The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down (2 page)

The following year, I was off to Harvard Law School (again on scholarship), and Nixon was off to pursue the presidency. Somewhere in my files, I still have the homemade campaign badge that says “Nixon Shepard,” as though I were his running mate. After all, I had made no secret to my Harvard classmates about my hopes to be a part of his administration, should he be victorious.

He was and so was I. A month after Nixon’s victory, at the ripe age of twenty-four, I applied to be a White House Fellow. I ended up being among the youngest ever chosen for that outstanding program, which is essentially a year-long seminar on how the federal government functions. I spent my fellowship year working at the Treasury Department
for Paul Volcker, then the undersecretary for monetary affairs. At its conclusion, I landed a much coveted position on John Ehrlichman’s White House Domestic Council staff, where I stayed for five years and eventually became associate director for general government.

And so this backward kid from Irvine Ranch ended up as the youngest policy-making lawyer on the White House staff. A little like Nixon himself, I had enjoyed a fast rise. I had been student body president and a champion team debater at Whittier. I had also graduated with honors from Harvard Law School, been selected a White House Fellow, and landed a prestigious position on the White House staff. Nixon’s rise, however, was through electoral politics; I was ecstatic just to be a member of his staff.

Years later, I learned that Nixon and I had studied under the same English professor at Whittier, although three decades apart. It seems clear that this was why the president liked my policy memos (I prepared hundreds of them over my five years on his staff)—he was unconsciously seeing the same organizational structure and approach that he’d been taught as a Whittier student many years before.

Again, like Nixon, I had had my share of disappointments growing up, but things were really coming up roses for me, at least until the Watergate scandal came along. Having been on Nixon’s staff almost from the outset, and my policy responsibilities extending to the Department of Justice, I knew and had worked with virtually every major Watergate figure. I was on John Ehrlichman’s staff and had reported to Egil (“Bud”) Krogh, later to gain notoriety as the head Plumber. Gordon Liddy was a colleague at Treasury and at the White House. Chuck Colson’s office was right across the hall; John Dean’s was just down the corridor.

When H. R. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean left at the end of April 1973, to be replaced by Alexander Haig and Fred Buzhardt, I sought a place on the president’s Watergate defense team. I never changed payrolls, but quickly began functioning as Buzhardt’s principal deputy. I ran the document rooms that housed the files maintained by Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean. I helped to hire and assimilate the dozen lawyers who assisted James St. Clair, the president’s outside defense lawyer. I
transcribed all of the White House tapes that were included in the Blue Book released to the public at the end of April 1974. And I was the official White House representative at the Supreme Court oral arguments in the case that ultimately upheld the subpoena for those White House tapes.

As you already know, it was all for naught. We failed in our defense, and the president was forced to resign. My responsibilities, however, did not end with his departure. Because of my legal work, I ended up being a chain-of-custody witness for the government at the Plumbers trial and was subpoenaed to appear in the same capacity in the cover-up trial. Testifying against my former colleagues, even about something as mundane as how a particular document or tape got from their files to the courtroom, was excruciatingly painful.

After so many of my friends and former colleagues had resigned in disgrace and been marched off to jail, I deemed myself a “Nixon holdover”—one of those who ought to leave government for the good of the country. After helping with the transition to President Ford, I voluntarily left early in 1975.

As close as I was to the tsunami that was Watergate, I was fortunate to have emerged relatively unscathed. The special prosecutor even provided a letter, carefully preserved in my safe deposit box, stating that I was not and had never been the object of any investigation of his office. Mine is one of only two such letters that were written on behalf of former members of the Nixon White House staff.

As does everyone else who was in the Nixon White House, I have strong personal feelings about my former colleagues. Many I hold in the highest esteem. Those whom I believe to have been culpable I studiously avoid. On balance, President Nixon attracted an exceptional group of people to his administration. Having worked on the policy development side, I am particularly proud of Nixon’s many accomplishments in both foreign and domestic affairs and have done my best to keep in touch with the people responsible for these successes and to help preserve an accurate record of how they were achieved.

For over thirty-five years, I have arranged and hosted annual reunions of Nixon’s White House staff who worked on policy analysis
and development. Most of these people served on the staff of the Domestic Council, the Office of Management and Budget, or the National Security Council. The others, who worked elsewhere in the White House on policy implementation, were counselors, speechwriters, and congressional relations staff. But the annual reunions are only part of the story. Long before email, cell phones, and the internet, my office maintained a directory of where and how former staff members could be reached. Real expertise in governance is quite scarce, and I’m proud of my role in holding our team together. Ours is the only former White House staff that gathers every year to discuss issues of governance.

Since 2010, I have helped produce a series of Nixon Legacy Forums highlighting many of the public policy initiatives of our administration. They allow those who helped with a particular policy formulation to explain the background of the documents available to scholars and researchers. Preparing for each forum is something like preparing for a trial. We have to review the initiative, its documentation, and the people involved, and we have to remind ourselves of how it all came about and what results were achieved. There have been more than thirty forums so far, all co-sponsored by the Richard Nixon Foundation and the National Archives. The programs are available on their respective websites, as well as my own (
www.geoffshepard.com
). Most have been broadcast on C-SPAN’s American History channel. Ours is the only administration producing such group oral histories.

That’s my background. I believe that Nixon was unfairly hounded from office and that the public has been misled about the Watergate scandal. By 2002, it was apparent that others who were on the inside of Nixon’s Watergate defense were not going to write about their experiences, so I resolved to do so myself. I discovered that the records of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force (like those of any governmental agency) are maintained by the National Archives and can be obtained
by request under the Freedom of Information Act. I have spent hundreds of hours at Archives II in College Park, Maryland, which houses most executive branch records, and Archives I on the National Mall, which houses congressional and court records. Papers of other Watergate luminaries, including Judge John Sirica and Edward Bennett Williams, are housed at the Library of Congress.

My first Watergate book,
The Secret Plot
, published in 2008, detailed how Nixon’s political opponents exploited the scandal with such success. This second book reveals how others, particularly judges and lawyers who should have known better, committed gross violations of legal propriety. By cutting ethical and legal corners in the Watergate prosecution, they made a mockery of the rule of law and inflicted a “cure” on our body politic far worse than the disease.

I have spent fifty years in Nixon’s shadow, explaining and defending the actions of a fellow Californian and Whittier alumnus. Much more remains to be done. The American public deserves a better understanding of Watergate, and this book is meant as a down-payment. Before turning to the wrongdoings of the prosecutors and jurists who toppled the Nixon administration, I want to set the stage with a brief account of the accomplishments of the man who supposedly was the worst president of our lifetime.

RICHARD NIXON, A MAN IN FULL

But for Watergate, Richard Nixon would have gone down in history as one of America’s greatest presidents.

The only president born and raised in California, Nixon had an unexceptional childhood but one characterized by earnest dedication and hard work, only to be followed by disappointment. He was not handsome, and, like most Americans, he did not come from great family wealth or enjoy the head start of an Ivy League education. Yet this man, his ideas, and the people he attracted to our nation’s capital dominated American political debates for the second half of the twentieth century, and their influence is still felt today.

Who was this man and what did America lose when he fell?

COMING OF AGE

Richard Milhous Nixon was born in 1913 in Yorba Linda, an agricultural community of some two hundred people thirty-five miles east of Los Angeles, dominated by acres and acres of citrus groves. When he was still very young, his family moved to nearby Whittier, where his father ran a general store. In later years he would recall lying awake at night listening to the sounds of trains disappearing into the distance and wondering about the faraway places they were headed. He longed for more.

Nixon graduated second in his high school class and won a scholarship to Harvard, but his family couldn’t afford the loss of his help with the store. So he went instead to the small Quaker college just four blocks up the street. He lived (and worked) at home—as did about a third of his classmates—commuting to classes and other activities on campus. Still, he worked hard at fitting in: he was champion team debater and student body president. He weighed too little to excel at football, so he mainly warmed the bench, but he never gave up trying to make the first string.

After Whittier College, where he finished second in his class, Nixon attended the newly established Duke University law school in North Carolina. Despite graduating third in his law school class, he was unable to land a job with a New York City firm or even with the FBI. He ended up returning home and joining the two-man firm of Wingert and Bewley in downtown Whittier.

With America’s entry into World War II, Nixon joined the navy, served in the South Pacific, and rose to the rank of lieutenant commander. While preparing to muster out, he received an invitation from back home that caused his life to dramatically change course.

RAPID RISE IN POLITICS

The sudden six-year rise to the pinnacle of national politics that followed is the stuff of legend, but Nixon also incurred the life-long enmity of a growing cadre of political opponents and media critics. It was personal, it ran deep, and it eventually evolved into the visceral hatred that continues to this day.

A returning veteran, Nixon was recruited by local Republicans to challenge Whittier’s five-term incumbent congressman, Democrat Jerry Voorhis. Though he was a political novice, Nixon devoted himself to his campaign with the same single-minded determination that had set him apart as a student. The nation’s mood was changing, and 1946 was not a good year for incumbents anywhere, but Voorhis also was not prepared for the intensity of his challenger. Nixon won 56 percent of the vote in a stunning victory over a popular incumbent. But there was a price to pay. He had knocked off the congressman voted most popular by the Washington press corps—and they were not pleased that he had bested their good friend.

The Republican congressional leadership, who saw Nixon as a hardworking moderate, convinced him to accept an appointment to the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was already displaying some of the tendency to excess that would boil over in the Senate during the McCarthy era, years after Nixon had left that arena. But what Nixon proceeded to do was seen by Democrats as outright sacrilege: He led the committee’s investigation into communist penetration of the Truman administration’s State Department, which culminated with the exposure of Alger Hiss as traitor and perjurer.

This is not the place to re-hash that much-told story, but two points should be mentioned. First, Hiss was everything that Nixon was not. An honors graduate of Harvard Law School, where he had been a protégé of Felix Frankfurter, Hiss had clerked for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Beginning in 1936, he held a series of prominent positions within the State Department, including serving as the executive secretary of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, which led to the creation of the United Nations, and being a part of the department’s delegation to the Yalta Conference, where Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin decided how to divide Europe following Hitler’s defeat. The Un-American Activities Committee’s investigation was dismissed by many as amateurish, and Hiss demeaned Nixon for his non-Ivy academic background, but Nixon pursued his prey with the same determination he displayed throughout his life.