on the surface, though. As theater, it was tedious. Dean delivered an opening statement on the first day in a lifeless monotone, and he referred to many people with whom viewers weren't necessarily familiar.

While there may have been nothing exciting about his delivery, there was plenty that was exciting in his testimony. And a buzz of excitement preceded his appearance before the Senate Watergate Committee. His testimony became must–see TV long before the phrase was used to promote a network schedule.

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Dean had a lot to tell the senators, and he used his entire first day on the stand to read a massive opening statement, pausing occasionally for a sip of water.

Dean told the senators that Nixon had been involved in the coverup all along. He also said he warned the president — prophetically, as it turned out — that "there was a cancer growing on the presidency and that if the cancer was not removed the president himself would be killed by it."

Looking back on that conversation, with the benefit of the transcript of the actual recording, White observed that Dean, in his choice of the cancer analogy, had "obviously thought through his briefing [for Nixon] carefully."

As the week went on, Dean told the senators that Nixon had misled the nation and insisted his accusations against Nixon were true. He revealed the existence of the "enemies list" and told the senators its purpose, and he told a story of a president who was obsessed with demonstrations and spoke of using IRS audits as weapons against his political foes.

Dean's testimony that week was often so detailed that some observers openly wondered how he could possibly have retained so much detail about conversations he'd had months earlier. To confirm what he said, it would be necessary to have some kind of corroborating evidence. But the conversations hadn't been recorded. Or had they?

"The televised hearings were already an unexpected hit that summer," wrote Matthew Cooper last month in the National Journal, "but the ratings soared with Dean's testimony. Still, when Dean finished, Nixon's defenders dismissed his account as one man's obfuscations and misinterpretations of what the president meant."

"Then, a few weeks later, a former White House aide named Alexander Butterfield testified before the committee that the president had installed a taping system in the White House," Cooper wrote.

And all bets were off.

Bad Times for the Enemies List

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These haven't been good times for the folks on the infamous "Enemies List" of the Nixon White House.

Of course, it's been nearly 40 years since the existence of the list was made public, and many of the folks who were on the "Enemies List" are gone now. That's to be expected, I guess. Just about everyone who was on the list would have to be in their 70s or 80s now.

In fact, if you're too young to remember the Nixon presidency, the very existence of an "Enemies List" should tell you all you really need to know about Nixon.

There are a few additional details you might need to know. There were no professional restrictions on this list. On the list you could find an assortment of politicians, actors, athletes, captains of industry, journalists, etc. Anyone who ever rubbed Nixon the wrong way, it seemed, wound up on the list.

I've heard that Gerald Ford, the man who was chosen to fill the vice presidential vacancy after Spiro Agnew resigned (and wound up succeeding Nixon as president when Nixon resigned), once observed that "Any man who has to keep a list of his enemies has too many enemies."

Ford was ridiculed during his presidency for being not too bright, but you've got to admit he might have been on to something there.

Anyway, some of the folks from the "Enemies List" are still around, but the passage of time seems certain to take them with more regularity in the years to come — and that is what has been happening lately.

It's been a tough time for those in the media — something Nixon might appreciate. First, Daniel Schorr died in late July, and then three–time Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Paul Conrad died yesterday.

I can't let Conrad's death come and go without making a few comments.

Winning one Pulitzer Prize would be the pinnacle of just about any journalist's career. Conrad won it three times, an accomplishment that almost no other cartoonist has been able to duplicate since the end of World War II.

When conservatives complain about a liberal bias in the media, they may have Conrad in mind. He was unapologetically liberal, and his political cartoons had a decidedly liberal slant. In fact, he was so liberal that it is said that he was most proud of being included in the list of Nixon's enemies.

He could draw most politicians rather well, but he seemed to have a special knack for capturing Richard Nixon. Maybe it was the shiftiness of Nixon's eyes, his hang–dog expression, the sagging quality of his jowls. Whatever it was, Conrad could nail it like no one else.

Robert McFadden of the New York Times recalled a fitting comment about Conrad:

"Conrad's name strikes fear in the hearts of men all over the world," the humorist Art Buchwald wrote, with echoes of the Shadow and Superman. "Where there is corruption, greed or hypocrisy, everyone says, 'This is a job for Conrad.' "

Obama and a Free Press

When I was a journalism student, my professors talked about how important it was to have a free press.

The only way that freedom of the press can flourish, they said, is if it has access to power — even if the person who holds the power wasn't endorsed by the newspaper.

In my experience, the politicians and the newspapers have been mutually respectful, even if they didn't always agree on issues.

Of course, there's always been a certain amount of tension between politicians and members of the media. It was best summed up, I think, in something Thomas Mitchell said to James Stewart in the Frank Capra classic, "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."

In the film, Stewart plays a naïve political novice, appointed to fill the unexpired term of a recently deceased senator. He feels his arrival in Washington was misrepresented by the newspapers, and he goes on a mission to hunt down the reporters and punch each one in the nose.

When he discovers a group of reporters assembled in a local watering hole, he quickly finds himself cornered by them and confronted with their cynical views of government. Mitchell tells him that reporters are the only ones who can afford to tell the truth. "We don't have to be re-elected!"

Relationships between the media and the politicians aren't always ideal. Richard Nixon, for example, used his position to compile a list of his political opponents, mostly members of the press. Legal counsel John Dean left little doubt what the purpose of the list was.

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"This memorandum addresses the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration; stated a bit more bluntly — how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies."

John Dean

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I have no evidence that either Nixon or any of his associates began compiling the enemies list before Nixon became president. (The original list included the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, Daniel Schorr of CBS and columnist Mary McGrory. The list was constantly revised, but it later included journalists from the New York Times and the Washington Post.)

Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, made an apt observation when the existence of the enemies list was made public. (I don't know the statement word for word, so I'm probably paraphrasing here.) Ford said that any man who has to keep a list of his enemies has too many enemies.

I hope we're not getting indications that such a list is being compiled by the Obama campaign.

Earlier this week, reporters from the New York Post, the Washington Times and the Dallas Morning News were ejected from the Obama campaign bus.

The Washington Times reports today that Obama's campaign insists it ran out of space, for various reasons — and that it wasn't punishing the three newspapers for endorsing John McCain.

You can read what each newspaper said in its endorsement of McCain here:

• Dallas Morning News


• New York Post


• Washington Times

Kirsten Powers, a columnist for the New York Post, calls the action by the Obama camp a "Nixonesque" move.

"This is bipartisanship?" she asks.

I hope that what the Obama campaign says is the truth.

Banning any member of the media from having access to power will bring change, all right.

But if the goal is to punish those who support someone else, it won't be the kind of positive change Obama and his acolytes have been preaching about.