The Watergate Mythology

In politics, no less than in personal life, people interpret events to suit their own purposes. Thus, to the abolitionists, Lincoln was a temporizer; in the eyes of the Copperheads, he was a radical. The Chicago Tribune thought the New Deal was a Red Star over America; new left historians say it was a clever sell-out to Wall Street. But seldom has an event so quickly inspired so many different self-serving interpretations as the Watergate scandal. In the last year and a half, the nation has witnessed the creation of a Watergate mythology which, if it prevails, will compound the disaster by obscuring its causes and preventing their correction.

Some of the Watergate myths have already been dispelled. For example, no amount of invective or evasion from Ron Ziegler could continue to sustain the claim that Watergate was a "caper" pulled off by seven crazies out on tout who just happened to be employees of the CREEP. That myth is now as "inoperative" as Mr. Ziegler. Yet most of the Watergate mythology remains and much of it is widely believed.

Perhaps the most universally credited myth is that Watergate was stupid because it was unnecessary. Presumably this is intended as an indirect but effective defense of Mr. Nixon. After all, we are asked, would a campaign so far ahead in the polls perpetrate or permit a burglary of the Democratic National Committee? The President himself has told us not to think that he was that dumb. (A reassurance followed recently by another, when for the first time in history, a president of the United States felt compelled to announce to the nation: "I'm no crook." Mr. Nixon's rhetoric is as infelicitous as his record.)

But the issue here is not the president's acuity; it is his credibility. He is once again simply wrong about the facts. The truth is that at the time when the Watergate was burgled and the dirty tricks were played and the dirty money was raised, the president's position in the polls was at best precarious. Senator Muskie was defeating him in the early trial heats; Senator McGovern was only eight points behind in May; and even after the California debates, the $1000 plan, and the Democratic Convention, the McGovern polls showed--as the Nixon polls surely also did--that a substantial segment of the electorate was only tentatively committed to Nixon and wanted to know more about McGovern before making a final choice.

Unfortunately for Senator McGovern, the voters first saw him as a national figure during the Eagleton debacle, and millions of them decided that they had seen enough. It was then, but not before, that the President's reelection was secure, at least in the absence of stunning revelations about the administration--for example that Vice-President Agnew was on the take or that the White House was deeply involved in Watergate. Earlier, however, Nixon's managers confronted the prospect of a close contest where their own candidate would have to campaign, and they knew all too well that when he had campaigned actively in the past he had won more votes, not for himself, but for the other side. They had a motivation for Watergate. And they did not have a sensitivity to Constitutional principles or ethical standards which might have stopped them short. An administration which burgled and bugged the home of syndicated columnist Joseph Kraft and so many others with the approval of its highest officials can hardly plead that these same officials would recoil in shock from a proposal to wiretap Larry O'Brien.

Hindsight can be a burden as well as a benefit, and we must beware of viewing 1972 with a hindsight that makes the Nixon landslide seem inevitable and the Nixon initiation of Watergate seem improbable. For it is a myth that Watergate was stupid because it was unnecessary. It was stupid because it was wrong. But understandably, no one has sought to raise in the President's defense the argument that he would decline a course of action simply because it was wrong.

The second prevailing Watergate myth is that Republican dirty tricks determined the Democratic nomination. As one who was closely associated with the Muskie campaign until the Senator's withdrawal from the primaries, I am convinced that the reasons for his failure were not Donald Segretti's vicious yet maladroit acts of sabotage, but our own mistakes. Senator Muskie was slipping in the New Hampshire polls before he cried on the steps of the Union Leader. The Muskie campaign was out-organized in Wisconsin and over-extended in Florida. The Senator did not take or communicate clear issue positions; he seemed an indecisive centrist in a political season when the voters decided to demand clarity and candor.

Senator McGovern later faltered when he appeared in the Eagleton affair to betray the honesty he had earlier exemplified. But that honesty, not the plots of CREEP, won him the nomination. The Nixon campaign's dirty tricks did not determine the Democratic outcome. They did make it harder to unify the Democratic Party. And the cover-up of the pervasive corruption of the administration did deprive the American people of the knowledge that, according to recent polls, would have led them to reassess the relative merit of the candidates and reverse their verdict despite their misgivings about Senator McGovern's vice-presidential troubles.

The third and latest Watergate myth is that if the tapes do not incriminate the President, then he is exonerated. The administration has adopted a strategy of narrowing the issues to what Mr. Nixon said to Mr. Dean. But the issues also include what Mr. Nixon said to the milk producers in return for hundreds of thousands of dollars, what he or his agents did for ITT in return for a subsidy to the Republican Party, who authorized the plumbers to rob private offices and what other offenses against law and decency they committed, and whether a president can violate the Constitution and lie to the Congress about a secret war in Cambodia.

I suspect that sometime in the next few weeks, Mr. Nixon's innocence may be proclaimed by a relieved band of Republican leaders who have read the transcripts of the tapes--that is, of course, the transcripts of those tapes that have not been "lost," or erased by the vagrant finger and heavy foot of Rose Mary Woods, or are not obscured by the Marine Band striking up "Columbia the Gem of the Ocean" just as the President starts to answer a question about pay-offs to the Watergate defendants. Who could believe the tapes except on blind faith, after two of the most critical have disappeared and electronics experts have testified that the accidental erasure of another actually sounds like a botched attempt to alter the tape? The so-called "buzz" on that tape speaks more eloquently than any words to the character of a leader who has raised lying to the level of official policy. And even if we believe the tapes, even if they are arranged to exculpate the President, they will not exonerate him for other offenses of "the most corrupt administration in American history."

Not long ago, Mr. Nixon said that the tapes were defective because the administration did not spend enough for a sophisticated system--the same administration that spent more than enough to convert San Clemente into the Taj Mahal. If the country believes that excuse, or takes the tapes as surely accurate, or accepts the myth that the tapes alone can determine Mr. Nixon's guilt or innocence, then we will have a resounding answer to a twenty-year-old question: "Would you buy a used car from this man?" The answer will be that a majority of the American people would, even if the Brooklyn Bridge was part of the deal.

The final and most pervasive--and most insidious--Watergate myth is that "everyone does it." If the myth-makers mean everyone in the White House, then apparently they are right. But if they mean everyone in politics, then they are wrong.

Of course, the charge itself is suspect coming as it does from an administration which forged diplomatic cables in an attempt to implicate a dead president in a murder plot. The burden of proof rests on those who try to claim that our politics has traditionally been as bad as they made it in 1972. They must show us that Dwight Eisenhower traded the public trust for a campaign contribution, that John Kennedy's staff was riddled with men subject to indictment, that Harry Truman was bugging Governor Dewey in 1948.

They cannot prove any of that--for if they could, in their desperation they would already have done so. Indeed, despite a massive investigative effort, they have not been able to sustain a single charge against the McGovern campaign, and only minor charges against other candidates last year. But it should not surprise us that the same Nixon who advanced his career by smearing each of his opponents now seeks to save his presidency by smearing the entire political system.

On a visit to Harvard two weeks ago, Senator McGovern was asked why he was no longer saying day after day that this was the most corrupt administration in American history. He replied: "I don't need to say it anymore; everyone knows it." The Congress does know it; the American people know it. Now the question is whether they will do something about it--or accept a Watergate mythology which expects nothing more of government than the unworthy and shameful record of the Nixon years.

In fairness, I should close by confessing a personal bias. I worked for two Democratic presidential candidates last year. Both of them are honest and decent men. One of them, George McGovern, honors public service by his part in it beyond any other person I know. He made mistakes in the campaign, but he did not commit crimes. And he did raise before the country a higher standard of respect for truth, for each other, and for "the decent opinions of mankind." More than a year later, I believe the country must still rally to that standard--not to elect Senator McGovern, because that contest is past--but to restore integrity to our leadership, because that is essential to our future.

Bob Shrum is a fellow of the Kennedy Institute of Politics.