watergate scandal essay question

The five men, said the story, "were surprised at gunpoint by three plain-clothes officers of the metropolitan police department in a sixth floor office at the plush Watergate, 2600 Virginia Ave., NW, where the Democratic National Committee occupies the entire floor."

The name still reverberates as one of the greatest domestic scandals in American political history, leading to the resignation of the President, Richard Nixon, and the trial and conviction of many of the men closest to him. It echoes, too, as the most daring and exciting story in the history of American journalism.

Barry Sussman, the Post's city editor in 1972, says in an interview that he never thought of the story in cosmic terms; he just thought it was a good yarn that needed good reporting. He remembers that about 8:30 a.m. on Saturday, June 17, he received a phone call from his boss, Harry M. Rosenfeld, the metropolitan editor. Rosenfeld said five men had been arrested for a break-in at Democratic Party headquarters and asked him to get into the office on what was normally his day off to supervise the coverage. Before doing anything else–before even getting out of bed–Sussman called two reporters to get on the story. One was predictable–Al Lewis, the Post's legendary police reporter, a man who had been on the beat so long (36 years) he thought like a cop. Lewis arrived at the Watergate complex with the city's acting police chief. They walked through the police lines and into the building, passing dozens of frustrated and curious reporters, and went straight up the elevator to the party headquarters. The other reporter summoned by Sussman wasn't so predictable. His name was Bob Woodward. He had worked for the Post on the metropolitan (local) staff for eight months.

With more than 80 metropolitan reporters at his beck and call, why did Sussman pick Woodward?

"You could see he was good," Sussman recalls. "Though he’d only been at the Post a short time, he’d been on Page One as much as anyone else." That was partly because he never seemed to leave the building. "I worked the police beat all night," Woodward says, "and then I’d go home – I had an apartment fiver blocks from the Post – and sleep for a while. I’d show up in the newsroom around 10 or 11 [in the morning] and work all day too. People complained I was working too hard."

He says he just couldn’t help himself. "I loved the place. I loved the feel of the news room – the intensity, the mystery, the unexpected things that happened."

"He really had his shit together," recalls Ben Bradlee, the Post’s executive editor at the time of the break-in, in an interview. "He was tenacious and worked hard," says metro editor Rosenfeld. "He had already impressed me by the work he did on the George Wallace shooting." Wallace, a presidential candidate, was shot an seriously wounded May 15 at a suburban shopping mall in Laurel, Md. At the time, according to Sussman and Rosenfeld, Woodward said he had "a friend" who might be able to help. Woodward, interviewed in his beautiful home in Georgetown, the capital’s poshest neighborhood, says that even after all these years he won’t say anything more. The "friend," of course, was the most mysterious of all Watergate figures, Woodward’s oracle, the man we all know as "Deep Throat."

Woodward was dispatched that first day to cover the court arraignment of the five burglars. He squeezed into a front-row seat and heard James W. McCord, one of the defendants, describe himself as a retired government worker. What agency? he was asked. "The CIA," McCord replied in what was almost a whisper. "Holy shit," Woodward remembers saying to himself, half-aloud.

Wandering around the newsroom that Saturday was the Post's Peck's Bad Boy, the official office hippie, a long-haired reporter who played the guitar and never turned his expense accounts in on time: Carl Bernstein, another young Metro reporter.

Bernstein had been at the Post since the fall of 1966. In 1972, Katharine Graham, publisher of the Post, wrote in her splendid autobiography, Personal History, that Bernstein " had not distinguished himself. He was a good writer, but his poor work habits were well known throughout the city room even then, as was his famous roving eye . In fact, one thing that stood in the way of Carl’s being put on the story was that Ben Bradlee was about to fire him. Carl was notorious for an irresponsible expense account and numerous other delinquencies – including having rented a car and abandoned it in a parking lot, presenting the company with an enormous bill."

But Sussman liked Bernstein. He got the job.

Woodward was a wealthy young man from the Midwest who went to private schools and Yale University. He had served five years as an officer and a gentleman in the U.S. Navy. Bernstein was a rare species in the Post newsroom – a native of Washington. He had grown up in metropolitan Washington and spent some time at the University of Maryland before dropping out. Both reporters had been married, but Woodward was divorced and Bernstein was separated from his wife. Without family obligations, they were able to devote almost all of their waking hours to the story.

So, by late afternoon that first day, the Post’s Watergate team was already shaping up. First of all, Woodward, 30 at the time of the burglary, and Bernstein, 29, the reporters. Next up the ladder, Sussman, 38, the city editor (responsible for District of Columbia news), an introspective fellow who grew up in Brooklyn and had been something of a vagabond before settling in at the Post. Sussman’s boss was Rosenfeld, 43, who had been foreign editor at the New York Herald Tribune when it folded. He was the Post’s metropolitan editor (in charge of the news from the city and its suburbs). Day by day, these were the people who worked on the Watergate story, all the time.

They all reported to Howard Simons, 43, a one-time science editor chosen by Bradlee to run the paper day to day. He was the Post’s highly competent managing editor. Simons, in turn, reported to Bradlee, 51 years old in June of 1972. That Saturday, when the story broke, he was at his cabin in West Virginia, where the phone, as usual, wasn’t working. And at the very top was Katharine Graham, the paper’s gutsy publisher.

Sunday's story in the Post described the break-in and said one of the defendants was James McCord, a retired CIA agent. Monday's story–it was bylined Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, their first of many byline pairings–said McCord was not only a retired CIA agent, he was also "the salaried security coordinator for President Nixon's re-election committee." And that wasn't all, the two reporters said–he also was under contract to provide security services to the Republican National Committee.

The reporters were able to pin down McCord's campaign connections because the paper's regular White House reporter, Carroll Kilpatrick, had spotted McCord's name in Sunday's story. "I know that man," he said, and he called the news desk to say McCord was on the re-election committee's payroll.

In the first of the many lies that were to follow, former Attorney General John Mitchell, head of the Committee for the Re-election of the President, which came to be known as "CREEP" by reporters, said that McCord's only role with the campaign was to install a security system at campaign headquarters. As for the other four defendants (all of them residents of Miami with anti-Fidel Castro backgrounds), Mitchell said they "were not operating either in our behalf or with our consent."

Rosenfeld recalled that by late Sunday afternoon Bernstein had concluded that Nixon and his long-time hatchet - man, Murray Chotiner, were behind Watergate. (This time, though, Chotiner, who had performed any number of questionable chores for Nixon over the years, was purely innocent.) Bernstein wrote a five-page memo expounding his "Chotiner Theory," and sent it to Woodward, Sussman, and Rosenfeld. "It scared the marrow out of my bones," Rosenfeld remembers. For many reporters and editors at the Post, and for almost everyone else at other media outlets, the idea that the President could be involved in these insane activities was simply ludicrous.

Sussman says he didn't want to think about any of those things. He simply wanted to keep the story going day by day, and see where it finally ended. Tuesday's story, though, kept the ball rolling nicely, and in the direction of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The break came from the Post's night police reporter, Eugene Bachinski. On Monday, a friendly police officer allowed him to browse through the notebooks and papers confiscated from the five suspects. In one address book, he found the notation, "W.H." In another, he found the listing, "W. House." The name connected to both of them was that of Howard Hunt. Bachinski arrived at the newsroom shortly before noon on Monday, and told Sussman what he had discovered.

Sussman gave Hunt's name to Woodward (in the book he wrote with Bernstein, All the President's Men, Woodward says he already knew about Hunt because Bachinski had called him at home late Sunday night). Woodward called the White House switchboard and the telephone operator put him through to an extension, but there was no answer. J ust as Woodward was about to hang up, the operator came back on the line and told him, "There is one other place he might be. In Mr. Colson's office." Hunt wasn't there either, but the secretary answering the phone suggested he might be reached at Robert R. Mullen and Company, a public-relations firm. She said he worked there as a writer.

Everybody on the Post's national staff knew who Colson was. He was Charles W. Colson, special counsel to the President of the United States, and he was a major figure in the White House. But Woodward had no idea. He asked an editor on the news desk if he had heard of someone named Colson. Sure, the editor said, Chuck Colson, like Murray Chotiner, was one of Nixon’s "hatchet" men. Woodward called the White House back and confirmed that Hunt was on the payroll as a consultant working for Colson.

Armed with all this information, he called Hunt at his P.R. firm. "Howard Hunt here," the man answering the phone said. Woodward identified himself and then asked why Hunt's name and phone number were in the address books of two of the burglars arrested at the Watergate.

"Good God," Hunt said, Woodward and Bernstein recalled in their book, All the President's Men. Hunt paused for a moment before going on. "In view that the matter is under adjudication, I have no comment." Woodward said Hunt then slammed the phone down.

In the book, Woodward said he telephoned his special "friend" who worked for the government–the legendary anonymous source dubbed "Deep Throat"–and was reassured that the FBI considered Hunt a prime suspect in its Watergate investigation. Woodward and Bernstein also said in their book that Sussman, invariably referred to as a master of detail, remembered Colson, and pulled out clips about him in the Post library. Sussman still sizzles at the idea that he was not much more than a master of detail. He argues that he was the editor with the broadest overview of the whole story and that, time and time again, he was the editor who whipped these stories into shape, often rewriting the leads. Sussman says in an interview he has no recollection of pulling those clips from the library.

In any event, someone pulled the Colson clips because the information in them became part of the story. One of the stories in the clips was written by a Post reporter, Kenneth W. Clawson. Clawson had left the paper earlier in 1972 to become the White House deputy director of communications. He had quoted an anonymous source describing Colson as "one of the original back room boys. The guys who fix things when they broke down and do the dirty work when it's necessary." Somebody slipped that lovely quote into the story, taking careful note to mention that Clawson was now working at the White House. Tuesday's story was headlined, "White House Consultant Linked to Bugging Suspects."

"Three days into the story," said Ben Bradlee, "and we're already into the White House. Not bad for those two kids."

The fact that four of the Watergate burglars were anti-Castro partisans from Miami led some reporters and investigators to the conclusion that Cuba had something to do with the break-in. At the New York Times, reporter Walter Rugaber had been sent to Miami and was writing some interesting stories about how the Watergate burglars had been financed. Rugaber's contact seemed to be Dade County state's attorney, or prosecutor, Richard Gerstein, who was running for re-election and had opened his own Watergate investigation.

At this point, the Post, in fact, went into something of a funk. The problem was the paper's massive commitment to the coverage of the Presidential election. More than 40 reporters were preparing to cover the summer's political conventions and there wasn't a whole lot of time for very much else. In his book, The Great Cover-Up; Nixon and the Scandal of Watergate, Sussman said that, to the paper's political writers, the Watergate story was "like a leaky faucet–something to think about when you stood near the sink, easy to forget when you were out covering the election campaign."

Things were so slow that Sussman took his wife and two daughters to the beach for a holiday starting the last day in June. He was there on Saturday, July 1, when Mitchell announced he was stepping down as the President's campaign manager to be with his family. He was succeeded by former Minnesota Congressman Clark MacGregor. When he returned from vacation, Sussman was called into managing editor Simons’ office and told the paper had to do more with the Watergate story. Simons pointed to the New York Times on his desk, carrying one of Rugaber's reports. Other papers were getting into the act too. On July 22, the Long Island daily Newsday reported that a former White House aide named G. Gordon Liddy had been fired in June for refusing to cooperate with the FBI. Simons told Sussman to work full time on the story, along with Woodward and Bernstein.

The Dahlberg Link

Bernstein tried to play catchup with the Times' reporting, a job loathed by every good reporter. He learned from reading the Times and by making his own phone calls that the Miami investigators had subpoenaed bank records of one of the burglars, Bernard L. Barker, and had begun turning up provocative information. From reading the Times, Bernstein learned that $89,000 had been deposited in Barker's account and then withdrawn from it in April. He reached the Dade County prosecutor's chief investigator, Martin Dardis, and asked him about the $89,000. "It's a little more than $89,000," Dardis said. It was, in fact, a little more than $100,000 and most of the money had been "laundered" in Mexico, so no one could trace its origins.

Bernstein was given permission to fly to Miami to learn more about the cash. As he boarded the plane on Monday, July 31, he glanced for the first time at the front page of the New York Times. "Cash in Capital Raid Traced to Mexico," the headline said. "Bernstein directed his ugliest thoughts to Gerstein and Dardis," he and Woodward wrote in their book. Upon arriving in Miami, Bernstein checked in at the Sheraton Four Ambassadors, the city's poshest hotel. He asked about Rugaber's whereabouts. "He checked out over the weekend," the desk clerk told him.

About 8 p.m. Monday, Bernstein called from Miami to say that after a long game of cat and mouse, Dardis — unable to shake the persistent reporter -- had finally let him see the actual checks. "There's a check for $25,000 signed by someone named Kenneth Dahlberg," Bernstein said. He had no idea who Dahlberg was, and neither did Woodward or Sussman.

In their book, the two reporters recount that Bernstein started working the phones furiously, calling police investigators and bank officials in Florida. One of the bankers, James Collins, said yes, he knew Dahlberg — he was one of the bank’s directors — and added, ever so gratuitously, that Dahlberg had been head of Nixon’s Midwest campaign in 1968. The two reporters wrote in their book that Bernstein called Sussman with his scoop and that Sussman told him that Woodward was at that moment on the phone with Dahlberg. "For Christ's sake!" Bernstein screamed, "tell him Dahlberg was head of Nixon's Midwest campaign in 1968." "I think he knows something about it," Sussman is reported to have replied, according to the Woodward-Bernstein book.

Woodward, working on the story in the Post newsroom in Washington, had traced a Kenneth H. Dahlberg to two addresses, one in Boca Raton, in Florida, the other in Minneapolis. Woodward tracked his man down to the home in Minneapolis. They chatted for a few minutes. Yes, said Dahlberg, he also had a home in Boca Raton. And what did he do? Well, among other things, he said, he was a fund-raiser for Richard Nixon.

Dahlberg called back later to confirm that Woodward really was a Post reporter. And he spilled more of the beans. He had raised so much money in cash, he said, that he had become worried about carrying it around. So he deposited the money in the First Bank and Trust, in Boca Raton, in exchange for a cashier's check. When he got to Washington, he gave the cashier's check either to Hugh Sloan, treasurer of the campaign finance committee, or to the top man himself, Maurice Stans, the former Secretary of Commerce and head of the finance committee. He told Woodward he had already talked to the FBI three times and had no idea how the money ended up in Barker's bank account. Or, he might have added, how fifty-three $100 bills drawn from Barker's account had ended up in the pockets of the Watergate burglars.

The story ran in the Post on Tuesday, August 1, on the lower half of the front page. It would have received more prominence that day if it weren't for the fact that another story led the page with an eight-column banner: "Eagleton Bows Out of '72 Race; McGovern Weighs Replacement." Thomas Eagleton, a well-respected U.S. Senator from Missouri, had withdrawn as McGovern's vice presidential running mate when it became public knowledge that he had been hospitalized three times with mental problems and had undergone shock therapy on two of those occasions.

The Post's August 1 Watergate story began with these words:

A $25,000 cashier's check, apparently earmarked for President Nixon's re-election campaign, was deposited in April in a bank account of one of the five men arrested in the break-in at Democratic National Headquarters here June 17.

The check was made out by a Florida bank to Kenneth H. Dahlberg, the President’s campaign finance chairman for the Midwest. Dahlberg said last night that in early April he turned the check over to "the treasurer of the Committee (for the Re-election of the President) or to Maurice Stans himself."

Woodward remembers that when Sussman finished editing the story–right on deadline, as usual–he put his pencil and his pipe down on his desk and told his ace reporter, "We've never had a story like this. Just never."

That night, Woodward says, he had dinner with the man he considers a mentor, the late Jerry Landauer, the Wall Street Journal's legendary investigative reporter (who broke the story that led to the resignation of Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew). "Bob," Landauer said, "I would have given my left arm for that Dahlberg story today."

Looking back at all the Post's Watergate stories, Sussman says this one, the August 1 story, was the most significant because it showed more clearly than anything else that the Watergate burglars were a part of Nixon's re-election campaign. It gave the lie to the campaign's contention that the Watergate break-in was carried out by zealots operating independently–Gordon Liddy, chief among them–who were simply out of control. It set in motion the official inquiries that led to Nixon's resignation.

All these years later, Ben Bradlee still revels in the Post's Watergate coverage, and especially that August 1 story. "We had street reporters," he says. "Over at the New York Times, they had Max Frankel [the Washington bureau chief] and he spent most of the day talking on the phone with Henry Kissinger."

Luck had been a part of nailing down the Dahlberg story. Rugaber missed the check; Bernstein found it. But that wonderful Post passion–the sheer doggedness of the coverage–played a part too. Bernstein had been pushed around in Miami. He met delay after delay. Maybe he could see the checks, maybe not. But he persisted. He didn't give up, he didn't call the office back in Washington and say he was coming home because the authorities weren't cooperating. In the end, he got the single biggest, most important of all the Watergate stories. It was at this point that the Times and the rest of the Post's opposition began to fade away. It was the beginning of the Post's ascension.

It is difficult to exaggerate just how hard Bernstein and Woodward worked on the Watergate story. They made phone calls; they knocked on doors. They each developed a thick list of sources, and there wasn’t much overlap between one list and the other. They worked all the time -- and they believed in what they were doing.

Suspicions were now growing that prosecutor Earl Silbert and the Justice Department, heavily influenced by the Nixon White House, hoped to restrict the investigation solely to the burglars.. The August 1 story about the $25,000 Dahlberg check demonstrated that it was a much bigger story than that. The wheels began to turn.

The most important wheel was a little-known agency in the General Accounting Office called the Federal Elections Division, headed by Philip S. "Sam" Hughes, a veteran bureaucrat who had helped write the GI Bill of Rights following World War II. The agency had set up shop on April 7, charged by a recently enacted campaign-reform act to tighten up the reporting of campaign contributions. Best of all, it was a part of the legislative–not the executive–branch. Hughes told Woodward there was no mention of the Dahlberg check in any of the finance filings by the Nixon committee. He pledged he would take a serious look–a full audit–to see what was going on.

At the same time, Congressman Wright Patman, the 79-year-old chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, directed his staff to see if there had been any violations of banking law in the way the Dahlberg check and the laundered Mexican cash had been handled. That investigation never really got off the ground, partly because Patman some days couldn't assemble a quorum of committee members, but it was a start. On the Senate side, Edward M. Kennedy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on Administrative Practices and Procedure, began another investigation.

But it was Sam Hughes and his little agency that caused the most trouble for the White House. Woodward's editors told him to make absolutely certain that no other paper beat the Post on the agency's findings. Woodward called someone at Sam Hughes' office every day.

On August 22, the second day of the GOP national convention in Miami, Woodward and Bernstein reported that Hughes' election office was preparing to release its report documenting illegal activities by Nixon's re-election committee. Hours before the final report was to be released, however, Hughes was summoned to Miami by Maurice Stans, for whom he had once worked, to talk things over. He made the flight, even though he knew it might look improper if the press got hold of it. Word did leak out–it almost always does in situations like this–and Democratic National Chairman Lawrence O'Brien charged that it was "the most outrageous conspiracy of suppression that I have witnessed in a generation of political activity."

The Nixon campaign knew it couldn't suppress Hughes' report, which was published August 26, after the convention adjourned, but it had managed to keep it from coming out while Nixon was celebrating his triumphal renomination.

In the short time he was in Miami, Hughes managed to track down Hugh Sloan, the one-time Nixon finance committee treasurer. It was at that time, Woodward and Bernstein say, that Sloan revealed to Hughes that the Dahlberg check and the Mexican money were a part of a larger cash fund kept in two safes at CREEP headquarters–one in Sloan's old office and one in Stans's office. This was the secret campaign fund–the slush fund–that the P.R. officials at the White House and at campaign headquarters had insisted didn't exist.

Senator Bob Dole, the Republican national chairman and a major White House mouthpiece, said George McGovern's Democratic finance committee had committed a lot more serious violations of campaign-finance laws–he cited 14 of them–and demanded that Hughes investigate the Democrats too. The Post published this story on September 13, reporting that the "General Accounting Office investigators have found only technical violations of the new campaign finance law ... [by] George McGovern’s election committee, according to reliable sources."

The findings contrast sharply with those from Hughes’ inquiry into the Nixon re-election committee, after which the GAO referred its audit to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. But, of course, the Justice Department was moving at a glacial pace in its Watergate investigation, saying frequently that it would be a disservice to the system and to the defendants to comment on the various allegations.

Sussman says he often wondered why the Post had so little media competition in the Watergate story. No other paper, he says, took the time to investigate Dole's allegations of impropriety in the financial affairs of the McGovern campaign. There was even a little skepticism at the Post, especially among members of the national staff, he says. "Be careful, they kept telling us, don't go overboard. These things happen in all campaigns."

Metropolitan Editor Rosenfeld says it didn't bother him a bit. "I was happy to be alone on the story," he recalled in a long telephone interview for this case study. "We all know what happens when one paper gets ahead of everybody else. The other guys gang up and piss on your story. Journalists are always denigrating one another."

By mid-August, Woodward, Bernstein, Simons, Sussman and others directly connected to the Watergate story were convinced that senior officials at the White House–perhaps even the President–had to be involved,. Checks for $25,000 didn't move around by themselves; somebody with influence had to authorize them. One of the obstacles in pinning the story down was the campaign headquarters itself. It was like a bunker, with uniformed guards at the door. Interviews with the people inside were hard to set up and when a reporter was allowed past the gates he was accompanied by someone to the office of the person he or she had arranged to interview, and then taken in hand and led back to the gate and out the front door when he or she was finished.

Who were all those people working at CREEP headquarters? What were their telephone numbers and where did they live? Woodward and Bernstein wrote that a Washington Post researcher obtained a list of 100 CREEP employees from a friend. Another list, containing even more names, was published by Sam Hughes's agency at the GAO.

"Studying the roster became a devotional exercise not unlike reading tea leaves," Bernstein and Woodward wrote in their book. "Divining names from the list, Bernstein and Woodward, in mid-August, began visiting CRP people at their homes in the evenings," they wrote, using the third person. "The first-edition deadline was 7:45 p.m., and each night they would set out soon afterward, sometimes separately, sometimes together in Woodward's 1970 Karmann Ghia. When traveling alone, Bernstein used a company car or rode his bicycle."

They hadn’t known each other very well when they began working on the story. And, in the early days, they viewed each other with a little bit of suspicion. By now, though, they were a team. This is how they described their working relationship in their book:

They realized the advantages of working together, particularly because their temperaments were so dissimilar.... Each kept a master list of telephone numbers. The numbers were called at least twice a week. Eventually, the combined total of names on their lists swelled to several hundred, yet fewer than 50 were duplicated....

By this time, Bernstein and Woodward had developed their own style of working together. To those who sat nearby in the newsroom, it was obvious that Woodward-Bernstein was not always a smoothly operating piece of journalistic machinery. The two fought, often openly. Sometimes they battled for fifteen minutes over a single word or sentence. Nuances were critically important; the emphasis had to be just right. The search for the journalistic mean was frequently conducted at full volume, and it was not uncommon to see one stalk away from the other's desk. Sooner or later, however (usually later), the story was hammered out.

Each developed his own filing system; oddly, it was Bernstein, far the least organized of the two, who kept records neatly arranged in manila folders labeled with the names of virtually everyone they encountered. Subject files were kept as well. Woodward's record-keeping was more informal, but they both adhered to one inviolate rule: they threw nothing out and kept all their notes, and the early drafts of stories. Soon they had filled four filing cabinets.

Usually, Woodward, the faster writer, would do a first draft, then Bernstein would rewrite. Often, Bernstein would have time to rewrite only the first half of the story, leaving Woodward's second half hanging like a shirttail. The process often consumed most of the night.

Sussman says the prodecure did not always work exactly as the two reporters describe it. Often, he recalls, there was heavy editing and rewriting. "These two guys were good leg men," he says, "but they weren’t much better than okay in putting their thoughts together."

The door-to-door canvassing began paying off, in bits and pieces. "It was all part of a mosaic," Woodward explains. One CREEP employee told the reporters, in tears, that she was scared of what was happening, and that all kinds of documents were being shredded. Another said that Frederic LaRue, Herbert L. Porter, and Jeb Stuart Magruder, all former White House employees working at campaign headquarters, knew about the bugging of the Democratic headquarters. What amazed them both was the fact that many of these people hadn't been interviewed by Federal investigators. Woodward remembers Earl Silbert, the chief prosecutor, asking him, "Why are you believing all these women?" which even at the time he remembers as being a sexist remark.

Deep Throat

Lurking in the background was Woodward's special friend, the man whom managing editor Simons had christened "Deep Throat " (the title of a pornographic movie popular at the time). In their book, Woodward and Bernstein described Deep Throat as a member of the Executive Branch who had access to information at both CREEP and the White House. Woodward reported later that "Deep Throat" had agreed to talk to Woodward on "deep background" with a guarantee that neither his name nor his title would ever be revealed without his permission.

At first, "Deep Throat" and Woodward talked on the telephone. But, as the story became hotter, "Deep Throat" insisted on other arrangements. He suggested that Woodward open the drapes in his apartment at 17th and P streets as a signal. "Deep Throat" would check the drapes every day. If they were open, they would meet that night. There was one problem with the arrangement–Woodward liked to open the drapes to let the sun in. So they refined the procedure. Woodward had an old flowerpot with a red flag on a stick and he placed it at the front of his balcony. If he wanted to see "Deep Throat," he would move the flowerpot and the stick with the red flag to the rear of the balcony. If the pot had been moved, Woodward and "Deep Throat" would meet at 2 a.m., when downtown Washington was quiet and a little eerie, in an underground garage.

In those rare instances when "Deep Throat" wanted to initiate a meeting with Woodward, he would somehow circle page 20 in the copy of the New York Times that was delivered to Woodward's door before 7 a.m. In the lower corner of the page there would be a hand-drawn clock, the hands pointing to the hour when "Deep Throat" wanted to meet Woodward in the garage. Woodward says he still has no idea how "Deep Throat" got hold of the newspaper to make those markings.

Sussman suggests that "Deep Throat" made for good drama but not really that important as a source. The problem was, he often spoke in riddles, like the oracles at Delphi. No, he would say, you can go higher to incriminate people at a still more important level of responsibility in the campaign. Yes, you should look harder at who had access to the money.

On September 15, the five Watergate burglars, plus Hunt and Liddy, were indicted by a federal grand jury. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst said the indictments represented the culmination of "one of the most intensive, objective, and thorough investigations in many years, reaching out to cities all across the United States as well as into foreign countries."

At the Post, Woodward and Bernstein wrote in their book, there was the gnawing suspicion that this was as far as the Federal prosecutors intended to take the case. After all, they noted, the Mexican checks, the $25,000 Dahlberg check, and the slush fund stashed away in Stans's safe weren't even mentioned in the indictments.

So, mostly out on a limb all alone by now, they pushed on.

The very next day, September 16, they reported that funds used in the Watergate bugging and break-in had been "controlled by several assistants of John N. Mitchell" when he was the campaign boss. Then, on September 29, they delivered a stunner:

John N. Mitchell, while serving as U.S. Attorney General, personally controlled a secret Republican fund that was used to gather information about the Democrats, according to sources involved in the Watergate investigation.

Four other persons, they reported, eventually were given authorization to approve payments from the secret fund. They identified two of them as former Secretary of Commerce Stans, the campaign's finance chairman, and Jeb Magruder, the deputy director of the campaign. The other two were unnamed.

In putting the story together, Bernstein called Mitchell at his apartment in New York City at about 11 p.m. and read him the lead. "Jesus," Mitchell told Bernstein. "All that crap, you're putting it in the paper? It's been denied. Jesus. Katie Graham [the Post's publisher] is gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's published. Good Christ. That's the most sickening thing I've ever heard." In the story, the quote was cleaned up to eliminate any mention of the publisher's anatomy. (It didn't bother Mrs. Graham a whole lot. A dentist in California made a little wringer with a working crank out of gold he normally used for fillings and sent it to Mrs. Graham. Later, her friend, the humor columnist Art Buchwald, gave her a tiny gold breast to go with it. "I occasionally wore them on a chain around my neck," Mrs. Graham later wrote in her autobiography.)

One result of what Woodward calls "incremental reporting–taking one step at a time, day after day, big stories and small ones–is that potential sources become acquainted with your work and know who to call when they think they have something worthwhile to offer. Other papers did good work on Watergate–the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Star-News, the New York Times–but only the Post did the kind of incremental reporting that made people aware that it was the paper with the biggest stake in the story.

Thus, the night of September 28, Bernstein received a phone call from a government lawyer with an interesting story. The caller said he had a friend named Alex Shipley who had been approached "to go to work for the Nixon campaign in a very unusual way." How unusual? Bernstein asked. Well, the caller said, his friend had been asked to join the Nixon team in the summer of 1971 to work with "a crew of people whose job it would be to disrupt the Democratic campaign during the primaries. This guy told Shipley there would be virtually unlimited money available."

Woodward and Bernstein had believed all along that the bugging and break-in at the Watergate hadn't been an isolated event; it must have been, they thought, a part of a larger campaign of sabotage and obstruction. Bernstein ran down Shipley, a Democrat and an assistant attorney general in Tennessee, who said the man who tried to hire him to do dirty tricks was Donald H. Segretti, a 31-year-old lawyer in Marina del Ray, California.

Bernstein and Woodward broke this blockbuster on the front page on October 10.

FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon's re-election and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.

The activities, according to information in FBI and Department of Justice files, were aimed at all the major Democratic presidential contenders and–since 1971–represented a basic strategy of the Nixon re-election effort.

Woodward and Bernstein hadn't actually got anything from Segretti, who refused to talk to them, but from three different people he tried to recruit for his little dirty-tricks operation, they had learned the broad outlines of what he was trying to accomplish.

They also had stumbled on to what the two reporters said was the best example they had seen so far of this kind of sabotage carried out by the Nixon re-election committee. It involved a letter to the editor published in the Manchester, N.H., Union Leader on February 24 alleging that Sen. Edmund S. Muskie of Maine, at that time the leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, had condoned the use of the derogatory word, "Canucks," to describe Americans with French-Canadian roots, who vote in large numbers in New Hampshire elections. The letter, signed by a fictional Paul Morrison of Deerfield Beach, Fla., deeply disturbed the thin-skinned Muskie and he was said to have ended up in tears talking about his troubles in a campaign speech in Manchester. It marked the beginning of the end for his campaign. Muskie's withdrawal was a coup for the Nixon strategists; they had believed from the start he would be their most challenging opponent.

In their October 10 story, Bernstein and Woodward said that Ken Clawson, the White House press officer who had once been a reporter at the Post, had told Post reporter Marilyn Berger that he was the author of the Canuck letter. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't–Woodward says he still isn't sure–but the damage was done.

Two days later, Bernstein wrote a story detailing more dirty tricks played on Muskie and his campaign. They included stolen documents, faked literature, canceled rallies and mysterious telephone calls. The whole business seemed bizarre, but Deep Throat put it all in perspective. "These are not very bright guys," he told Woodward.

Both the Post and Time magazine, whose Washington bureau had good sources at the Justice Department, reported on Sunday and Monday, October 15 and 16, that Segretti had been hired for the dirty-tricks job by Dwight Chapin, Nixon's appointments secretary. At Sussman's request, Bernstein and Woodward noted that Chapin met the President on a daily basis and "is one of a handful of White House staff members with easy access to the President." In their story on the 16th, Bernstein and Woodward reported that Segretti had been paid to do his dirty tricks by Herbert Kalmbach, Nixon's lawyer.

Incrementally, one step at a time, the reporting was taking the Post closer and closer to the Oval Office itself.

This was getting serious, and at this point Sussman began to think he was being pushed aside by Rosenfeld and other top editors at the Post. "I began to feel somewhat sorry for myself" on October 16," Sussman wrote in his book, "and for the first time in a long while, I left the office in the midst of a Watergate story."

The next morning, Rosenfeld complained that Woodward and Bernstein had been difficult to work with the night before. Woodward and Bernstein complained that Rosenfeld had been a problem. That afternoon, they all met in managing editor Simons' office. Simons told them the Post was putting together a Watergate task force, with Sussman still in charge. But Sussman realized things would never be quite the same. The bureaucracy was moving in on the story.

The Hugh Sloan Story

Sussman arrived for work in the newsroom about 9:30 a.m. on October 24, and found Woodward already talking to a source on his telephone. He gave Sussman the thumbs up signal, covered the phone, and said, "We've got Haldeman." H.R. "Bob" Haldeman and his sidekick, John Ehrlichman, were Nixon's two top aides and advisors. They were a team that ran the White House. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, would be the biggest catch of all.

Sources were telling the two reporters that Chapin would never have hired or paid Segretti without the approval of his boss, Haldeman. Their most important source was Hugh Sloan, the former CREEP treasurer who had resigned weeks earlier, apparently because he hadn't approved of what was going on at the re-election committee. They talked to him time and time again, and they became convinced that he had hinted to them that Haldeman was one of the handful of Nixon operatives with access to the famous slush fund in Stans's safe. They also understood that Sloan had told them he had testified to that effect before the grand jury. Other sources seemed to confirm the story.

At about 6 p.m., the two reporters, along with Sussman, Rosenfeld, and Simons, met in Bradlee's office. "Bradlee began asking questions the way a prosecutor would," Sussman remembered. This was a new departure; story sessions on Watergate had never been like this before. For the first time, too, lawyers were called in to read the copy.

In the end, Bradlee said, "OK, go." The story appeared on the Post's front page the morning of October 25 saying that Sloan had testified before the grand jury that Bob Haldeman was one of the men who had access to the secret campaign fund.

The story was wrong.

Throughout Watergate, Nixon Administration officials had become notorious for criticizing stories by attacking them without actually denying them. These official statements sounded like denials, but when they were carefully parsed, they did not actually contradict the allegations in the stories. Reporters even coined a term for these statements. They called them "non-denial denials." At times, when the Administration was shown to have done what it had seemingly denied doing, officials would quietly back away from those earlier statements. At one point, White House press secretary Ron Ziegler even said that one former non-denial denial was "no longer operative."

When the Hugh Sloan story hit, Woodward, Bernstein and others at the Post knew there were problems because the Administration’s denials were the real thing.

"I watched the shit hit the fan on the CBS Morning News," Bradlee recalled in his book. "To my eternal horror, there was correspondent Dan Schorr with a microphone jammed in the face of Hugh Sloan and his lawyer. And the lawyer was categorical in his denial: Sloan had not testified to the grand jury that Haldeman controlled the secret fund."

Even now, Bradlee shudders at the thought. "It was terrible," he recalls. "So many people had been waiting for us to get it wrong, and here we did it. When you pick yourself off first base, and that's what we did, you can't pretend it didn't happen."

Sussman says the story was wrong on three points–"Sloan hadn't told the grand jury about Haldeman, Haldeman hadn't been interviewed by the FBI as we said he had, and we had his age wrong. He was 46, not 47."

In the past, the White House had been forced to waffle on most of its explanations about the Post's stories. This time, Nixon's spokesmen jumped all over the Post with both feet. No, said Ron Ziegler at his regular morning press conference, the story wasn’t true. "I personally feel," he said, "that this is shabby journalism by The Washington Post…. It is a blatant effort at character assassination that I do not think has been witnessed in the political process in come time."

As it turned out, Bernstein and Woodward had the main point right–Haldeman was deeply involved with the slush fund. But they had the details wrong. For this, they paid a heavy price.

How did these two young reporters, so far ahead of everyone else on this story no one could see their dust, get the October 25 story so wrong?

There were cautionary yellow lights all along the way. One of the sources, for example, an unidentified FBI agent, was asked by Bernstein, "Are you sure it's Haldeman?" in a phone call with Woodward listening in on another line, according to Sussman's book. "Yeah," he replied, "John Haldeman." After they hung up, the two reporters looked at each other. "John Haldeman?" Haldeman's first name, of course, was Bob. So Bernstein called the source back. "You said John Haldeman, but his name is Bob." Not to worry, the agent said, it's Haldeman. "I can never remember first names."

There were more problems. Woodward and Bernstein had spent hours with Sloan, who was still reluctant to tattle on his old colleagues. He was "elliptical" in what he told the two reporters, Sussman said in his book. It was hardly a surprise, then, that the two reporters had problems writing the story. That in itself is a cautionary light. Good, clean stories tend to write themselves. Stories with problems don't flow easily.

The two reporters knew who their sources were–even though what they had said came up short–and they had more problems in figuring out how to handle the story's attribution. They were faced with finding a way to make the story sound authoritative without exposing their reluctant or maybe confused sources.

Howard Simons, the managing editor, was uneasy, and suggested, according to Sussman, that Woodward and Bernstein try to come up with another source. According to Sussman, Bernstein piped up that he knew a source in the Justice Department who might be willing to confirm such an important story. But the source was skittish, and in the end Bernstein suggested a novel arrangement in which the source would say nothing if the story was right and hang up if it was wrong. The source agreed and used the signal that Bernstein understood meant that the story about Haldeman's involvement was correct.

In his book, Sussman told what happened next:

"That's madness, Carl," I said. "Don't ever do anything like that. Bernstein and Woodward knew a lot more about the details of what they were reporting than I did. But here was Bernstein saying that he was able to confirm a story damaging to the President of the United States and his chief of staff through the silence of a balky source. Maybe that could work in the movies, but not in The Washington Post."

The story ran on schedule in the Post. A year later, Sussman bumped into the balky Justice Department source. He told Sussman that "Carl got his own signals mixed up. I didn't give him the 'confirm' signal, I gave him the 'deny.'"

Bernstein's arrangement with his source was too clever by half. Sussman was right to be outraged. Yet, no one blew the whistle on the story. Everyone wanted the story to be right. Everyone wanted to nail Nixon's chief of staff.

Publicly, the Post's initial reaction was a statement from Bradlee that the Post stood behind its story. Internally, however, the editors and reporters knew better. They did argue that the story was "basically true" because Haldeman was really involved, even though Sloan hadn't explicitly said so in his appearance before the grand jury. Yet, they admitted to themselves, and later publicly, and even to this day, that they blew the story. They knew that if the details were wrong, the story was inaccurate. And they vowed to examine where they had gone wrong and do better in the future. None of the principals involved in the story defends those mistakes as mere details.

Two weeks later, on November 7, Nixon was re-elected president, defeating George McGovern by 18 million votes (60.7% to 37.5%).

For the White House, it was retribution time. No more news for the Post; the White House dumped it all in the laps of the Star-News. Even Dorothy McCardle, the nice 68-year-old lady who covered social events at the White House for the Post, was cut off. The Post thought it was curious, too, that two of its TV stations in Florida suddenly had their licenses challenged.

Worst of all, though, the Post fell into what Bradlee called a "black hole." "We couldn't get a smell of a story," he wrote.

Desperate to make some news, Bernstein and Woodward tried to get in touch with the grand jurors handling the Watergate investigation in late November. They came very close to being thrown in jail for their efforts. "I am sure we were all influenced by Nixon's overwhelming re-election win, on top of our own inability to break new ground in the Watergate story," Bradlee wrote. He went on to defend the exercise, but without very much enthusiasm. Bernstein and Woodward, in their book, conceded it was "a seedy venture" and said they wished they had never thought of it.

Early in December, Post reporter Lawrence Meyer discovered that a White House phone used by Howard Hunt had been installed in a woman's home in Alexandria. The telephone company said it had never seen anything quite like it. It wasn't much of a story but it put the Post back in the game. "We won a $2 bet," Woodward says.

But, for all the Post's gloom, the cavalry was on the way.

"What you have to remember," says Woodward, "is that while maybe everyone wasn't reading about Watergate, we had two subscribers who were reading every word." One of them was John Sirica, the chief judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, a very tough judge known, not always affectionately, as "Maximum John." The other was Democratic Senator Sam Ervin from North Carolina, a very smart country lawyer.

The trial of the five Watergate burglars and Liddy and McCord began in Judge Sirica's courtroom on Monday, January 8, 1973. This marks the end of the Post's lone-ranger coverage of the Watergate story. Now, with an actual trial under way, with real people doing real things, reporters from other newspapers and magazines and from radio and TV could finally get their teeth into the story.

Bradlee wrote he was actually pleased to be beaten on an important story by his old friend, Seymour M. "Sy" Hersh and the New York Times, "because it meant the Post was no longer alone in alleging obstruction of justice by the administration." Hersh had reported that the Watergate defendants were being paid hush money with funds that appeared to have been raised for the Nixon re-election campaign. Bradlee said one story like that was fine, "as long as we didn't get beaten again."

Sirica wasn't pleased with the way the trial was progressing. He had read all those Post stories, and he was convinced there was a lot more at stake than a bugging and burglary at Democratic Party headquarters. He got the break he needed when McCord wrote him a letter saying pressure had been applied to keep the defendants quiet and that perjury had been committed.

More damaging information came from the hearings to confirm L. Patrick Gray's appointment as FBI director. On February 5, Senator Ervin introduced a resolution calling for an allocation of $500,000 to fund the operation of a Special Senate Committee to investigate Watergate. The resolution passed 77 to 0. Woodward interpreted that to mean that possibly Nixon's support on Capitol Hill was beginning to erode.

On April 30, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Attorney General Kleindienst resigned, and John Dean was fired. James McCartney, the respected national correspondent for Knight Newspapers, was in Bradlee's office when the news came in, interviewing the editor for a long freelance piece in the Columbia Journalism Review. McCartney wrote:

Howard Simons, the Post's managing editor, slipped into the room. "Nixon has accepted the resignations of Ehrlichman and Haldeman and Dean," he said. "Kleindienst is out and [Elliot] Richardson is the new attorney general."

For a split second, Ben Bradlee's mouth dropped open with an expression of sheer delight. Then he put one cheek on the desk, eyes closed, and banged the desk repeatedly with his right fist. "How do you like them apples?" he said to the grinning Simons. "Not a bad start." Then, addressing the visitor: "The White Hats Win."

...Bradlee couldn't restrain himself. He strode into the Post's vast fifth-floor newsroom, and shouted across rows of desks to reporter Bob Woodward. "Not bad, Bob! Not half bad."

Still, it wasn't over. Everything around him was collapsing, but Nixon was still standing. It needed something more. By May 17, when the Watergate committee began its televised hearings, there was only one name left in their files that Bernstein and Woodward had never thoroughly checked out–presidential aide Alexander P. Butterfield. Sloan had once told them that Butterfield was involved in "internal security." "Deep Throat" had said he might be interesting. Woodward passed the word to investigators for Ervin's Watergate committee. Maybe, he said, it would be a good idea to interview Butterfield. Sam Dash, the committee counsel, set up the interview for Friday, July 13, 1973, surely the unluckiest day of all for Richard Nixon.

The next morning, Woodward received a phone call from a senior investigator. "We interviewed Butterfield," he said. "He told the whole story."

What whole story? Woodward asked.

"Nixon bugged himself," the investigator replied.

Woodward called Bradlee at home Saturday night and told him what he had learned. Bradlee, half-asleep, didn't seem very interested.

"How would you rate the story?" Woodward asked.

"B-plus," Bradlee replied.

On Monday, before a national television audience, Butterfield laid out the whole story about how the President of the United States had recorded all those terribly incriminating conversations in his own office.

"OK," Bradlee said the next day, "it's more than a B-plus."

Woodward says it was the only time during the whole pursuit of the story that Bradlee was wrong.

Events now moved slowly but inexorably.

On July 23, Nixon refused to turn over the tape recordings to the Senate committee. On October 20, in what became known as the "Saturday Night Massacre", he fired Archibald Cox as the Watergate special prosecutor and abolished his office. Attorney General Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus resigned in protest.

It wasn't until July 24, 1974, that the Supreme Court ruled, unanimously, that Nixon had to turn over the tapes, in which investigators finally found the "smoking gun." Three days later, the House Judiciary Committee passed the first of three impeachment articles, obstruction of justice.

On August 8, 1974, Nixon resigned as President. His vice president, Gerald R. Ford, succeeded him.

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From the archives: How the Watergate crisis eroded public support for Richard Nixon

Andrew Kohut, the founding director of Pew Research Center and its president from 2004 to 2012, was one of the nation’s leading pollsters. He died in 2015. His work, over three decades, won him wide respect for his expertise and ability to craft stories about what people could learn from survey research. One of his particular talents was to reach back in time to take a snapshot of the mood of Americans in another era to show how much times had changed.

Here is one of those articles, originally published on Aug. 8, 2014.

Forty years ago today, Richard Nixon announced his resignation from the nation’s highest office, making that decision in the face of almost certain impeachment by the House and plummeting public support, as a majority of Americans called for his removal from office. But it happened in stages.

Nixon had won reelection in 1972 by a landslide and began his second term with a lofty 68% Gallup Poll approval rating in January 1973. But the Watergate scandal – which started with an effort to bug the Democratic National Committee office at the Watergate Hotel and subsequent efforts to cover it up – quickly took a heavy toll on those ratings, especially when coupled with a ramp-up in public concerns about inflation. By April, a resounding 83% of the American public had heard or read about Watergate, as the president accepted the resignations of his top aides John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman. And in turn, Nixon’s approval ratings fell to 48%.

But that was just the beginning of the toll the scandal would take on the president that year. The televised Watergate hearings that began in May 1973, chaired by Sen. Samuel Ervin, commanded a large national audience – 71% told Gallup they watched the hearings live. And as many as 21% reported watching 10 hours or more of the Ervin proceedings. Not too surprisingly, Nixon’s popularity took a severe hit. His ratings fell as low as 31%, in Gallup’s early August survey.

The public had changed its view of the scandal. A 53% majority came to the view that Watergate was a serious matter, not just politics, up from 31% who believed that before the hearings. Indeed, an overwhelming percentage of the public (71%) had come to see Nixon as culpable in the wrongdoing, at least to some extent. About four-in-ten (37%) thought he found out about the bugging and tried to cover it up; 29% went further in saying that he knew about the bugging beforehand, but did not plan it; and 8% went all the way, saying he planned it from beginning to end. Only 15% of Americans thought that the president had no prior knowledge and spoke up as soon as he learned of it.

Yet, despite the increasingly negative views of Nixon at that time, most Americans continued to reject the notion that Nixon should leave office, according to Gallup. Just 26% thought he should be impeached and forced to resign, while 61% did not.

A lot of key scandal events were to follow that year and into 1974, but public opinion about Watergate was slow to change further, despite the high drama of what was taking place. For example, October 1973 was a crucial month as the courts ruled that the president had to turn over his taped conversations to special prosecutor Archibald Cox, and subsequently Nixon ordered for the dismissal of Cox in what came to be known as the Saturday Night Massacre . The public reacted, but in a measured way. In November, Gallup showed the percentage of Americans thinking that the president should leave office jumping from 19% in June to 38%, but still, 51% did not support impeachment and an end to Nixon’s presidency.

In the spring of 1974, despite the indictment of top former White House aides , and Nixon’s release of what were seen as “heavily edited” transcripts of tapes of his aides plotting to get White House enemies, the public was still divided over what to do about the president. For example, by June, 44% in the Gallup Poll thought he should be removed from office, while 41% disagreed.

Only in early August, following the House Judiciary Committee’s recommendation in July that Nixon be impeached and the Supreme Court’s decision that he surrender his audio tapes, did a clear majority – 57% – come to the view that the president should be removed from office.

But once he was gone, the Americans were not quick to forgive and forget. In September, a 58% majority said Nixon should be tried for possible criminal charges. And they took the view that he should not be let off the hook easily, if found guilty. By a margin of 53% to 38%, the public thought that President Ford should not pardon Nixon, if he was found guilty.

The latter sentiment of course, would carry on, and be crucial to the outcome of the next presidential election. Ford did pardon Nixon in September, an act that was followed by a plummet of his own poll numbers, and later was seen as a factor in his loss to Democrat Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential election.

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• “Gavel-to-Gavel”: The Watergate Scandal and Public Television

Watergate and Public Broadcasting

• The Watergate Scandal, 1972-1974
• Cast of Characters
• The Watergate Coverage
• The Impeachment Coverage

Additional Resources

The Watergate coverage is significant, not only insofar as the hearings themselves are significant, but also as a great moment in public television history. In the years preceding the coverage, pressure from the Nixon Administration had put in question whether public television should carry public affairs programs at all. The Watergate coverage answered that question with a definitive ‘yes’. In the years before C-SPAN, no network had ever broadcast full hearings “gavel-to-gavel” in prime time before. This format, which allowed viewers to draw their own conclusions from the evidence, expanded public television’s viewership by orders of magnitude. For a summer, viewers were glued to their screens, often past midnight, watching such personalities as Sam Ervin, Howard Baker, John Dean, and John Ehrlichman discuss what increasingly became a constitutional crisis.

The broadcasts were so successful that public broadcasting continued to use the format for future political events, including the House impeachment inquiry a few months later. They also launched the partnership of anchors Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer who would go on to host the program that today is called the PBS NewsHour . To learn more about the substantial impact Watergate had on the history of public broadcasting, please see the following essay. To jump past the background to a discussion of the coverage itself, click “Gavel-to-Gavel”: The Senate Hearings Open on Public Television in the “jump to” section.

Introduction Background: The Carnegie Commission, CPB, and PBS The Office of Telecommunication Policy (OTP) and the Problem of Funding “Us” versus “Them”: Antagonism Grows “Gavel-to-Gavel”: The Senate Hearings Open on Public Television “Watergate Junkies”: The Appeal of NPACT’s Coverage Not with a Bang but a Whimper: the Senate Watergate Committee Signs Off Aftermath: Public Television Secures Its Place Conclusion

The people of the United States were caught up in all this to a degree that might seem unlikely to anyone who didn’t experience it. Day after day, week after week, we watched the drama play out in one disclosure after another. It was all on television and through television the people became a part of the process of judgment in the summer of 1973. -- Charles McDowell, Summer of Judgment (1983 WETA Documentary) The Nixon administration and public television began at virtually the same turbulent moment in our history. Their relationship proved mutually disadvantageous at almost every turn. Richard Nixon was not good for public television. His administration very nearly succeeded in strangling it at birth. And public television, ironically, was not good for Richard Nixon, either….The broadcasts [of the Senate Watergate Hearings] undoubtedly helped bring about his downfall. 1 --David M. Stone, Nixon and the Politics of Public Television

Introduction

There is a mythic story often told about the Nixon Administration and public broadcasting. Contemporary observers and historians alike have used phrases like “poetic symmetry,” “pure delicious” justice, and slightly more modestly, “the situation is not without irony,” to describe the tale. 2 In its most stripped down form, the story has an endearing David and Goliath quality. A fledgling team of public broadcasters with federal funding for production provided only since 1967, quaked before the power of the hostile Nixon administration. Then James Karayn, president of the National Public Affairs Center for Television (NPACT) found his slingshot: the Senate Watergate hearings. “Nixon vetoed the [CPB] funding bill,” Karayn commented, “Now he’s given us our best programming.” Over seven months in 1973, NPACT’s “gavel-to-gavel” coverage of the hearings revealed in prime time the crimes that would lead to Nixon’s resignation. 3

This story, like most historical fables, becomes more complex under examination. What remains clear is that NPACT’s coverage of the hearings was an unmitigated success for public broadcasting. Letters, phone calls, personal checks, and newspaper clippings from around the country flooded national and local offices praising the coverage . Men and women who had barely heard of public television before 1973 devoted evening after evening to hours in front of their TVs. The hearings solidified public television’s place in news programming, laying the groundwork for The MacNeil/Lehrer Report , later the PBS NewsHour . Some have claimed that the coverage saved public television altogether. 4 Others have seen the Watergate affair as a “Pyrrhic victory” that left the fundamental problems in public broadcasting unresolved. 5 The following essay will tell the story of the Nixon Administration and public broadcasting and examine the impact of the Senate Watergate and the House impeachment hearings on public television.

Background: The Carnegie Commission, CPB, and PBS

Public broadcasting in its contemporary form began with the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, established in 1965. The Commission, which inspired the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, sought to organize the scattered, independent, and largely ignored constellation of educational broadcasters into a national system sustained over the long term by a reliable source of federal funding. Its goals were utopian; to create a public forum for idealized democratic discourse and culture. 6 To this end, the act created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). CPB is a non-profit, independent entity designed to collect and distribute money to stations, serving as a “heat shield” against partisan interference. 7 The act also tasked CPB with arranging for interconnection services to carry programs to local stations, but required that it outsource the task as a shield against creating a “fourth network.” National Educational Television (NET), established in 1952 to provide national programming to local educational stations, did have experience performing interconnection, but had often found its mission at odds with that of local station managers. By the mid-1960s, NET wanted to be a “fourth network,” one that would operate like ABC, CBS, and NBC, but “would program controversial and compelling shows that commercial television shied away from.” 8 Many local stations opposed empowering NET because they found the organization “unresponsive to their needs” and too progressive in its politics. 9

In November 1969, CPB created the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) to perform interconnection services and to schedule national programming. 10 PBS also served to create a “more geographically and ideologically balanced” public system by removing power from the New York-based NET. PBS would be a representative organization of local station managers to serve the idea that “stations must arise out of a sense of need within a community, must have roots in the community, and must be under community control.” 11 Later that month, in a further attempt to decentralize, CPB began developing plans to diminish NET and replace it with a Washington-based public affairs programmer. The result was NPACT, which chose James Karayn, the former executive producer of NET’s Washington bureau, as its president in July 1971. 12

Although the topic of delineating specific responsibilities was a frequent agenda item, during PBS’s first three years of existence CPB and PBS had no formal contract. As a result, the partnership began informally, without any delineation of their respective spheres. 13 The lack a clear chain of command generated an internal battle, both ideological and political, between PBS and CPB for control of a number of issues, but most importantly for “program control.” This initial network of competing interests, CPB, PBS, NPACT, the local stations, Congress, the White House, and the nebulous idea of the “public good,” set up tensions that would render public television a house, as it were, divided. 14

The Office of Telecommunication Policy (OTP) and the Problem of Funding

One recommendation of the Carnegie Commission not included in the Public Broadcasting Act was a long term funding plan. While the Commission had suggested an excise tax on TV sets that would provide permanent, insulated funding for public broadcasting, the act first passed with only short term federal appropriations. Observers in all camps agreed that annual funding left public television vulnerable to partisan manipulation, but late in his final term, Lyndon Johnson left the problem of long term funding to the next administration. Public television, according to David M. Stone, “could hardly have been given to a less willing benefactor than the Nixon White House.” 15 Richard Nixon believed that since 1948, when he had challenged Alger Hiss in his role on the House Un-American Activities Committee, the media had been against him. 16 Since then, Nixon increasingly distrusted and antagonized the press, which he believed distrusted and antagonized him. 17 This hostility, which permeated his entire administration, became explicit when Vice President Spiro Agnew gave a widely televised speech in November 1969, in which he charged television with being an “Eastern liberal” boondoggle orchestrated by “a closed fraternity of privileged men.” 18 So when, on June 27, 1973 , former White House counsel John Dean revealed the existence of Nixon’s “enemies list,” it was no surprise that it contained a number of well-known journalists, broadcasters, and newsmen. The goal of the enemies list, which encapsulated the mentality of the White House, was, in the words of Dean, to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” 19

Unfortunately for public broadcasting, there was simply more federal machinery available to the White House. Nixon was not at first, or theoretically, opposed to public broadcasting, provided it stayed committed to the doctrine of localism as dictated by the Carnegie Commission, but a few offending public affairs programs sent him scrambling to tell his staff to get them off the air. 20 Although public broadcasting maintained “a miniscule impact on public opinion” relative to commercial media outlets, Nixon had the power to tame the “freewheeling” system by holding its federal subsidy as bait. 21

The man in charge of Nixon’s policy on public broadcasting was a young MIT PhD by the name of Clay T. Whitehead. Whitehead joined the Administration as a general assistant to the president, but soon became the expert on communications policy—“Nixon’s would-be TV czar,” as one journalist dubbed him. The Office of Telecommunications Policy (OTP) was created in 1970 for Whitehead to lead, but for a man more interested in the possible future of cable television, the problems of public broadcasting created by the last administration became an unrelenting headache. 22 Whitehead was a free-marketeer who neither believed in the goals of public broadcasting, nor felt that it would be politically possible to eliminate it. 23 He compromised by taking up the task of developing a plan that would put power in the hands of local stations rather than with the “preachy” Eastern establishment. Mid-range funding would sate public broadcasting until the arrival of cable television and true free market competition, at which point public television would no longer be necessary to break the monopoly of the three networks. 24

Throughout Nixon’s Presidency, Whitehead became the nemesis of many in the public broadcasting world. One commentator complained, “It's kind of too bad Clay Whitehead wasn't implicated in the Watergate scandal.” 25 However, he never sought to eliminate public television. Others in the White House were not so politic. While many like Whitehead pursued a theoretical debate about the right balance between local and national funding, between insulation from politics and accountability to the taxpayers, there was also “the [Charles] Colson — [H. R.] Haldeman antagonism that saw the CPB programming as politically active and hostile.” 26 On the more extreme end, Pat Buchanan could be counted on to say, “Wrong thing for the government to fund. We’ve got to zero it out, and that’s that.” 27 It became Whitehead’s task to find a solution to the Administration’s unchosen obligation of public broadcasting, without appearing to be motivated by partisan interests.

“Us” versus “Them”: Antagonism Grows

On November 4, 1969, Whitehead wrote in a memo

Since the Nixon Administration will set the tone and pace…for the future growth of public broadcasting, we should give some real attention to how we want it to develop and how much money we are willing to spend. This is potentially a high visibility area where we can reflect considerable credit on the President at relatively low expenditures. 28

This early recommendation from Whitehead suggests optimism that the Administration could easily earn a feather in its cap for supporting public broadcasting. Whitehead’s grand plan was to withhold long-range funding until the system reordered itself with empowered local stations in a loose federal structure. Whitehead’s 1970 proposal allocated half of public broadcasting’s funding to the Corporation and half to the local stations. 29 In the meantime, John Ehrlichman , the president’s advisor on domestic affairs, suggested that Nixon stack the CPB Board with politically friendly appointees. 30 In December 1970, when an ex-White House aide was scheduled to criticize Nixon’s policy of minimum income on The Advocates , a debate-style program produced by WGBH, White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman asked Whitehead to look into whether they could do anything about it. 31 Whitehead responded in a memo that CPB was established “to insulate programming decisions from direct government control.” However, he continued, “the Corporation does have a clear responsibility to see that balanced presentations of viewpoints are made.” He hoped that the Nixon appointments to the Board would overcome the “rather unsubtle liberal bias” of public television leaders by steering programming away from public affairs and towards cultural and educational shows. 32

With this plan to create a favorable board, the Nixon Administration began to directly influence the public broadcasting system. On June 18, 1971, Whitehead and Antonin Scalia, then a legal consultant to OTP, began a “Memorandum for the President” suggesting that the Administration focus on establishing “structures and counterbalances” that would restrain the tendency of the Corporation to support liberal causes and that would “be difficult for other administrations to alter.” They suggested replacing CPB President John W. Macy, Jr. with an “apolitical” leader, giving more money to local stations, and putting further pressure on the CPB to shrink NET. 33 On September 23, 1971, the same day that Whitehead, Scalia, and their team completed their memo, NPACT announced the hiring of Robert MacNeil and Sander Vanocur to do a weekly political program. According to Jon M. Huntsman, Staff Secretary to President Nixon, the announcement “greatly disturbed the President who considered this the last straw. It was requested that all funds for Public Broadcasting be cut immediately.” 34 Nixon considered Vanocur to be a “well-known Kennedy sympathizer” who had contributed to his loss to John F. Kennedy in 1960. 35 Whitehead and his team rushed to warn their higher ups of the dangers of interference in a purportedly independent system. One of Haldeman’s aides wrote in a memo discouraging the cessation of funding for public broadcasting, “Believe me, I do not enjoy watching these left-wingers any more than you do, but I think it is essential that we know the maximum that can be done and do it rather than spinning our wheels proposing the impossible.” 36 Whitehead advised that any substantial action would “raise a loud Liberal howl,” but if Nixon was willing to risk the controversy, he would “open the attack” in his address to an upcoming convention of local station representatives. 37 Nixon’s staff opted for action.

On October 20, 1971, Whitehead spoke at the annual convention of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) in Miami. Whitehead cited political bias in public affairs coverage and the influence of the Ford Foundation as the two largest problems in public broadcasting. 38 He argued for a restructuring of the system that would give power back to the local stations and weaken CPB, PBS, and NET. 39 Many of the local station leaders who had qualms about overreach and liberal leanings from New York and Washington were receptive to Whitehead’s speech. 40 Executives from larger stations, however, understood the speech as a threat. James Day of NET later called the speech “the opening salvo in the Administration’s divide-and-subdue strategy” to pit local stations against the national organizations. 41 NPACT President Jim Karayn wrote to Whitehead on November 4, 1971, explaining that “NPACT programming is not dictated by one person or a small group of individuals with a particular philosophical viewpoint or journalistic background.” 42 Both the president of PBS, Hartford Gunn, and of CPB, John Macy, sought to appease the administration by requesting “new guidelines permitting PBS to review programs on behalf of the stations.” 43 The leadership’s willingness to adopt whatever restraints the White House (or their appointments on the Board) demanded rather than rock the boat set the pattern for the following two years. 44

One of the ugliest episodes was, in Day’s words, “The Great Salary Dustup of 1972.” 45 In late fall, OTP “began to encourage speculation” about the NPACT anchors’ salaries. Whitehead wrote to Haldeman in a November 24 memo,

We plan to do two things in the next few weeks to continue to call attention to balance on public television, especially NPACT. We will quietly solicit critical articles regarding Vanocur’s salary coming from public funds (larger than that of the Vice President, the Chief Justice, and the Cabinet) and his obvious bias. We will quietly encourage station managers throughout the country to put pressure on NPACT and CPB to put balance in their programming or risk the possibility of the local stations not carrying their programs. 46

The trick had its desired effect and the resulting pressure put NPACT on its heels, with programs erring on the side of blandness out of fear for what controversy might bring. 47

In early 1972, the CPB board, now with a majority of Nixon appointees, decided to limit funding to public affairs programs. As a result of the cuts, NPACT had to scrap grand plans to cover the 1972 election. 48 On February 20, 1972, the ACLU released a report that accused the Administration of trying to “intimidate” and “starve” public broadcasting. 49 In an implicit rebuttal, Whitehead sent a letter to Congressman Robert Michel on April 28 indicating that the Administration would support a $45 million bill, a modest increase in funding from $35 million in the previous year. He stated that OTP would not add more until public broadcasting restructured itself and the overall budget looked more favorable.

Meanwhile, unwilling to wait for the White House to act, Congressman Torbert Macdonald put forward a public broadcasting bill that would provide $65 million in the first year and $90 million in the second. 50 The bill passed in the House by a vote of 254 to 69 and in the Senate by 82 to 1. 51 Whitehead strongly recommended that Nixon veto the act since “while the goal of insulating CPB from governmental pressures is sound,” public media “has not yet demonstrated the responsibility of maturity to justify such funding.” 52 Nixon followed Whitehead’s advice, rejecting the bill on June 30. In the veto, despite the wide margins on the congressional vote, Nixon cited “the serious and widespread concern expressed in Congress and within public broadcasting itself, that an organization, originally intended only to serve the local stations, is becoming instead the center of power and the focal point of control for the entire public broadcasting system.” 53 Congress, not certain that it had the votes to override and caught off guard by the veto, decided to accept the Administration’s proffered one year funding bill. 54

Nixon’s veto left CPB President John Macy so dispirited that he resigned, leaving the opening the Administration had long awaited. Their chosen replacement shows the Administration’s increasing boldness as they realized how much they could get away with. The new president, former director of the Voice of America, Henry Loomis, was elected unanimously after a hasty board meeting. 55 He boasted of never having seen public television and that he had never heard of CPB, the organization he now headed. 56 Now that the White House had gained control through the board, Nixon no longer needed the divide and conquer strategy Whitehead had proposed. Change could be affected more directly. In October, Whitehead emphasized that when the President met with Loomis he should impress on him “the necessity of dumping NPACT and withdrawing CPB support for news and public affairs programs.” 57 The CPB Board met on January 10, 1973, and carried out a purge of public affairs shows including Bill Moyers’ Journal , Elizabeth Drew’s Thirty Minutes With… , Washington Week in Review , World Press Review , and even William F. Buckley’s Firing Line . 58

If Whitehead’s speech to NAEB had alarmed public broadcasters and the veto had made the small viewership scratch their heads, the purge of public TV’s most popular programming brought the attack on public media to popular attention. In the words of David Stone, “The first six months of 1973 saw the administration’s battle against public television turn into something of a wintertime Russian campaign for Richard Nixon, on his way to Waterloo.” 59 Newspapers picked up the story, linking the partisan board appointments and the purge with the growing narrative of Nixon’s “assault on the media.” 60 Editorials struck out against the cuts as thinly veiled attempts to silence political enemies. 61 Ron Powers of the Los Angeles Times wrote, “The Nixon Administration's continuing efforts at lobotomizing this country's broadcast media—to say nothing of the print media—constitute a horror story without end.” 62 Robert MacNeil, himself a victim of the cuts, denied bias as legitimate grounds for censoring public broadcasting in a January 1973 speech asserting, “Bias in their minds is apparently any attitude which does not indicate permanent genuflection before the wisdom and purity of Richard Milhous Nixon.” 63

Once the purge of public affairs shows put a spotlight on White House actions, their justifications began to cave under scrutiny. The veto had effectively defanged PBS, but had kept programming decision-making power with CPB rather than the local stations. Therefore, it appeared that Nixon preached localism while legislating centralization. 64 Bill Moyers, whose own show had been cut, commented, “What is emerging is not public television but government television shaped by politically conscious appointees whose desire to avoid controversy could turn CPB into the Corporation for Public Blandness.” 65 Henry Goldberg, OTP’s own attorney, pointed out that their current path of relying on the boards of PBS and CPB to enact White House initiatives “involves an inherent inconsistency, in that it seeks centralization as the first step in achieving decentralization.” He warned that since the tension was so obvious, “our motives become suspect and the continued restatement of the localism goal is discounted as simply not being credible.” 66 The public agreed. That February, vocal and financial support came out of the woodwork, perhaps for the first time, for a public television system on the ropes. 67

As the Nixon Administration struggled to maintain an image of non-partisan involvement with public television, presidential speech writer Patrick Buchanan laid out the Administration’s true goals. On a March 28, 1973, appearance on The Dick Cavett Show , Buchanan listed all the shows and people he considered to be anti-Administration that had been cut for that reason: Sander Vanocur, Robert MacNeil, Elizabeth Drew, Washington Week in Review , Black Journal , “and then for a fig leaf, they throw in William F. Buckley’s program.” 68 He then directly implicated Nixon by claiming that after the bill passed 82-1 in the Senate, many thought Nixon “couldn't possibly have the courage to veto something like that. And Mr. Nixon, I'm delighted to say, hit the ball about 450 feet down the rightfield foul line, right into the stands; and now you've got a different situation in public television.” 69 Buchanan’s comments ended Whitehead’s credibility with the subcommittee working on the next short-term funding bill and left him wanting “to go hide somewhere.” 70 Buchanan did not say anything many in the White House would not have agreed with, but, Whitehead commented later, “he was not the kind of guy you would choose to articulate a policy position that requires a lot of nuance.” 71 As Henry Goldberg summarized the Administration’s aims by March 1973, “They didn’t care about structure, didn’t care about localism, didn’t care about decentralization or insulated feeling. They cared about ‘them’ and ‘us.’” 72 This us versus them attitude, which pushed the Nixon Administration to attempt to control public broadcasting’s news shows could be seen in other arenas as well, not least in the Democratic National Committee headquarters break-in at the Watergate. 73

“Gavel-to-Gavel”: The Senate Hearings Open on Public Television

In the months before the Watergate affair became a major scandal, Jim Karayn saw an opportunity for public television to improve its reputation for bland content and subservience to the government. Congressional hearings had been covered on television before, including the 1948 HUAC investigations, the 1950 Kefauver Committee hearings investigating organized crime, and the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, the last of which helped raise ratings for a struggling ABC. 74 Karayn visited PBS president Hartford Gunn “twelve weeks in a row, every single day, five days a week” to persuade him to announce that PBS would cover the Senate Watergate hearings. 75 Karayn commented, “I kept saying, ‘Hartford, this is our issue. This is our real moment to make the whole world realize that we are not the government network.’” 76 If the hearings did not take place, the network could improve their reputation. If they did, the content could liven up ratings. Gunn initially rejected the plan, but was emboldened after in-fighting between PBS and CPB eased. 77 In April, PBS conducted a poll of its 237 member stations on whether NPACT should broadcast the hearings. 78 The vote passed at 52%, with all far from convinced of the wisdom of the plan. One station chief told Karayn, “You’ve decided to commit professional hara-kiri.” 79

Karayn was convinced that the coverage of the hearings should have goals beyond “trying to drive one more nail into the ghost of Richard Nixon.” 80 In an April 18 press release he stated his vision of the pedagogical value of public affairs programming:

This is precisely the kind of event which public television should put before the American viewer. By providing complete coverage of these hearings, millions will be able to see that the hearings have a significance far beyond alleged wrongdoings by a political party. They should provide insight into the basic workings of American government by dealing with such issues as congressional procedure, the investigative process, and executive privilege. 81

Karayn entrusted this message to his anchor team of Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, the latter of whom NPACT had hired six months earlier from Dallas’s KERA-TV station to replace Sander Vanocur. 82 While Karayn would have preferred to have NPACT researchers prepare the anchors to deliver expert commentary, the Center had neither the funds nor the staff capacity. Instead, NPACT decided to put together an “impressive list of people” as a “brain trust” who could add perspective at the end of each broadcast. 83

Throughout April and May, public television laid plans for the upcoming hearings. The networks, on the other hand, did not even decide to air the hearings until the week before. During this time, the member stations voted on whether they would prefer live or delayed coverage. The result of the poll set the start time at 8 p.m. Eastern time. 85 On May 10, PBS was persuaded to offer a “live feed” during the day to the 46-station Eastern Educational Network at additional cost. 86 Funding was a constant issue for NPACT. 87 Even after it started airing the shows, Karayn did not have the capital to air more than 15 episodes. 88 After the end of June, NPACT would be spending funds earmarked for productions in the fall. It proceeded with the confidence that the money would come from somewhere, hopefully grants from CPB. 89

On May 17, 1973, the Watergate hearings began. The broadcast, as on subsequent nights, opened with Robert MacNeil reading the Committee’s resolution :

In the Senate of the United States, a Resolution: To establish a select committee of the Senate to conduct an investigation and study of the extent, if any, to which illegal, improper, or unethical activities were engaged in by any persons, acting individually or in combination with others, in the presidential elections of 1972, or any campaign, canvas, or other activity related to it.

MacNeil and Lehrer provided around five minutes of commentary before giving a “line up” of the day’s hearings and switching to the caucus room. The anchors only interrupted the broadcast during natural breaks in the hearings for “station identification” that local managers could use to promote upcoming programming. 90 During these breaks, the anchormen also invited viewers to voice their opinions on the gavel-to-gavel coverage. In the second broadcast, MacNeil explained , “We’re doing this as a kind of experiment to find out how you the viewers like this, so if you have any observations we hope you’ll write to us.” At the end of the first day’s hearings, MacNeil and Lehrer closed with ten minutes of commentary and an orienting statement from Lehrer :

We are running it all each day because we think these hearings are important and because we think it is important that you get a chance to see the whole thing and make your own judgments. Some nights, we may be in competition with a late, late movie. We are doing this as an experiment, temporarily abandoning our ability to edit, to give you the whole story, however many hours it may take.

One imagines that MacNeil and Lehrer signed off that night not knowing whether anyone at all had watched. As it turned out, they needn’t have worried.

By the sixth broadcast, NPACT had received over 70,000 letters from citizens watching the shows. Of these, 70,023 were “favorable and laudatory” while only 573 were “negative evaluations.” 91 MacNeil shared some of these comments on the June 5 broadcast :

James Wilmeth, Ft. Worth, Texas: “I am sick of press and TV reporters’ opinions on Watergate. You are the one station that gives it to us as it is and allows us to form our own opinions.” Mrs. June Wilson, Atlanta, Georgia: “Since the Watergate gavel-to-gavel rebroadcast began, I have not sewed on a button, taken up a hem, or put the yogurt on to make, since I work during the day I would be hard pressed to keep up with the testimony and the nuances which undeniably show themselves in such a hearing. Thus I arrive red-eyed and sleepy to work now and don’t care.”

Even the participants themselves responded positively to the presence of TV cameras in the hearing room . 92 Senator Joseph Montoya wrote to NPACT that the results helped “restore my faith in the public’s concern in their government.” And, he noted, “I too find myself watching the evening telecasts for it helps refresh my memory on certain points raised in the day’s hearings.” 93 Viewers sent money, as well. After the first night of hearings, New York’s station received $9,000, Miami’s $8,500, San Francisco’s $6,600, and Dallas’s $5,700. 94

The overwhelming support of public television’s coverage of the hearings contrasted sharply with the response received by the commercial stations. After the first two weeks, the three Boston network affiliates received 724 negative responses and 380 positive responses in total. In New York, the condemnation was even stronger with 1,652 complaints and only 181 compliments. 95 Those who protested network coverage were mostly housewives who were upset that the hearings displaced daytime soap operas. 96

The public television viewership spanned the country geographically, challenging the existing stereotype. Karayn commented that the letters

destroy some myths about typical public television audiences. They come from the Midwest, from blue collar workers, and from the aged as well as from the educators and the Eastern intellectuals usually associated with public TV. In televising the Watergate hearing, public television has had a unique opportunity to expand viewership. 97

A study conducted in Cleveland found that viewers of the Watergate hearings on public television were more likely to be white, female, college educated, Democrats, and to have voted for McGovern. 98 However, authors of a study of four regions in Florida—Jacksonville, Miami, Tampa/St. Petersburg, and Tallahassee—found that the viewership skewed differently. Men tended to watch more than women, and black citizens made up a high proportion of viewers. 99 Whatever the exact sex, race, and class makeup of Watergate audiences, what is certain is that the notion that only Washington and New York audiences would be interested was shattered. Newspapers from locales as far ranging as Everett, Washington; Clearwater, Florida; and Galveston, Texas all praised the hearings. Cities close to the border received substantial positive support from Canadian viewers. 100 The captivating content alone was enough to please station managers, but the money streaming into stations also gave them the capital to produce local programming. 101

“Watergate Junkies”: The Appeal of NPACT’s Coverage 102

What made the hearings so appealing to such a wide viewership, many of whom had never seen a program on public television before? 103 Top reasons include an enthralling cast of characters, the chance to interact with politics in an unmediated fashion, and the dramatic developments for the future of their country.

The senators on the Committee, selected for their relative obscurity, lack of political ambition, and non-partisan reputation turned out to be a cast made for television. Chairman Sam Ervin, a conservative Democrat and self-described “country lawyer,” was known previously by his colleagues as “a non-partisan authority on the Constitution and the Bible and as wily an old country boy as ever came out of North Carolina.” By the end of the hearings, Ervin’s charming countenance, homespun idioms, and aggressive questioning full of righteous anger had made him “nearly everybody’s new folk-hero.” 104 The ranking minority member, Howard Baker, gained fame as the handsome Republican from Tennessee who many hoped would run for president someday . Baker provided the coverage with perhaps its most quotable line, “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” The other senators, as well as the counselors for the Committee became “very important parts of our daily lives,” Lehrer commented , as audience members picked, “personal favorites, villains, and dunces.” 105

In addition to the senators, who provided a set of familiar faces and personalities, the hearings delivered daily variation with a parade of aides, burglars, agents, and politicians testifying before the Committee. Some, like Jeb Magruder , the former deputy director of the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), and White House plumber E. Howard Hunt confessed their crimes in contrition. Others, like John Mitchell , the former Attorney General, and John Ehrlichman , former advisor on domestic affairs, obstinately did battle with the Committee, fiercely maintaining their own innocence and the innocence of Richard Nixon. Witnesses like former NYPD cop Anthony Ulasewicz brought welcome levity to the proceedings, leading Senator Baker to ask “Who thought you up?”

The proceedings revealed capers that were, as MacNeil and Lehrer were fond of pointing out, the “stuff of spy novels.” On May 22, burglar James McCord demonstrated how to bug a telephone , while on September 25, Hunt showed how to photographically steal documents. The audience could track an ever expanding list of code names, including Gemstone, Ruby, Crystal, Sedan Chair II, and Fat Jack. They heard stories of secret midnight phone calls from mysterious men, cash payments in laundry bags, and any number of “dirty tricks” and “White House horrors.” These stories only continued to expand and multiply as the Committee uncovered the depth and perplexing diversity of the Administration’s crimes.

Throughout these proceedings, the NPACT team provided steady, earnest commentary on the day’s events. That MacNeil and Lehrer became close friends over the course of covering the hearings is clear and endearing. Avid fans will note that Lehrer began calling MacNeil by his more personal name, Robin, as the weeks went on. Viewers appreciated that NPACT aired the hearings in full and withheld personal commentary, allowing viewers to “draw their own conclusions.”

Perhaps equally important to the dramatic cast and the mysterious story of Watergate was the ability to watch the uncertain future of the country unfold from the comfort of one’s living room. As Charles McDowell noted in the 1983 WETA documentary on Watergate , Summer of Judgment , “Never had a nation participated so intimately in an investigation of its government.” On June 6, MacNeil commented

It reminds one of the finals scenes of one of those Shakespearean histories. The forces hostile to the king are rising on all sides. Messenger after messenger rushes in with bad news. But the decisive battle is still some scenes away and we don’t yet know if this is a tragedy we are witnessing.

Pure shocks came when on June 25, John Dean accused the President of guilt in the Watergate cover-up and on July 16 when former White House aide Alexander Butterfield revealed that Nixon had taped every conversation in the Oval Office . Viewers saw the start to a constitutional crisis when on July 23, the Committee voted unanimously to subpoena Nixon , the first time Congress had served a sitting president, opening the question of whether any man is above the law. 107 The hearings were, in MacNeil’s words , “a kind of extended morality play,” in which Americans saw democracy at its worst and at its best and all in prime time.

Not with a Bang but a Whimper: The Senate Watergate Committee Signs Off

The hearings opened in May with a tentative schedule that continued to extend, putting a strain on congressional breaks and television schedules alike. As early as July 23, a Los Angeles Times columnist called Watergate “a boon that may become a bust” for public television. 108 As September approached, local stations managers had to face the question of whether they would displace their scheduled fall seasons to accommodate the ever expanding Watergate scandal. 109 On September 16, PBS announced that it would continue to show the full hearings. 110 However, after MacNeil departed in August to return to the BBC and the Committee lost its centrality in the unfolding constitutional crisis as it entered the “dirty tricks” phase of its investigation, viewership declined precipitously. When the Committee extended the hearings yet again, the stations “voted overwhelmingly to discontinue unabridged 8 PM daily coverage.” 111 After Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox on October 20, 1973 in the so-called “Saturday Night Massacre,” however, a PBS spokesman announced, “I think the whole public reaction simply indicates that if we can possibly do it, we are obligated to provide the coverage.” 112 As a result of the vote by the stations, NPACT did not cover the hearings on October 31 and November 1, but following this brief interruption of coverage, NPACT continued to show the Senate hearings until the bitter end. The coverage finally concluded on November 15, after 246.8 hours over 51 days of hearings. 113

Aftermath: Public Television Secures Its Place

So after 51 days, what did public television have to show for its efforts? One immediate result was the revitalization of WNET’s Bill Moyers Journal , which had been cut in January 1973 before being refunded in the spring to return in October. Moyers’ first show back, titled “An Essay on Watergate,” collected highlights from the summer hearings, as well as commentary from notables and Moyers himself. 114

The coverage became a model that public television continued to use, a model subsequently adopted by C-SPAN in 1979. 115 On May 28, 1974, NPACT announced in a press release that it would run live and taped prime time coverage of the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment inquiry . 116 Jim Lehrer teamed up with future Washington Week in Review moderator Paul Duke and correspondent Carolyn Lewis to anchor gavel-to-gavel coverage of the proceedings in the format built for the Senate hearings. By the end of the year, NPACT board Chairman Sidney L. James wrote to the PBS Programming Committee that “the most significant and important margin of real difference between Public and Commercial television inevitably lies in the area of public affairs programming.” 117 The following spring, NPACT won a 1974 Peabody award for its coverage of the two sets of hearings. 118

Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer so impressed the nation with their balanced news reporting that the two later would work together again on a more permanent basis. The first show of The Robert MacNeil Report aired on WNET on October 20, 1975. Within six months, the program was picked up by PBS for national distribution as The MacNeil/Lehrer Report , when Lehrer, who had been the program’s Washington correspondent, partnered with his good friend. “It is an absolute certainty,” Lehrer later commented, that without Watergate, “there would have been no anything called MacNeil/Lehrer .” 119 In 1983, the show changed names again to The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour when it expanded to a longer broadcast, making it the first hour-long news program in America. 120 Although Nixon had criticized MacNeil and Lehrer’s journalism as biased, the NewsHour became known as one of the most “articulate, focused, and balanced” programs on television. 121

Perhaps more importantly, the sprawling Watergate affair distracted the Administration from its attempts to control or end public broadcasting. “Had Watergate never come to light,” David Stone went so far as to argue, “the Nixon White House would likely have succeeded in muzzling public television as it might have succeeded in muzzling all its opponents.” 122 Instead, the White House was put on the defensive. Clay Whitehead had not intended to stay in Washington long and felt that he had sacrificed his reputation to a tangled mess he had not wanted in the first place. 123 But, he had started this job, and he intended to finish it. On July 27, Whitehead advised the President to sign the two year, $175 million Public Broadcasting Financing Act of 1973. 124 The Administration simply did not have the political credibility to continue to oppose a bill so widely supported in Congress. 125 In October, Whitehead advised the President to allow him to craft a long range funding plan for 1975 onward that would insulate the changes they succeeded in making from interference from future administrations. Pat Buchanan suggested otherwise:

My view is that we should not quit; we should hold their feet to the fire; the President has the power to veto, and we should not hesitate to employ it on public broadcasting if that institution continues to provide cozy sinecures for our less competent journalistic adversaries. If they are going to have public broadcasting, and they are going to overload it against us, why should we approve of any public funding at all. In that event, I would bite the bullet, and keep the present level of funding ad infinitum . 126

Nixon agreed, but the already thin ice below him had started to crack. 127

In the end, the problem came down to the fundamental tension that had emerged when Nixon’s Administration took on the problem of public television in the first place: the White House was internally divided, each camp attempting to use other units within the Administration to its own advantage. In Stone’s view, “The Office of Telecommunications Policy had a consistent view favoring decentralization and the deregulation of the communications industry,” based on the imminent arrival of cable television. 128 “But the lawyers, economists, and technocrats,” on the other hand, “did not operate in a non-partisan political vacuum. The plain fact was that Nixon hated the press. Many of his closest advisors hated the press. They were willing to use virtually any means available to them to stamp on or stamp out their enemies in the media.” 129 Stone concluded, “it appeared as though OTP was just providing the philosophical pretext for breaking the “Eastern liberal” control of the news media.” 130

Whitehead submitted his long term funding bill in April 1974 and was furious when in early June, he learned that the President had rejected it. At that point, Nixon wanted to end public broadcasting or give it pittance. Whitehead appealed to Nixon’s chief of staff, writing, “For the President to attempt to back away from that commitment now is unwise, unworkable, and quixotic.” 131 In an act of pure frustration, Whitehead leaked the story to The New York Times , which on June 10 published a front page article stating that a source close to CPB claimed that Nixon had “flatly rejected” OTP’s long range funding plan. 132 White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler quickly denied the statement, and on July 16, OTP’s bill was submitted to Congress. Whitehead supplied the letter of transmittal, which stated that after years of successful restructuring, public television was ready for insulated funding. 133 On August 7, Whitehead announced his resignation. Nixon resigned two days later. 134 OTP’s bill eventually became the Public Broadcasting Financing Act of 1975, which President Ford signed into law on December 31, 1975. 135 For the first time since the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the system had the funds necessary to ensure its independence.

Under the next two Administrations, public television audiences expanded significantly, with nearly two-thirds of American households tuning in at least once a month by the end of the decade. 136 This viewership was orders of magnitude larger than in 1972. 137 In spite of these two positive facts, and the victories of the Watergate coverage, public broadcasting failed to soar to the heights the first Carnegie Commission envisioned. A second Carnegie Commission, undertaken in 1979, concluded that the period from 1971-1973 “slowed the growth of public broadcasting and left a psychological scar on the stations—an enhanced sensitivity to perceived threats to their independence—which persists today.” 138 Even the long-range funding of 1975 did not allow for the “freedom,” “experimentation,” and “risk taking,” desired by many who joined public television in its early years. 139 Whitehead had succeeded in devolving a substantial amount of power to the local stations, but without the funding or the ambition, few of these stations produced much controversial content. 140 But through NewsHour and public television’s consistently excellent cultural, educational, and children’s programs, public television has found its place as “a civilized voice in a civilized community,” as the first Carnegie Commission prescribed. 141

Conclusion: Watergate’s Aftermath

It might be hard to imagine without seeing NPACT’s coverage of the Senate Watergate and House impeachment hearings how they could have captivated so many Americans for so long. But it doesn’t take long after one watches them to understand why so many stayed up until three in the morning to watch Bob Haldeman calmly deny his involvement in the whole affair. At the level of public television, the Watergate affair ushered in an era of news reporting that exists to this day—a format that “dare[s] to be boring,” doing away with the flash and glitter out of respect for the rational intelligence of its viewership. 142 On another level, Watergate was “that rare event in which reality literally outstripped satire,” a fascinating caper that could be so engaging as to create “Watergate junkies” who showed up to work with “Watergate hangovers,” brought on by long nights in front of the television. 143 But perhaps most importantly, Watergate was a tragedy. Sam Ervin said ,

I deeply regret that this situation has arisen, because I think that the Watergate tragedy is the greatest tragedy this country has ever suffered. I used to think that the Civil War was our country's greatest tragedy, but I do remember that there were some redeeming features in the Civil War in that there was some spirit of sacrifice and heroism displayed on both sides. I see no redeeming features in Watergate.

What better way to learn from a tragedy than to watch, gavel-to-gavel, how America taught itself a valuable lesson.

Special thanks to Allison Perlman for her review of this essay.

Next: Cast of Characters

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Amanda Reichenbach

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Home — Essay Samples — History — History of the United States — Watergate Scandal

Essays on Watergate Scandal

What makes a good watergate scandal essay topic.

When it comes to writing an essay on the Watergate Scandal, it's important to choose a topic that is not only interesting but also relevant and thought-provoking. A good essay topic should be able to capture the reader's attention, provide new insights, and spark meaningful discussions. Here are some recommendations on how to brainstorm and choose an essay topic, what to consider, and What Makes a Good essay topic.

When brainstorming for essay topics on the Watergate Scandal, it's important to consider the significance of the event and its impact on American politics and society. You can start by researching the various aspects of the scandal, such as the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, the subsequent cover-up, and the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Consider how these events have shaped the political landscape and influenced public opinion.

It's also important to choose a topic that is specific and focused. Instead of writing a broad overview of the Watergate Scandal, consider narrowing down your focus to a specific aspect or angle. For example, you could explore the role of investigative journalism in uncovering the scandal, the legal and ethical implications of the cover-up, or the long-term consequences of the scandal on American politics.

A good essay topic should also be able to offer new insights and perspectives on the Watergate Scandal. Avoid choosing topics that are too obvious or overdone, and instead, look for unique angles and interpretations that can offer a fresh take on the subject. Consider how you can bring a new perspective to the table and contribute to the ongoing conversation about the Watergate Scandal.

In addition, a good essay topic should be able to spark meaningful discussions and debates. Choose a topic that is relevant and timely, and that can prompt readers to think critically about the issues at hand. Look for topics that can inspire thought-provoking discussions and offer opportunities for further exploration and analysis.

Best Watergate Scandal Essay Topics

• The Role of Investigative Journalism in Uncovering the Watergate Scandal
• The Legal and Ethical Implications of the Watergate Cover-Up
• The Long-Term Consequences of the Watergate Scandal on American Politics
• The Impact of the Watergate Scandal on Public Trust in Government
• The Influence of the Watergate Scandal on Subsequent Presidential Administrations
• The Role of Deep Throat in Exposing the Watergate Scandal
• The Media's Coverage of the Watergate Scandal and Its Impact on Public Perception
• The Nixon Tapes: Their Role in Unraveling the Watergate Scandal
• The Legacy of the Watergate Scandal in American Political History
• The Watergate Scandal and the Evolution of Presidential Powers
• The Cultural Impact of the Watergate Scandal on American Society
• The Watergate Scandal and the Erosion of Public Trust in Institutions
• The Role of Congressional Investigations in Uncovering the Watergate Scandal
• The Watergate Scandal and the Rise of Investigative Journalism in the United States
• The Role of Whistleblowers in Exposing Government Corruption: Lessons from the Watergate Scandal
• The Watergate Scandal and the Evolution of Political Scandals in the United States
• The Watergate Scandal and the Dynamics of Power and Corruption in American Politics
• The Watergate Scandal and the Concept of Presidential Accountability
• The Watergate Scandal and its Influence on Political Campaign Finance Laws
• The Watergate Scandal and the Role of Public Opinion in Holding Government Accountable

Watergate Scandal essay topics Prompts

• Imagine you are a journalist in the 1970s and have just received a tip about a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Write a fictional account of your investigation and the challenges you face in uncovering the truth about the Watergate Scandal.
• Consider the impact of the Watergate Scandal on public trust in government institutions. How has the scandal shaped public perception of political leaders and the government? What are the long-term implications of the scandal on American society?
• The Watergate Scandal is often referred to as a "constitutional crisis." Explore the legal and ethical implications of the scandal and its impact on the balance of power between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government.
• Reflect on the role of whistleblowers in exposing government corruption, using the Watergate Scandal as a case study. What motivates individuals to come forward with information, and what are the risks and rewards of speaking out against powerful institutions?
• Consider the legacy of the Watergate Scandal in American political history. How has the scandal shaped subsequent presidential administrations and influenced public discourse on government transparency and accountability?

The Watergate Scandal: Historical Review

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The Outcomes of The Watergate Scandal for American Society

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Political Scandaland Its Impact on American Cultureby The Example of ‘watergate’

A historical analysis of the watergate scandal.

June 17, 1972 - August 9, 1975

United States, Washington, D.C.

The Watergate scandal was a series of interlocking political scandals involving the administration of U.S. President Richard Nixon from 1972 to 1974 that led to Nixon's resignation. The scandals were revealed following the arrest of five burglars at Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters.

Initial investigations of Watergate were heavily influenced by the media. Political investigations began in February 1973 when the Senate established a Committee to investigate the Watergate scandal. The Committee also uncovered the existence of the secret White House tape recordings.

Around the country, there were calls for Nixon to resign. In late July and early August, 1974 came Nixon’s last days in office. In the face of almost certain impeachment by Congress, Nixon resigned in disgrace on August 8.

Watergate had profound consequences in the United States. There was a long list of convictions and other casualties. The Watergate scandal resulted in 69 government officials being charged and 48 being found guilty.

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