The Watergate affair is a political scandal that occurred in America in 1972, which led to the resignation of the then head of state, Richard Nixon. This is the first and so far only time in American history when a president during his lifetime left his post early. The word "Watergate" is still considered a symbol of corruption, immorality, and criminality on the part of the authorities. Today we will find out what the background of the Watergate case was in the USA, how the scandal developed and what it led to.
The beginning of Richard Nixon's political career
In 1945, 33-year-old Republican Nixon won a seat in Congress. At that time, he was already famous for his anti-communist beliefs, which the politician did not hesitate to express publicly. Nixon's political career developed very rapidly, and already in 1950 he became the youngest senator in the history of the United States of America.
Excellent prospects were predicted for the young politician. In 1952, incumbent US President Eisenhower nominated Nixon for the post of vice president. However, this was not destined to happen.
First conflict
One of the leading New York newspapers accused Nixon of illegally using election funds. In addition to serious accusations, there were also some very funny ones. For example, according to journalists, Nixon spent part of the money on buying a cocker spaniel puppy for his children. In response to the accusations, the politician made a speech on television. Naturally, he denied everything, claiming that he had never in his life committed illegal or immoral acts that could tarnish his honest political career. And the dog, according to the accused, was simply given to his children as a gift. Finally, Nixon said that he was not going to leave politics and would not just give up. By the way, he will utter a similar phrase after the Watergate scandal, but more on that a little later.
Double fiasco
In 1960, he ran for president of America for the first time. His opponent was someone who simply had no equal in that race. Kennedy was very popular and respected in society, so he won by a huge margin. 11 months after Kennedy's appointment to the presidency, Nixon nominated himself for the post, but lost here too. After the double defeat, he thought about leaving politics, but the craving for power still took its toll.
Presidential post
In 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated, he took his place. He coped with his task quite well. When the time for the next election approached, the situation in America greatly worsened - the Vietnam War, which dragged on too long, caused protests throughout the United States. Johnson decided that he would not run for a second term, which was quite unexpected for the political and civil community. Nixon could not miss this chance and announced his candidacy for the presidency. In 1968, beating his opponent by half a percentage point, he headed the White House.
Merits
Of course, Nixon is far from the great American rulers, but it cannot be said that he was the worst president in US history. He, together with his administration, was able to resolve the issue of America's withdrawal from the Vietnam conflict and normalize relations with China.
In 1972, Nixon came on an official visit to Moscow. In the entire history of relations between the USA and the USSR, such a meeting was the first. It brought a number of important agreements concerning bilateral relations and arms reduction.
But at one point, all of Nixon’s services to the United States literally became worthless. Only a few days were enough for this. As you may have guessed, the reason for this is the Watergate affair.
Political wars
As you know, the confrontation between Democrats and Republicans in America is considered a common thing. Representatives of the two camps almost take turns taking control of the state, nominating their candidates for elections and providing them with massive support. Of course, every victory brings great joy to the winning party and great disappointment to the opponents. To gain the levers of power, candidates often engage in very intense and unprincipled struggles. Propaganda, compromising material and other dirty methods come into play.
When one or another politician takes the reins of power, his life turns into a real fight. Every, even the slightest mistake becomes a reason for competitors to go on the offensive. To protect himself from the influence of political opponents, the president has to take a huge number of measures. As the Watergate case showed, Nixon had no equal in this regard.
The Secret Service and Other Instruments of Power
When the hero of our conversation, at the age of 50, came to the presidency, one of his first priorities was the creation of a personal secret service. Its goal was to control opponents and potential opponents of the president. The framework of the law was neglected. It all started when Nixon began wiretapping the telephone conversations of his competitors. In the summer of 1970, he went even further: he gave the go-ahead for the Secret Service to conduct non-sectional searches of Democratic congressmen. The President did not disdain the “divide and conquer” method.
To disperse anti-war demonstrations, he used the services of mafia militants. They are not police officers, which means no one will say that the government neglects human rights and the laws of a democratic society. Nixon did not shy away from blackmail and bribery. When the next round of elections was approaching, he decided to enlist the help of officials. And so that the latter would treat him more loyally, he asked for certificates about the payment of taxes by people with the lowest income level. It was impossible to provide such information, but the president insisted, demonstrating the triumph of his power.
In general, Nixon was a very cynical politician. But if you look at the political world, from the point of view of dry facts, it is extremely difficult to find honest people there. And if there are any, they most likely just know how to cover their tracks. Our hero was not like that, and many knew about it.
"Plumbers Division"
In 1971, when there was only a year left before the next presidential election, the New York Times newspaper published in one of its issues classified CIA data regarding military operations in Vietnam. Although Nixon's name was not mentioned in this article, it called into question the competence of the ruler and his apparatus as a whole. Nixon took this material as a personal challenge.
A little later, he organized the so-called plumbers unit - a secret service engaged in espionage and more. An investigation conducted later showed that employees of this service were developing plans to eliminate people who were interfering with the president, as well as disrupting rallies held by Democrats. Naturally, during the election campaign, Nixon had to resort to the services of “plumbers” much more often than in normal times. The president was ready to do anything to be elected for a second term. As a result, the excessive activity of the spy organization led to a scandal that went down in history as the Watergate affair. Impeachment is far from the only result of the conflict, but more on that below.
How it all happened
The headquarters of the US Democratic Party Committee at that time was at the Watergate Hotel. One June evening in 1972, five men entered the hotel, carrying plumbers' suitcases and wearing rubber gloves. This is why the spy organization was later called the Plumbers. That evening they acted strictly according to the plan. However, by chance, the sinister deeds of the spies were not destined to take place. They were interrupted by a security guard who suddenly decided to conduct an unscheduled inspection. Confronted with unexpected guests, he followed instructions and called the police.
The evidence was more than irrefutable. The main one is the broken door to the Democratic headquarters. Initially, everything looked like a simple robbery, but a thorough search revealed grounds for more serious charges. Law enforcement officers found sophisticated recording equipment from the criminals. A serious investigation began.
At first, Nixon tried to hush up the scandal, but almost every day new facts were discovered that revealed his true face: “bugs” installed in the headquarters of the Democrats, recordings of conversations that took place in the White House and other information. Congress demanded that the president provide all the records to the investigation, but Nixon produced only part of them. Naturally, this did not suit the investigators. In this matter, not even the slightest compromise was allowed. As a result, all that Nixon managed to hide was 18 minutes of sound recording, which he erased. It could not be restored, but this no longer matters, because the surviving materials were more than enough to demonstrate the president’s disdain for the society of his native country.
Former presidential aide Alexander Butterfield claimed that conversations in the White House were recorded simply for the sake of history. As an irrefutable argument, he mentioned that during the time of Franklin Roosevelt, legal recordings of presidential conversations were made. But even if one agrees with this argument, there remains the fact of listening to political opponents, which cannot be justified. Moreover, in 1967, unauthorized listening was prohibited at the legislative level.
The Watergate case in the United States caused a great stir. As the investigation progressed, public outrage grew rapidly. At the end of February 1973, law enforcement officers proved that Nixon had committed serious tax violations more than once. It also revealed the fact that the President used huge amounts of public funds to fulfill his personal needs.
Watergate case: verdict
Early in his career, Nixon managed to convince the public of his innocence, but this time it was impossible. If then the president was accused of buying a puppy, now it was about two luxurious houses in California and Florida. The "plumbers" were accused of conspiracy and arrested. And the head of state felt more and more every day not the owner of the White House, but its hostage.
He persistently, but unsuccessfully, tried to dispel his guilt and put the brakes on the Watergate case. The president’s state at that time can be briefly described with the phrase “struggle for survival.” With remarkable enthusiasm, the president refused his resignation. According to him, under no circumstances did he intend to leave the post to which he was appointed by the people. The American people, in turn, did not even think about supporting Nixon. Everything led to impeachment. Congressmen were determined to remove the president from high office.
After a full investigation, the Senate and House of Representatives rendered their verdict. They recognized that Nixon had behaved in a manner unbecoming of a president and was undermining America's constitutional order. For this he was removed from office and brought before the court. The Watergate affair caused the president's resignation, but that's not all. Thanks to audio recordings, investigators established that many political figures from the president’s entourage regularly abused their official positions, took bribes and openly threatened their opponents. The Americans were most surprised not by the fact that the highest ranks went to unworthy people, but by the fact that corruption had reached such a scale. What until recently was an exception and could lead to irreversible consequences has become commonplace.
Resignation
On August 9, 1974, the main victim of the Watergate case, Richard Nixon, left for his homeland, leaving the presidency. Naturally, he did not admit his guilt. Later, recalling the scandal, he would say that as president he made a mistake and acted indecisively. What did he mean by this? What decisive actions were discussed? Perhaps about providing the public with additional compromising evidence on officials and close associates. Would Nixon really agree to such a grandiose confession? Most likely, all these statements were a simple attempt to justify themselves.
His role in the development of the scandal was clearly decisive. According to an American researcher, during the Watergate scandal, it was the media that challenged the head of state and, as a result, caused him irreversible defeat. In fact, the press did what no institution in American history had ever managed before - it deprived the president of his post, which he received with the support of the majority. This is why Watergate and the press still symbolize the control of power and the triumph of the press.
The word “Watergate” has become entrenched in the political slang of many countries around the world. It refers to the scandal that led to impeachment. And the word “gate” has become a suffix that is used in the names of new political, and not only, scandals. For example: Monicagate under Clinton, Irangate under Reagan, the Volkswagen car company scam, which was nicknamed Dieselgate, and so on.
The Watergate case in the USA (1974) has been depicted more than once to varying degrees in literature, cinema and even video games.
Conclusion
Today we found out that the Watergate case is a conflict that arose in America during the reign of Richard Nixon and led to the resignation of the latter. But as you can see, this definition describes the events rather sparingly, even taking into account the fact that, for the first time in US history, they forced a president to leave his post. The Watergate case, the history of which is the subject of our conversation today, was a great revolution in the consciousness of Americans and, on the one hand, proved the triumph of justice, and on the other, the level of corruption and cynicism of those in power.
The beginning of the Watergate scandal is considered to be June 17, 1972. On this day, Frank Willis, a security guard at the Watergate Hotel complex, during a routine tour of the premises, discovered a film on the doors of the headquarters of the Democratic Party candidate McGovern that prevented the lock from being locked. Willis at first did not attach any significance to the find and simply removed the film - but it reappeared. Suspecting something was wrong, Ullis called the police. A team of plainclothes cops, known in narrow circles as “The Bum Squad,” responded to the call. Its members dressed like hippies and drove a regular car without special markings. The pseudo-hippies entered the premises without attracting attention and immediately detained five suspicious subjects, who were found to be carrying listening devices, cameras, films and thousands of dollars in cash. This “incident” immediately became known to the general public, and the media seized on it - after all, the election campaign was in full swing.
This case, one of the most notorious in the history of journalism, ended in a well-known way. Nixon's resignation, which looked like the result of a journalistic investigation, so shocked the public that the Watergate scandal became not only a subject of study in journalism departments, but also a bottomless source of texture for works of fiction - as well as gossip and misinterpretations. We have examined the five main ones.
MYTH #1: President Nixon was overthrown by The Washington Post journalists
As will be clear from the following story, the press rather contributed to the development of the media scandal than to the progress of the administrative and criminal investigation against the president.
From the very beginning of the Watergate scandal, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein received information from a high-ranking intelligence source. Already on June 20, 1972, Woodward first met with a mysterious person nicknamed Deep Throat, who began to supply him with secret information about spying on Democrats.
On August 1, a note appears in The Washington Post about the amount of $25,000 that was paid from Nixon campaign funds to one of the Watergate detainees. September 29 in the same place about a whole secret fund created to spy on Democrats with the active participation of US Attorney General John Mitchell.
When Bernstein approached Mitchell for comment, he launched threats against him and at the same time against The Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham. Without thinking twice, Bernstein published a threat. On September 15, the five burglars (called "plumbers" by handlers), along with Nixon Re-election Committee (CRP) financial adviser G. Gordon Liddy and former CIA officer Hunt, were indicted on charges of conspiracy, illegal wiretapping, and burglary. In October 1972, Bernstein and Woodward announced that the FBI had established a connection between the Nixon administration and the Watergate burglars.
Liddy and Hunt belonged to Nixon's inner circle - the ring around the president was tightening, and it seemed to the general public that journalists played a key role in this - and they were actually engaged in publishing FBI leaks.
30 years later, Deep Throat revealed: it turned out to be Mark Felt - no less than the then deputy director of the FBI.
MYTH #2: Nixon's involvement in the Watergate break-in has been proven.
Everett Collection/East News
Richard Nixon addresses his Cabinet and White House staff after resigning. From left - Edward and Tricia Nixon
In fact, this never happened, although the Woodward-Bernstein duo certainly provoked a split in society and increased distrust in the White House.
Even State Prosecutor James Neal was confident that President Nixon did not know about the impending penetration into the Democratic lair, evidence of which he saw in the question that Nixon asked his chief of staff Haldeman on June 23: “What kind of idiot did this?” During the investigation and trials, five “plumbers” and two organizers, Hunt and Liddy, were convicted directly for the intrusion into the Democratic headquarters, but it was not proven that they acted with Nixon’s knowledge.
The investigation received evidence that a brigade of “plumbers” was created with the knowledge of the president back in 1971 in order to stop the leak of information about the dark aspects of US participation in the Vietnam War. Among their exploits was breaking into the apartment of the psychiatrist of American anti-war activist Daniel Ellsberg, whom Nixon's minions apparently intended to blackmail with the materials they found. This hack gave Nixon's team nothing, but became another highlight in his political career.
But until his resignation on August 9, 1974, Nixon never admitted to organizing the Watergate break-in, and his successor as president, Gerald Ford, granted him a full pardon and thus stopped further official investigation. Richard Nixon died on April 22, 1994, having a very controversial reputation, but his involvement in the hack was not proven in court - and he himself did not confess either.
MYTH No. 3: Watergate wiretapping of Democrats was the main reason for Nixon's downfall.
Bettmann/Capital Pictures/East News
In fact, Nixon’s main mistake was a clumsy attempt to hush up the June 17 incident - this is what, after the trial of the direct perpetrators of the Watergate invasion, both the FBI and a specially created committee in the Senate investigated.
To get the burglar witnesses to talk, the harsh judge John J. Sirica (a Republican, by the way) gave them preliminary sentences of 40 years in prison, confirming his nickname John Maximum. And already on March 23, 1973, Judge Sirica read before the court a letter from one of the “plumbers” - James McCord, in which he, in fear of the prospect of dying in prison, pointedly hinted that he was forced to remain silent about his high-ranking patrons.
Sirica did not trust Nixon and his team from the very beginning and willingly reopened the investigation. Thus began the hot phase of the scandal: it turns out that the White House is involved in covering up and hushing up the crime.
Already on April 9, 1973, news appeared in the New York Times: McCord informed the Senate Watergate Committee about the large sums that the Nixon campaign paid to “plumbers.”
Then events developed with dizzying speed: in the same month, witness testimony began to reveal facts of concealment of details of the hack by influential Nixon advisers: Harry Robbins Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Dean.
All three were forced to leave their posts (and subsequently serve different prison terms), and Dean was also forced to begin cooperating with the investigation. Among other things, in his 245-page report, Dean admitted that he had repeatedly discussed with Nixon ways to hush up the matter - that is, obstruct justice, in legal parlance. Now the Senate committee was most concerned with the question of how much the president himself was aware of the hacking.
At the worst possible moment, Nixon's former secretary Alexander Buttersfield appeared on live television in front of millions of amazed Americans. told senators about the multi-day wiretapping of the Oval Office, which was carried out on the orders of the president himself.
It became obvious to the committee members, as well as to millions of Americans, that these tapes would shed light on Nixon's role in the conspiracy.
But President Nixon refused to release the tapes, and instead ordered Attorney General Richardson to fire the obstinate prosecutor Archibald Cox, who demanded their release. An outraged Richardson refused to comply and resigned in October.
The chain reaction of investigations and resignations continued, and on February 6 the House of Representatives decided to begin impeachment proceedings against the president himself. Bureaucratic red tape dragged on until August 5, 1974, when the Supreme Court demanded that the contents of the tapes be made public.
As expected, the tapes turned out to be a “smoking gun”: on them, Nixon directly discusses with his subordinates ways to hush up a sensitive matter. Among other things, he suggested that CIA officials lie to FBI investigators that the Watergate hack was carried out in the interests of national security.
By the way, in one of the recordings, Advisor Haldeman assures Nixon that his man in the FBI named Mark Felt (yes, that same Deep Throat, as it turns out later) will help cover his tracks.
It was these tapes, and not the Watergate wiretaps, that became the main evidence of Nixon’s guilt and one of the key reasons for his downfall.
MYTH No. 4: The famous phrase of the vice-chairman of the Senate committee investigating the Watergate scandal, Howard Baker, “What did the President know and when did he know it?” was incriminating
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
On June 29, 1973, after John Dean finished his monstrous two-day report, it was Tennessee Senator Howard Baker's turn to ask questions. It was then that Baker uttered his historic question.
In fact, Baker, like many members of the commission, did not pursue the goal of proving Nixon’s guilt at any cost. The minutes show that this question from Baker, an active member of the Nixon administration and a staunch Republican, was intended to show that Nixon did not know about the impending hack. Witnesses could not say for sure that the president was aware of the idea, and therefore Richard Nixon was never criminally liable, unlike many of his associates.
By the way, this sacramental phrase found a new life in 2016, at the height of Russiagate - this time liberal journalists addressed it to Trump in an accusatory manner. By the way, the situation repeated itself: it was not possible to prove the awareness or involvement of the current US President in the actions of Russian hackers.
MYTH #5: The Washington Post investigation began after Deep Throat's FBI source told reporters, "Follow the money."
This effective line is as much pious fiction as a very large part of the Oscar-winning Watergate film All the President's Men. In the aforementioned Washington Post article from September 29, 1972, the newspaper's own staff spoke of "reliable sources" who provided them with information about the impressive spending on dubious purposes from the Nixon campaign fund.
In reality, Mark “Deep Throat” Felt never uttered this advice, not least because he and his FBI colleagues themselves investigated the spending of the Committee to re-elect President Nixon (“follow the money”) and, at the right moments, reported their observations to the press .
In general, the story of Watergate became a pop-cultural phenomenon largely thanks to the book “All the President's Men” by Carl Bernstein himself and the aforementioned film of the same name, where he co-wrote the screenplay, and the roles of the fearless journalists of The Washington Post were played by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford. Generated by the exalted imagination of the scriptwriters, the phrase “Follow the money!” appeared only in the film, and then went viral as an idiom romanticizing the inquisitive spirit of a reporter.
But, as can be seen from the above, the investigation against the Nixon team was carried out by the leadership of the American intelligence agencies, supported by the respectable conservative judge John Sirica and the political elites in Congress. The American power system has discovered sufficient immunity to resist the Machiavellian methods of the Nixon administration, and the story of the struggle of dedicated lone journalists against the powerful repressive state machine turns out to be just another urban legend.
On August 8, 1974, the President of the United States of America, Richard, announced his resignation. He became the only owner of the White House to leave his post early and voluntarily.
A major American politician, member of the Republican Party, Nixon repeatedly participated in election campaigns. In 1952 and 1956, he ran for election as a candidate for vice-president of the country together with, and both times their tandem won. While in the second most powerful position in the United States, Nixon visited the Soviet Union and met with Nikita Khrushchev. In 1960, he lost the presidential election: thus, for the first time, a Catholic stood at the head of the United States. In 1964, the Republicans bet on the more right-wing Barry Goldwater, but he lost.
In 1968, Nixon was again nominated as a candidate from and this time walked around and right-wing candidate and Democrat Hubert Humphrey. As president, he began to actively pursue a new foreign policy.
Nixon announced "Vietnamization" wars in Southeast Asia. By 1968, 550 thousand Americans were there, despite the fact that anti-war protests were constantly taking place in the country. In June 1969, the withdrawal of US troops from this country began. In 1971, Nixon visited Beijing as part of the normalization of relations with the People's Republic of China. The Republican president was also a supporter of détente in relations with the Soviet Union.
However, in parallel with these measures, Nixon strengthened the system of political surveillance beginning in 1970.
He feared the expansion of anti-war protests, feared the polarization of public sentiment and called for increased surveillance of “radicals and those who protest.”
In July 1970, the committee drafting the measure proposed lifting restrictions on burglary, wiretapping, mail interception, and the planting of informants on college campuses. Another factor that forced Nixon to intensify political investigation was the appearance in the press of leaks about the ins and outs of the Vietnam War from the archive of the US Secretary of Defense who resigned in 1968. In June 1971, the Pentagon Papers appeared in the press. The fight against information leaks has become a major task for us.
In 1972, Nixon faced an election. The Committee for the Re-election of the President created a special group that began to engage in political espionage. In June 1972, his target was the office apartment of a prominent representative, Lawrence O'Brien. Listening devices were installed there.
And on the night of June 17, during another secret visit to the apartment, the group members were arrested. All this took place at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, and the name became a household name.
The incident itself did not cause any public response: voters considered it an election skirmish. However, immediately after the arrest, the process of “illegal concealment of facts” began. Both the re-election committee and the White House distanced themselves from the burglar. The destruction of evidence began. At press conferences, Nixon lied about how “no one from the White House staff, no one from the administration was involved in this very strange incident.”
Nixon managed to win the election. Moreover, at the end of 1972 he ended the “dirty war” in Vietnam. But his authoritarian methods - the creation of a government “super cabinet”, purges in the special services - caused rejection even among fellow party members.
On Capitol Hill they feared an “imperial presidency,” and so on February 7, 1973, a commission was formed to investigate the Watergate affair.
Nixon underestimated the strength of the opposition: on April 30, 1973, he was forced to dismiss part of his administration. The President then pretended that he did not keep track of the illegal actions of his subordinates.
In October 1973, Watergate came back into the spotlight. They started talking about him again when Nixon, taking advantage Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, fired a prosecutor who demanded the release of tapes from the White House (they could contain recordings of Nixon's conversations about Watergate).
As a result, Congress passed laws limiting the president's authority to conduct military operations outside the country without declaring war for a period longer than a month. But most importantly, a campaign for Nixon's impeachment began in the country.
The House Judiciary Committee formulated charges: in early August 1974, a transcript of the tape was published that incriminated Nixon.
On August 8, the president resigned. The vice president announced a full pardon for Nixon a month later.
Some researchers are convinced that the arrest of uninvited guests in Watergate and making this story public became a provocation by the Central Intelligence Agency (). The intelligence services and Nixon were dissatisfied with each other: the CIA did not approve of the president’s policy of withdrawing from Vietnam and normalizing relations with Moscow and Beijing, and Nixon believed that Langley was spending too much money.
However, the more popular view among historians and political scientists is that the American legislature was too afraid of presidential authoritarianism and let things go.
Soviet historiography saw in Watergate only a “deep crisis of bourgeois democracy” and “moral corruption of the ruling class.” However, a deep understanding of the internal reasons that forced Congress to launch a campaign against Nixon began only during the years of perestroika.
The word “Watergate” itself has become a household word and is used to refer to a political scandal.
The suffix “-gate” began to be added to many high-profile cases: for example, the case of secret arms sales to Iran in the mid-1980s began to be called Irangate, and the case of Clinton and Monica Lewinsky - Monicagate or Zippergate (from the word “zipper” - “lightning”) ").
But Watergate was not the last political scandal involving espionage. In 2013, an employee disclosed a number of secret documents related to surveillance and wiretapping of communication devices. Snowden ended up in Russia, where he received a residence permit for three years.
References:
Geevsky I.A. Mafia, CIA, Watergate. M.: Publishing house of political literature, 1980
Samuilov S.M. Watergate: background, consequences, lessons. M.: Nauka, 1991
Context
Arkady Smolin, special correspondent for RAPSI
Forty years have passed since the beginning of the Watergate scandal. Those events were so ahead of their time that we only received terms to describe the essence of the legal revolution that took place then: after the rise and fall of Wikileaks, after the transformation of Arab Facebook revolutions into tactics of street terror on the streets of London. This was not so much the first presidential impeachment as the victory of the policy of de-anonymization and the transformation of the media into the “people's militia.”
2011 has all the prerequisites to go down in history as a new incarnation of 1968: the year of revolutions, youth riots and the agony of outdated forms of power. The first thing that catches your eye is the incompetence of existing legal mechanisms, ranging from the European strategy of multiculturalism and tolerance to the nationalist and authoritarian practices of the Middle East.
An island of relative social stability and tranquility abroad can only be observed in the United States, where even the threat of default has not yet provoked a noticeable increase in the level of protest activity. Unlike Europe, overseas discussions of important problems of society take place without street excesses. Thus, the only legal system that has once again demonstrated its effectiveness is the Watergate Formula.
What exactly is it?
Dictatorship of transparency
The result of the investigation by Washington Post journalists Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein can be called a ban on secrecy - a "dictatorship of transparency." A whole series of events from 1969 to 1974, of which the Watergate scandal was the most publicized, but far from the most important, radically changed the form of interaction between government and society, quietly making Julian Assange’s dream a reality just a year after his birth.
The first significant event associated with Watergate occurred on June 13, 1971, when the New York Times published secret documents stolen from the Pentagon. A few days later, her initiative was supported by the Washington Post, and then many other newspapers.
From the publications, it became obvious that the administrations of all American presidents from Harry Truman to Lyndon Johnson systematically distorted public information about US military operations in Southeast Asia. In particular, it became known that Laos and Cambodia were deliberately drawn into the war by the Americans.
In addition, it turned out that the “Tonkin Incident” on August 2, 1964, when American ships collided with torpedo boats of the DR Vietnam fleet, was deliberately provoked by the White House and the Pentagon.
Two days after the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the Federal Government asked the Supreme Court to halt publication. However, the court found the evidence of the need for such a measure insufficient.
The result of the judges' decision was the current broad interpretation of the constitutional provision on freedom of speech: in particular, the absence of a crime in the actions of the media publishing materials transferred to them by third parties.
There is a version that it was this judicial precedent that made it possible to change the arsenal of interdepartmental wars. The essence of the change that has occurred is clearly illustrated by the difference between the methods of eliminating two US presidents: John Kennedy and Richard Nixon.
Without going into conspiracy theories, we note the fact that based on this legal precedent, a year later, FBI Vice President Mark Phelps chose Washington Post journalists as a weapon to eliminate Nixon's growing secret intelligence service. Together with the president himself.
Today this story can finally come to an end. The legal norm, created by the precedent decisions of the US Armed Forces on the publication of the “Pentagon Files” and Nixon’s Watergate negotiations, receives its final form exactly forty years later. At the end of July this year, the Federal District Court in Washington upheld the claim of historian Stanley Cutler. The court's opinion stated that Nixon's testimony was of historical value and therefore should not be kept secret.
However, the US government may challenge the court's decision. President Barack Obama's administration opposed the release of Nixon's testimony, including due to privacy concerns. However, apparently, the prospects for an appeal are very conditional. After all, the outcome of the Watergate scandal was the annulment of the executive privilege by the court.
It is also important to note that Nixon gave the testimony in question before a jury after his resignation in California in 1975. Minutes of deliberations involving jurors are generally not disclosed. Now the classification of secrecy will be removed from these materials.
Since American laws are of a precedent nature, it is now quite possible to say that officially there is almost no secret information left in the United States (in reality, only the details of military operations are hidden). The court's decision deprived the authorities of all known formal ways to conceal important information from the public.
Thus, an important component of the “Watergate formula” was the practical application of the “presumption of guilt” in relation to the object of a journalistic investigation.
However, the current court decision can be considered a legislative formality. The alliance between the FBI and the media finally became known to everyone six years ago, when 90-year-old FBI veteran Mark Felt admitted that he was the same Deep Throat agent who leaked information to the media during the Watergate scandal.
It is believed that in this way he settled scores with Nixon, who after the death of J. Edgar Hoover appointed the head of the FBI not Felt, whom everyone considered his heir, but Patrick Gray, a man from the presidential entourage who had connections with the CIA. It is quite possible, because the FBI and CIA were then in the most acute phase of the war, and there is also plenty of evidence that Nixon was going to weaken the FBI as much as possible by relying on intelligence.
One thing is clear: the transition to open play was a forced step by the FBI leadership after the disclosure of the Media dossier. And only this fact matters for society and for strengthening the independence of the judicial system.
Two shots at Big Brother
On the night of March 8, 1971, a small group of an amateur “commission to investigate the activities of the FBI” entered the premises of the bureau branch in the Pennsylvania city of Media. The FBI managed to publish the secret documents obtained there in a magazine a few days later.
From these documents, the public learned that for many years the FBI had been secretly monitoring the behavior and mentality of citizens. In the 1960s, the bureau increased its focus on anti-racial activists and opponents of the Vietnam War. The greatest outrage was caused by the fact that the FBI did not limit itself to surveillance, switching to provocative tactics that had dire consequences for their victims.
When the policy of the secret threat ("Big Brother") was finally discredited, the FBI switched to a modified, even more total, but paradoxically absolutely legal, "policy of leaks", the wide PR of which Assange did, forty years late.
Instead of controlling the collective mind, preference was given to directing it in the right direction through a system of hints and provocations. Instead of secretly destroying trends that threaten national security, there is their exposure, the “desacralization” of the secrets of underground and behind-the-scenes enemies.
To enter the public space, the intelligence services needed the media. Since then, a stable form of defining the special status of a journalist as a “national security expert” has appeared in the Western press. Of fundamental importance for the legal health of society is the fact that almost none of these journalists have long been making no secret of their task of providing a literary presentation of intelligence information that requires legalization.
This does not mean at all that the media are being used for a war of compromising evidence. On the contrary, giving all interested political actors space in the press pages to publish accusations and suspicions has turned the media into an alternative, social and moral court.
At the same time, the selection and verification of the reliability of information turns journalists into assistants (in terms of the functions they perform, practically “advisers”) of the judicial system. For example, Washington Times national security expert Bill Hertz notes that he double-checks when he takes information from intelligence agencies. “We also strive to ensure that intelligence agencies, by giving us some information, thereby achieve their specific goals. It is also prohibited to provide disinformation to the American press.”
However, it is unlikely that Felt’s initiative would have turned into a trend, and simply would have been successfully implemented without legislative support. Its legal basis was the principle of “fair mistake”. The right of the media to it was recognized in 1964 by the US Supreme Court. He ruled that public figures wishing to sue for libel must not only prove that the published information was false, but also that the editors either knew about it or published it with “gross disregard” for the question of its veracity or falsity.
With the help of an “honest mistake,” the media gained the right to publish both investigative journalism and materials from third-party sources.
And in 1969, a precedent-setting decision was made that allowed the publication of even those statements that contained abstract calls for the violent overthrow of the government. As the Supreme Court has ruled, such publications must be protected provided they do not lead to an imminent threat of unlawful action.
If the “honest mistake” was an encouragement for the publication of versions, then the second decision of the US Supreme Court was nothing more than the legalization of the right of journalists to bring charges. The media have actually become an independent investigative institution. Having received the status of a full-fledged assistant to the court, the media turned into a lower-level body of power - something like a “civilian police” (the right of citizens to independently investigate a crime and bring charges in court), the need for which was so persistently discussed in our country during the reform of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Legal war of intelligence services
The publication of the Pentagon Papers showed the possibility of practical application of these laws. However, Nixon attempted a “legal counter-revolution.” The President ordered the formation of a special secret service at the White House. The unit, known as the “plumbers” (they acted under the guise of plumbers), included his closest advisers and assistants. Their first task was to find and punish those responsible for leaking information from the Pentagon.
The problem was solved quite quickly. The main culprit turned out to be Dr. Daniel Elsberg, an employee of the National Security Council, a consultant on “Vietnamese affairs” to the chief of the foreign policy department, Henry Kissinger. Elsberg did not wait for the inevitable arrest and himself appeared in court, which left him free on bail of 50 thousand dollars. Soon after, Ellsberg's case fell apart due to serious procedural violations: the court learned that the defendant's telephone conversations had been illegally wiretapped by a team of "plumbers."
According to American researchers, Nixon was obsessed with Manichaean enemy-friend thinking, which made it acceptable for him to equate legitimate opposition with extremism. For example, in 1970, Nixon approved a large-scale plan to undermine the anti-war movement with the help of the FBI and CIA.
There are well-founded assumptions that the “plumbers” could become the basis for a new extensive network of highly secret intelligence, which would tie up all politically influential forces, placing authoritarian control over them in the hands of the president. If not for Watergate, the "plumbers" might well have grown into the American "Stasi".
This project could only be destroyed through a huge scandal and a restructuring of the country's legal system in order to prevent similar precedents in the future.
As you know, on June 17, 1972 (four months before the presidential election), at the headquarters of Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, located in the Watergate complex in Washington, five men in business suits and rubber surgical gloves were detained by breaking into the hotel. .
They set up listening equipment and, according to some reports, photographed internal documents of the Democratic headquarters. In addition to the two bugs, a set of master keys and $5,300 in cash in consecutive hundred-dollar bills were found on them.
The connection of this particular incident with the Nixon administration has not yet been proven. It is only known that the president actually had tapes of illegally recorded conversations between Democrats, but that “wiretapping” obviously had nothing to do with the Watergate Hotel. That the president ordered or even knew about this action, which his press secretary classified as a "third-rate hack," is unlikely.
Researcher Robert Gettlin wrote: “From the point of view of the upcoming elections in November, this crime was completely meaningless. The bugs could not provide any such secret information about rivals: by mid-June, the Democrats had not yet elected their presidential candidate ready to challenge Nixon "And all the public opinion polls showed: whoever Nixon's opponent turns out to be, he will be smashed to smithereens."
An indirect confirmation of Nixon's formal innocence is his reaction to the incident. The President at first did not attach any significance to the arrest and returned to Washington from vacation only a day later, after newspapers reported that the arrested Howard Hunt was connected with the White House.
It wasn't until nearly a week later, on June 23, that Nixon and his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, had a series of taped conversations in which Nixon refers to the Watergate story as a "smoking gun." And then he discusses how “in the interests of national security” he can obstruct the investigation with the help of the CIA and the FBI.
The president's aides managed to quickly localize the problem. Nixon easily won the election by a huge margin. The fact that the scandal did reach national proportions was the result of the activity of two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Indeed, Nixon most likely did not order the wiretapping of Watergate, but the public was interested not only in the fact of the offense, but also in the reaction of the president and his staff. Only professional journalists with the support of intelligence services could convey such information to the public in an accessible form.
At this moment, the very “Watergate formula” was born. The media has become a civil body that monitors the activities of the authorities in the interests of society. And the intelligence services have established themselves as the guarantor of national security and the viability of constitutional norms, not personally controlled by anyone, but absolutely transparent.
The new position of the intelligence services was formalized legislatively in 1975, when the Senate created a commission that placed the heads of the CIA subordinate to both houses of the US Parliament. Since then, the President of the United States cannot give a single order to intelligence without the knowledge and approval of the Senate.
The Last Spy Novel
But the role of conductor of the Watergate scandal solely belonged to Mark Felt. He combined four functions at once: he organized a scandal, officially investigated it, secretly leaked information, and sought himself out as a “traitor” within the department.
The “legal revolution” in American society took place according to the classic canons of spy novels. Not even Woodward's investigative partner Bernstein knew that Felt was Deep Throat's informant, only he himself. Felt and Woodward agreed not to call or meet in public - only in an underground garage in Arlington after a pre-arranged signal.
Woodward communicated the need for a meeting by moving a flower pot on his balcony. When Felt needed a meeting, Woodward received the New York Times, on page 20 of which there was a clock face with arrows indicating the hour of the meeting. Woodward got to Arlington by hailing a taxi on the street, leaving the car halfway, catching another one, and walking the last few blocks to the meeting place.
It is symptomatic that it was not the usual police squad who came to arrest the burglars, but plainclothes agents. According to the official version, the nearest patrol crew did not have gasoline at the time of the call, after which the signal was redirected to the next car, in which the undercover officers found themselves. Therefore, the car did not have a siren, which made it possible to take the burglars by surprise.
Of course, this whole story is too reminiscent of a standard FBI provocation (for which the bureau was subjected to public obstruction after the publication of Media materials). However, all these “setups” would have been useless if the president had reacted within the framework of the law. The provocation organized by Felt only highlighted his unlawful pattern of behavior. This was a campaign not so much against a specific President Nixon, but against the policy of concealing information.
Watergate denouement
In January 1973, the trial of the Watergate burglars began. In March, the Senate Watergate Committee was formed, and trial hearings began to be televised throughout the country. It is unlikely that the scandal would have had such significance in the history of the country if not for the reaction of society to it. It is believed that 85% of Americans watched at least one meeting. They actively expressed their dissatisfaction with the president's behavior. Thus, the independent judicial system received tangible support from the politically active part of society.
A journalistic investigation revealed the names of government officials who, under threat of criminal liability, spoke about the existence of audio recordings confirming the involvement of the presidential administration in the Watergate scandal.
Nixon persisted in his reluctance to present the tapes in his possession to the investigation even after February 6, 1974, when the US House of Representatives decided to begin impeachment proceedings.
Nixon relied on executive privilege, but this privilege was ineffective against the constitutional and legal charges of the president of “treason, bribery or other crimes and misdemeanors.” In July 1974, the Supreme Court unanimously determined that the president did not have such privileges and ordered him to immediately release the tape to prosecutors.
However, four months before this decision, Nixon actually buried his political career. In April 1974, the White House decided to launch a counteroffensive by publishing a distorted copy of the conversation containing 1,200 pages. This document finally turned American society against the president. Citizens were disappointed by the inconsistencies with Nixon's early statements, but they were even more shocked by the tone of communication in the White House and the criminal way of thinking.
The public reaction actually equated the choice of marginal vocabulary by government officials with real crimes and offenses. This reaction seems quite justified, because by that time psychologists had already proven that the use of certain lexical tools predetermines the choice of actions. If you give a person a hammer, he will look for a nail, a pen, a piece of paper, and if you allow him to use obscenities, he will begin to look for someone to humiliate and destroy.
“Watergate” is an example of how a politician’s personal traits influence his activities. Richard Nixon was an extremely suspicious man, prone to secrecy, secrecy and underhanded actions. He loved intrigue and always suspected those around him of plotting against him. Its natural habitat would have been the court of Catherine de' Medici or Ivan the Terrible. Nixon satisfied part of his suspicion by collecting materials on his competitors and opponents, incl. by listening. For example, he was the only one of all presidents who gave the order to bug the Oval Office - the president's work office, which ultimately led to his political collapse and resignation under the threat of impeachment. After him, none of the presidents, naturally, allowed such eavesdropping.
In 1972, amid a tense presidential election campaign in which Nixon wanted to be re-elected to a second term from the Republican Party, he agreed on a plan proposed by his aides to wiretap the Democratic Party office rented in the luxury Watergate housing complex in downtown Washington. Nixon and his campaign hoped to gather more data on Democratic tactics during the election.
On the night of June 17, 1972, a security guard at the complex's management company, during a routine tour of the premises, accidentally noticed that the front door to the Democrats' office was not closed tightly. Opening it slightly, the guard made sure that there was no one in the office. The door lock tongue was covered with tape, which aroused the security guard's suspicions. He called the police. Five people were found inside the premises and were detained. The burglars were found to have stolen Democratic campaign documents from desks and cabinets. Later it turns out that this was the second time they entered this office - the initially installed listening equipment was malfunctioning and it was necessary to repair it. At first glance, it seemed like an ordinary robbery, but the burglars found phones and contacts of employees of the Republican headquarters.
Nixon said that his headquarters had nothing to do with this hack, voters believed it and in November 1972 Nixon won a landslide victory, continuing his activities as President of the United States, and an investigation began against the burglars, which was greatly helped by a parallel investigation by two journalists from an influential newspaper Washington Post. After some time, the investigation led to the very top - Nixon's closest and trusted aides. At some point, when everything began to point to the president's involvement in this scam, Nixon publicly declared: “I am not a crook.”
A special prosecutor was appointed, which meant giving the investigation an extremely important status. Everything would be fine, but one of the suspects accidentally blurted out that there were tapes of conversations in the Oval Office. The special prosecutor also demanded extradition, was refused and then fired, which caused a political crisis in Washington and made impeachment inevitable.
To avoid it, Nixon resigned and left the White House on August 8, 1974, in the middle of his second term in office. J. Ford, who replaced him, exercised the right of pardon, and Nixon thus avoided trial and punishment.
Although Watergate's motives were largely personal, its consequences were political, severe, and long-lasting. It is generally accepted among Americans that Watergate dealt a severe blow to the institution of the presidency. Ordinary swindlers are condemned for lying under oath, but here the president himself turned out to be a swindler, a swindler, from whom they expect clear moral guidelines and an example in observing the laws. The perception of scandal was aggravated by the defeat at that time in the Vietnam War, i.e. American society received a double blow at that time. Society was shocked by the revelations of abuses of power and ordinary criminality at its highest levels.
The national trauma from Watergate began to be overcome only with the coming to power of R. Reagan in 1981.
Nixon faced impeachment not for the hack itself, but for lying and obstruction of justice.
History is repeating itself now with Trump, and surprisingly in many details. There was a hack (of servers), there are traces pointing to the very top, there is a statement from the president that he was not responsible, there is the dismissal of the FBI director who led the investigation, there is a special investigator whom Trump also wants to fire, the first accused have appeared, the Congress has already appointed the question of impeachment.