Pictured: Nixon and a crook. Via Getty
Fifty years ago this Friday, the police of Washington, DC discovered a break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office complex. When the news first broke, I, like most people, gave it no notice. Within days, however, it was revealed that the intruders were not ordinary burglars. Among them were former CIA operatives who were working in some unknown capacity for President Richard Nixon’s re-election committee.
That got my attention. At the time, I was a member of the White House staff. I ate lunch almost every day in the White House Mess with Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, Deputy Chief of Staff John Erlichman, and a crowd of other political aides. I wondered if any of them were involved in this very strange political espionage operation.
Fortunately, my presidential appointment had nothing to do with domestic politics. Along with receiving a White House pass, I had been confirmed by the Senate as an ambassador and in practice was working as the president’s chief trade negotiator. Although I carried a diplomatic passport issued by the State Department, Nixon distrusted State. He often used me as his personal representative for sensitive discussions with foreign leaders and officials.
I had served Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in several posts since 1962 and had decided, when Nixon was elected, to leave my assignment in the Office of the US Trade Representative. But shortly after Nixon was sworn in, a stranger wandered into my office, whom I soon discovered had been sent by the White House personnel office.
The stranger said his name was Murray Chotiner and that he had been Nixon’s campaign manager in California and during his first run for president in 1960. Murray said Nixon had originally planned to give him a presidential appointment after entering office, but the press had characterised him as Nixon’s “dirty tricks manager”, making Senate confirmation problematic. So he was assigned as general counsel in the USTR.
Murray said he had been advised by several members of Congress that I was the best informed official on political and trade disputes with European nations. Could he accompany me on my visits to foreign capitals? I told him I was planning to resign but would stay three months to bring the incoming Nixon team up to speed. Murray travelled with me for about 10 weeks. After a while we became travel buddies, and I came to like his humour and deep insights into politics.
Two years later, in mid-1971, Murray called me to ask if I would be willing to be a consultant to Nixon on international issues, and I agreed. At the start of 1972, Murray called again and said “the President needs you”. I agreed to join his staff full-time and my name was sent to the Senate for confirmation. When I met the president alone, he said he had several international tasks in mind that would likely be subject to political controversy in Washington. When I needed his approval for my decisions or initiatives, he said I could bypass the Haldeman bureaucracy and just tell Murray, who would notify him. “Just don’t tell anyone you have direct access to POTUS.”
In the early days in my new post, Murray took me aside, “Be careful when you speak in or near the Oval Office”, he said. “Recording devices are keeping records of everything said.” This was Haldeman’s idea. A control freak, he wanted to know whatever Nixon was saying or doing with other visitors whenever Haldeman was not present. Murray said he had warned the president that the recordings were a bad idea that would bite him eventually, but Nixon shrugged it off.
As the months rolled on and the Watergate scandal broadened, more and more White House officials and Cabinet officials seemed to be caught covering up inappropriate or even illegal actions.
During this turmoil, I was busy doing my own job. In 1973, for example, Nixon and French President Georges Pompidou agree to hold a Summit in Reyjavik, Iceland, to address US-French tension following Nixon’s 1971 decision to abandon the gold standard. Nixon asked me to accompany him alongside Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, Treasury Secretary George Shultz, Treasury Undersecretary, Paul Volcker, and other key officials. A special side meeting had been planned for Shultz, Volcker and I to speak with French Finance Minister Giscard d’Estaing. To my surprise, Nixon asked me to do the talking. Later, Shultz explained that Giscard deeply disliked Volcker but seemed to respect me.
When Kissinger and Shultz scheduled a trip to Moscow to meet with Leonid Brezhnev and other high Soviet officials, Nixon asked me to tag along. He also asked me to go to London to assist the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office in their negotiating UK joining the European Common Market in 1973. After Kissinger laid out a new Pacific security policy framework known as the “Guam Doctrine”, Nixon suggested I go to Canberra and Tokyo to begin dialogue on a potential US economic arrangement with Asia-Pacific nations, which I did.
During 1974, most of my time was spent shepherding Senate approval of the Trade Act of 1974. During this period of Congressional bargaining, Nixon gave me personal authority to sign off with Senate leadership the final drafts of that historic law.
As I was busy doing my job, I saw a building series of actions and cover-ups among the political appointees, resulting in the resignation of the Attorney General, and then successor Attorney Generals and their appointees. A Senate Committee was finally established to investigate the question: was Nixon personally involved in the cover-up? As Senator Howard Baker asked, “What did the President know, and when did he know it?”
It turned out that the president knew a lot. On 16 July, 1973, one of Nixon’s aides, Alexander Butterfield, revealed the existence of the White House taping system in a televised interview, elevating the scandal from a curiosity to a national obsession. Senate investigators demanded the tapes; Nixon resisted, prevaricated, and dragged his feet, but eventually, in 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that the president had to make them available, and he complied. It then became clear that Nixon had long been complicit in the elaborate cover-up. Given the choice of impeachment or resignation, Nixon resigned in order to avoid further damage to the institution of the presidency.
Looking back, I saw catastrophic damage done to a president by a bunch of inept thugs bent on undermining his political adversaries. Sadly, I could not ask Murray for his opinion because he had been killed in a car crash in 1973. I thought Nixon should have fired everyone involved in the Watergate break-in as soon as the illegal raid on the DNC came to light. I remembered Murray’s warning to me that the White House recording system would come back to bite the president someday.
In some sense, history has been unkind to Nixon. Recently, Watergate has been compared to the raid on the US Capitol on 6 January, 2021, no doubt because both involved a presidential scandal followed by high-profile Congressional hearings. But Nixon was no Trump. His decision to cover up the break-in was a regrettable lapse in judgment, but when confronted with evidence that he was personally involved, Nixon chose his country over himself, resigning to avoid the impeachment of a sitting president. Trump, by contrast, sought to overturn a national election, and at no point since has he been willing to admit responsibility or even acknowledge reality.
In my experience, Nixon was an excellent foreign-policy president. He was actively involved in foreign policy and demonstrated more strategic thinking in this regard than most of his successors, even pulling off a handful of impressive diplomatic coups. His domestic policy decisions, on the other hand, were often questionable. But in that — going by the record of America’s more recent presidents — Richard Nixon was hardly alone.
Halsrethink 
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SubscribeViewed in its entirety and with non-partisan objectivity, the crime(s) of Watergate pale in comparison to the despicable behaviors exhibited by the Democrats in the Russian collusion hoax perpetrated against the American people, which was sourced by the craven Hillary Clinton, who is one of the most despicable politicians in all of American history.
It is an established fact that there were contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia, that Trump solicited Russian intelligence intervention in leaking Democrat emails, that Russian intelligence did in fact help Trump by leaking Democrat emails, and that Trump was Russia’s preferred candidate. OK, in the end there is no proof that the collaboration went deep enough to amount to a conspiracy, but there is amply enough there to justify an investigation (which the Republicans blocked, BTW). Considering that the Trump campaign made a lot of mileage out of entirely fabricated panics about Benghazi, and Hilary Clintons’ emails (‘lock her up!’, right?), you are really not in a position to be outraged.
Do we detect a certain shortage of non-partisan objectivity?
Still touting an openly public joke about Hillary’s illegal insecure private server as ‘proof’? The other claims you make are equally weak beer, as we’ve gone through before. Meanwhile the Clinton campaign actively manufactured fake Russian smears and then fed them friendlies in the media and the DOJ and FBI to try to bring down a president, by hook or by crook.
I’ve followed this closely for years and read all of the investigations and reports made public. While not every statement you make is false overall the facts are not on your side. And I don’t like Trump. I would stand for a Dem if they were unfairly accused.
Hillary’ campaign manager said in open court that she knew the accusations were false and that she told her team to spread them to the media anyway.
Got a link? I’d like to know exactly which accusations were admitted to be false. The specific words I put above I’d say were pretty safe. So, as a person better informed than I, what would you say actually did happen?
WSJ: “In short, the Clinton campaign created the Trump-Alfa allegation, fed it to a credulous press that failed to confirm the allegations but ran with them anyway, then promoted the story as if it was legitimate news. The campaign also delivered the claims to the FBI, giving journalists another excuse to portray the accusations as serious and perhaps true.”
WSJ: Hillary’s Role in the Russia Smear
For a broader picture, National Review’s Russiagate Misunderstood and is written by a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York — Andrew C. McCarthy.
There is lots more where this came from. Read the summary of or the whole Muller Report here
Oh, and one more link again from WSJ – Three Friends Chatting: How the Steele Dossier Was Created
Sorry, Rasmus – I just can’t stop now. Since I brought up the Mueller report – there’s this WSJ reporting “Durham Unravels the Russia Case” which embarrasses him as well: “The Durham prosecutions also speak poorly of former special counsel Robert Mueller. Mr. Mueller’s job was to learn the facts about the collusion allegations, and he had access to everything that the FBI had learned. Yet the Mueller team, led by Democratic partisan Andrew Weissmann, never told the public the Clinton side of the story.”
And the Washington Post: “The Washington Post this week offered a first sign of media self-reflection, noting the Durham indictments “cast new uncertainty on some past reporting on the dossier by news organizations,” including its own. Yes they do.”
Rightist partisan rags!?
Too intellectually lazy to dispute them?
Again, Rasmus. I do not support or like Trump. But the unrelenting, mendacious, coordinated, smears and outright lies and attacks on him were and remain one of the worst political hit jobs in US history.
Not convincing, sorry. The WSJ articles are obviously partisan Republican from their wording (and National Review link is behind a paywall). I’ll accept that the Democrats ran with it, and that many of the more lurid allegations were unfounded – like the Steele Dossier that was never fully believed by anyone. But the fact that the Democrats tried to make hay with it does not prove that Trump was innocent – any more than the fact that the whole noise about Hunter Biden’s laptop was obviously a Trump dirty tricks operation would prove that the laptop was a fabrication or that Hunter Biden was innocent.
Considering the obviously biased source, I am more struck by the following quote:
“U.S. government investigations found some evidence that the Trump campaign held furtive meetings with Russians involved in influencing the elections. Mr. Mueller charged dozens of Russian entities and individuals with engaging in a two-pronged attack of disinformation and hacked computers, and described in his report repeated contacts between Russia-linked entities and Trump campaign advisers that happened at around the same time.”
So the WSJ accepts that there was evidence of a black Russian operation to help the Trump campaign, and of contacts between the campaign and the Russians. Whether this goes beyond normal dirty politics and into crime (or treason) is another matter. The end result is that there is no proof it did and there let it rest. But you can hardly say there was nothing there to come for.
A foreign agent leaks bullshit about Trump. All good.
A foreign agent leaks true information about Democrat corruption, forcing the DNC chair to resign, and of course it’s not all good. Very bad. Meddling. Grrrr.
The DNC actively corrupted the primary process to have a Clinton win. This was revealed in the leaked emails.
As an American voter I am grateful. Don’t care if the leak came from Manchester or Moscow, I am grateful.
Crap – you asked for a summary. Okay, here you go.
Finally, on Benghazi – yeah, Obama and Clinton lied about that too. Sharyl Attkisson won an Emmy for her reporting in this area.
From her: “An investigation revealed that Obama officials knew, even as the Benghazi attacks were underway, that Muslim terrorists (rather than a video-motivated mob) were responsible. Also revealed was the fact that U.S. diplomats on the ground had repeatedly asked State Department headquarters for better security leading up to the attacks. The requests were denied. Instead, security was drastically drawn down. Investigators also learned that there had been a explicit threats of such an attack, as well as other attacks in Libya that were also consummated as threatened.
Key to the cover up of the terrorist nature of the Benghazi attacks right before the 2012 U.S. presidential elections were the false “talking points” used to brief Congress and the public. A series of emails I obtained in reporting on the scandal showed Obama officials excised all mention of Islamic extremists and terrorism from the final version of the talking points.”
Okay, I’m done. Promise.
Thanks. There is clearly more to this than I had thought, and I know more about it now. If nothing else you have reminded me that one side has no monopoly on manipulation and dirty tricks.
There is no doubt that a major Russian goal was to promote division and chaos in the US, no matter who won. ‘Destroy anything good in enemy country’ as Sun Tzu said. But I still think it is obvious that Russia preferred a Trump presidency, and made some modest efforts to get one. Do you have any evidence that the Clinton campaign had meetings with Russian operatives and discussed how they could get helpful material? Can you point to where Russian intelligence leaked material that was likely to damage Trump and help Hilary Clinton win?
Established fact, really? Scarcity of details much?
Speed of light much?
Yes, and about those emails….
(replied to wrong comment – excuse me)
Trump is no Nixon for sure. Nixon was clearly guilty of a serious crime and would have a conviction, in the Senate and possibly also in criminal court, if not for his deal to resign. Trump on the other hand, has been doggedly pursued by Dems and MSM (but I repeat myself) for 7+ years and the charges? The partisan 1/6 DNC Infomercial committee can’t even find a charge to recommend -because there is none. Impeachment #1: pressuring Ukraine to investigate Hunter’s /Joe’s corruption? That’s not a crime (well at least Trump’s actions are not, the Bidens’ actions appear so). Impeachment 2: does anybody remember the charge? (something about mean tweets I think).
FY -I am not even a Trump fan and wish he would walk off into the sunset. I just felt some perspective was lacking.
Indeed. I was never a Trump fan either, but voted for him twice. His scant 4 years in office were incredibly successful, despite being dogged by the savage hyenas in the opposition party and the Washington swamp. Once the R’s gain control of Congress next year, the Senate hearings on 2020 election fraud will be riveting.
Interesting. Could you list what you think he has achieved?
I have some thoughts, as one who was wholeheartedly against Trump during the 2016 primaries. First off, he was the first R with a national stature since Reagan who showed no fear of the rotten labels and smears from the other side, thus setting a path forward for whoever might come next. Kind of a big deal in my book. More than a big deal. Recall that Mitt Romney was the 2012 candidate, and John McCain in 2008. And of course we know who was president for the prior 8 years. Ponder that for a while.
Beyond that, he brought all the rats out of the woodwork into the clear light of day and sent them panicking in all directions. The amount of hatred the most powerful and evil people in the western world have for this man – I can’t express how much this means to me, having been so much in the dark previously.
He defeated Hillary Clinton. Again, he defeated Hillary Clinton. Need I repeat that again? Why not? He defeated Hillary Clinton.
And finally, just speaking off the top of my head, he did not shit all over the average American citizen, so despised by all the swamp rats, twitter blue-checks, and leading citizens of this nation, from Biden to Obama to whoever might be writing a featured NY Times op-ed or hosting Saturday Night Live this weekend. Quite to the contrary, he stood up for us and told the told the world that we are just decent ordinary people trying to do our best day-by-day, which is true, and to me at least, kind of a big deal.
Can you hear yourself? ‘rats out of the woodwork’ Etc. I just think your extreme language demonstrates that you and other Trump supporters on here are as partisan as they come, hardly balanced or neutral. You don’t hate Trump; instead you have a visceral loathing of Hilary Clinton and other Democrats. So much better! There are many reasonable people in the United States who don’t support either extreme, but you don’t clearly speak for the ‘American public’, more than half voted against the man in 2020, fraud or no fraud. If Trump was a tenth as good as his advocates argue, and, yes, that DOES mean not demonising everyone not in his beloved ‘base’ he would have won by a landslide in 2020.
We don’t usually consider one-term presidents to be successes; think Jimmy Carter, so why this doesn’t apply to Trump I don’t know. Even now the man is barely articulate on almost any issue; I heard a recent interview which was simply embarrassing. I think the Republicans would be well advised to choose a more effective and less divisive candidate; they may well do so.
No, Nixon resigned because Sens. Goldwater and Scott and Rep. Rhodes told him he would be convicted in the 56-42 Dem Senate. (It takes a 2/3 vote).
But when Clinton was impeached in the House, the Dems in the 54-45 GOP Senate said no way. Again, it takes a 2/3 vote.
But, of course, Clinton was snow-white and Nixon a dirty dog, as all the world knows.
If you ever take a deep look into American political history at the time you will find the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to be no better in just how shady they were. Nixon was the one who got exposed in front of the American public, but the sheer amount of corruption and abuse of power by those three administrations is almost mindboggling even today. By the way if anyone wants to complain about Trump having the worst personality of any president, they have no idea what Johnson was like. Kennedy’s assassination washed away all his political sins. Finally, sorry Tricky d**k, you really were a crook.
Edit: really? They censored Nixon’s nickname?
Power corrupts. They each did some shady things but I don’t think they were fundamentally corrupt.
What has sustained the west is a reasonably balanced system and a set of underlying values. The Neo Marxist Post-modern critical social Justice activists are trying to destroy those values and the system across the West. God help us if they win.
To be more precise, converts out of the post-modern ideology write on UnHerd all the time. Most of the formerly “radical feminist“ authors are good examples.
Maybe “corrupt” is a feature, not a bug.
Let’s be brutally honest, or even just a little honest. Anyone who seeks to be POTUS or, for that matter, any politician of high office, has to be shady in order to get to the podium in the first place. The only way you can amass the power necessary to win is to over promise and deliver the goods to your donors.
Whenever someone cites Trump’s purported crudeness, I always point out Johnson, who was a racist swine – and that’s the nicest thing I can say about him.
Finally, sorry Tricky d**k, you really were a crook.
In what way? If he had been upfront about the whole thing immediately, he probably would have skated. I’m fairly certain that his biggest sin was nailing Alger Hiss. The Dems never would forgive that.
One might notice that Nixon was convicted ultimately for running bugging operations on his political rivals with a view to condition the presidential election. Clinton was accused, ultimately, for having consensual sex with an adult woman he was not married to. Maybe that is why even upright and evenhanded senators could decide that this was not a resignation matter.
These days sexual relations with an young low level staffer would be seen as vitiating consent, given the disparity of power.
It probably would – but I would disagree. There was no suggestion of coercion, nor of the young lady depending on Clinton for career advancement. Even Lewinsky herself did not complain of power imbalances until a decade or two after the event. I would argue that one reason for people being so rigid about this kind of relationship is not that it always coercitive, but that the man is helpless to defend himself against accusations afterwards.
The Republican political machinations against Bill Clinton were the most despicable and worst I’d ever seen, at least up until 2016. However, technically Clinton was impeached for lying about the affair under oath, and obstruction. Not for the affair itself.
The machinations were bad because they simply started with Whitewater – which had some genuine questions – but when that came up blank, they levered the investigative powers to try to dig up anything else they could find. Using the law as a weapon is bad law. I’d guess the way the anti-Bill Clinton Republicans played nasty, at least partly motivated the dirty tricks played by the Democrats against Trump.
That and the dirty tricks played by the Trump campaign against Hilary Clinton.
I agree with you otherwise. I remember thinking that the entire investigation (after Whitewater at least) was obviously a pretext: “Explain your extramarital affairs in detail, under oath, ‘blow-by-blow’ as it were, or get done for perjury and obstruction“. Which is why I was actually happy to see Clinton’s shameless wriggling out (“depends on what you mean by ‘is’“). Not a reaction I would usually have to lying politicians.
Clinton had sex with an intern while supposedly on the job in the Oval Office, lied to the world about it (most damningly, Congress), and then, with his knowing abettor at his side, accused his political rivals of perpetrating a vast right wing conspiracy. That was the least of his crimes. He should have been impeached and charged with treason for his criminal selling of defense technology to the Chinese – and that’s just one egregious atrocity he (and she) were guilty of.
What? Perjury and obstruction of justice are no big deal? That’s ultimately what Clinton was accused of.
So you’re in the peculiar position of liking Nixon and loathing Trump. That’s better than riding along in a giant hoard of nitwits I suppose, and I really enjoyed reading your perspective of events from the tragic Nixon era when I was a child. But that’s not why you wrote this article. You want us to know that from your lofty position of a somewhat important person 50 years past that Nixon was a better person than Trump, or something like that. A more respectable seeming but not so well reasoned “orange man bad” offering. So you weigh in with your 2 cents as a moral judge. But with all due respect, who gives a shit about your or anyone else’s moral comparisons of these two? Neither of them is my mother, father, or God, and 2020 was not 1972. And truth be told, we all knew the Nixon regime did some really awful shit in various parts of the globe. Of the two, I’d say that Trump did more good than Nixon, and was far more courageous. But I’m not their moral judge. Neither are you.
What’s wrong with making moral judgements? We all have the capacity and the freedom to do that, I hope.
We do, and they’re all worth exactly 2 cents. This author wants us to believe that his moral judgements are worth more than yours or mine because of some reason that’s not clear to me. I disagree.
It’s amazing how many dusted off relics will come forward to espouse the “approved” narrative. I can’t wait for the Senate hearings on the 2020 election fraud. And the Hunter laptop scandal. And the Russian collusion hoax. And the Covid-19 origin.
A card carrying member of the political establishment dislikes Donald Trump. How shocking is that? This is how the man rose to power in the first place. The people hate the establishment, and the establishment hates Trump, therefore by the transitive property Trump must be a threat to the establishment, and the people want the establishment destroyed at almost any cost. Yes, my British friends, it’s that bad. These political types should stop worrying about Trump and start worrying what might happen if a more soft spoken and universally popular version comes along.
Thans Harald, excellent memoir.
Always interesting to hear from the corridors of power but the ‘Nixon was no Trump’ doesn’t wash. Yes he had foreign policy success and he was a scourge of the Left, but he did know and he did facilitate criminality.
I’ve no idea what happened in the 2020 election but Trump got 74 million votes – a record for an incumbent – and it must be clear to all that THEY wanted him out.
At the time of the break-in, did he know?
Presume not…but!
Just one typo: Murray Chotiner died in 1974, not 1973.
“Trump, by contrast, sought to overturn a national election, and at no point since has he been willing to admit responsibility or even acknowledge reality.”
It will be proved that the 2020 election was stolen, by the use of 20 million votes from non-existent voters, and hacking of the Dominion servers. See the film “2000 Mules”. Add together the total votes for Trump and the total “votes” for Biden, and they far exceed the total number of eligible voters in the USA. Trump had a better grasp of reality than all the collaborating media.