Watergate Again?

ANOTHER BOOK on Watergate should have trouble justifying its existence. The profusion of literature inspired by Watergate can be grouped into three general categories: first, the apologia of the accused; second, the narratives of media and congressional heroes who scaled the White House walls of secrecy; and third, the chastening "outsider" voices of post-Watergate analysis. Until Clark Mollenhoff's book, however, a chasm existed between the first perspective--that of government "insiders"--and the second and third points of view--those of media people, congressional investigators, judges, lawyers, and political scientists.

But Mollenhoff's treatment of the Watergate saga is a unique interplay of "outsider" journalistic digging and "insider" knowledge and communication. This dual vision results in a broader perspective on the Nixon kingdom and its demise than either the analyses of outsiders or the recollections that those who sank with the Watergate wreckage have been able to provide. The book delineates Mollenhoff's participation in the Nixon regime and his subsequent disillusionment with it. Soon after Nixon began his first term of office, Mollenhoff left a distinguished reporting career, highlighted by a Pulitzer (1958) and the publication of five books on various aspects of government waste, stupidity and wrongdoing, in order to join the White House staff as an "ombudsman". His job: investigating activities of the sprawling executive branch.

A staunch Republican and initially a Nixon supporter, Mollenhoff was persuaded to assume the newly-created post by the president's expressed desire to ferret out the vestiges of past scandals and the seeds of future mismanagement. "I knew he was no angel," Mollenhoff said in an interview with the Crimson this week, "but I did think he was a salvageable political figure."

Immediately, problems surfaced in the form of the "Berlin Wall," an insurmountable barrier to communication with the President guarded by the ferocious watchdog team of John Ehrlichmann and H.R. Haldeman, whom Mollenhoff characterized as "inexperienced meddlers pulling political levers." Mollenhoff's unsuccessful early attempts to gain access to the Oval Office foreshadowed his later inability to implement any real reforms within the executive branch. "I had an opportunity from the first to view the real problems: excessive secrecy and an extreme political motivation that dominated their thinking," Mollenhoff said. These obsessions and the Nixon team's unshakeable belief in executive privilege defeated the author before he began to fight, and crippled the potential usefulness of a White House ombudsman position. The manner in which Haldeman, Ehrlichmann and their henchmen handled the government and its critics is regarded by Mollenhoff as the result of ignorance and amateurism more than as the consequence of deliberate evil, as stated in the book:

...Nixon's White House team captains were rank amateurs in the operation of government. Through arrogance, superficiality, ignorance and ethical insensitivity they could destroy the very people they hoped to use to their political advantage. These irresponsible, superficially bright children were playing with the awesome power of the presidency, unmindful of the inherent danger to themselves and the nation in the misuse of that power.

Game Plan for Disaster chronicles the mushrooming use of executive privilege by the Nixon administration to obtain greater power while it was concurrently hiding the means of gaining that power. From the outset of the author's short-lived government experience through the Watergate stonewalling, Nixon and his boys--especially his boys, Mollenhoff suggests--utilized the tool of executive privilege out of misplaced zeal, naively blind to the processes and ethics of government. An addiction which led to their downfall.

After a series of unsuccessful efforts to clean up the machinery of government--Defense Department and NASA contracting, conflict of interest problems, questionable land deals, tax evasion--Mollenhoff resigned in May, 1970, frustrated by his lack of clout and effectiveness. "I had never realized before," he reflected in the interview, "that even though you have a title and an office in the White House, you can get boxed out to the point of having no authority or influence. One had to be on the inside to get the full flavor of the enormous power and great reverence for the President which existed."

Upon leaving the White House, Mollenhoff rejoined the Des Moines Register and Tribune as Washington bureau chief; the rest of his narrative deals with his role as a journalist during the unfolding of events which finally climaxed in Nixon's resignation. His position was ticklish; as a former government official he was not always favorably regarded by other journalists, and as a journalist he was avoided by loyal government officials. Even so, Mollenhoff did have an unusual amount of personal access to several Watergate personages--John Dean, Richard Kleindienst, Jeb Magruder--and he also had a clearer idea than most journalists had of the White House hierarchy and the indicators which pointed the finger at Haldeman and Ehrlichman. "Money was important, but only a few reporters wrote about it. I was zeroing in on it in July. Woodward and Bernstein did not really know the law of the land on Haldeman until late in the year. I understood at the earliest point that Haldeman had to have known, because he ran everything and I knew the way he operated--no one else there would ever do anything without checking first with Haldeman."

MOLLENHOFF did not intend to write a piece of "Watergate literature." He sees the Nixon experience as "simply a warning of what can still happen. When Nixon left, there was a tendency to put it all behind us, but we are not over that hump yet. It is important for everyone to learn a lesson, to understand that this was not just two young reporters from the Post, but that it took tremendous drive from a lot of people to bring it into the open--and that the investigation still would have fallen on its tail without John Sirica. I like to think that this book is something beyond just today, because I've tried to put a current topic into the perspective of American history and government."

Mollenhoff's gradual shift from pro-Nixon optimism to active opposition and vocal criticism is not engulfed in ideological aversion or vindictive "I-told-you-so" triumph, as are the views of so many Watergate litterateurs. Mollenhoff's experience can be viewed as a mirror of the thought processes of most Americans during the Nixon debacle, the majority who elected Nixon out of confidence in his ability to erase the mistakes of the Johnson years, people who were initially unwilling to accept the disclosures of illegal practice, but who gradually found their doubts eradicated by the snowballing evidence of wrongdoing. The transition of public opinion from hope to disillusionment is the national psychological counterpart of Mollenhoff's personal experience. His recollections implicitly convey the progression of national reaction to Watergate more effectively than other studies have been able to do.

Mollenhoff is a dexterous craftsman, but sometimes the progression of the book is lost in a flood of details which encumber the reader and threaten to spoil the clarity of the author's argument. The presence of numerous passages from old Des Moines Register issues leaves one with the suspicion that Mollenhoff enjoys pulling old columns from his scrapbook every so often in search of a good quote. The pace slackens especially during the last third of the narrative, where the morass of Watergate-related comings and goings leaves the reader with a "deja vu" feeling; a wish to escape from yet another version of the intrigues he has encountered many times before. The book might have benefited from less reliance on the temporal sequence of events and greater emphasis on specific incidents to illustrate the author's thesis.

Mollenhoff defends the book's structure by saying, "It was necessary to give the details so that the book was not just my opinion, and so the reader has evidence that I am not misleading him. I could have put the whole message of the book into two chapters. The details, though they may be tedious, increase the credibility of Mollenhoff's thesis, making Game Plan a unique addition to the literature of Watergate.

Mollenhoff swears he won't become enmeshed in government again. However, his short period as an official has been helpful to his journalistic career, he says, because through direct practical experience he gained a real sense of the inner workings of the presidential institution. Mollenhoff has received his warning; Game Plan for Disaster cautions those of us who have not undergone his antithetical experiences of government service and investigative journalism that the "Berlin Wall" obsessions that momentarily endangered the national political machine can too easily take over the system again.