The First of the Nixon Tapes

When the taping system was installed, Alexander Butterfield explained to the present how the system worked. The transcript is available here.

The audio can be listened to here.

This conversation took place sometime between 7:56 am and 8:58 am on Tuesday 16th February 1971.

Coverage of the Watergate Hearings

PBS broadcast this programme about TV coverage of the Watergate Hearings.

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The Watergate Tapes

I was in Oxford today for a conference on Watergate: 40 years on. I presented a paper about the Watergate Effect on the November 1974 elections entitled, "Who's the Daddy: The Influence of the Watergate Scandal in the Election of the "Watergate Babies".

But the conference's highpoint was a spell-binding hour and a half during which Alexander Butterfield, Deputy Assistant to President Nixon; and John R Price, Special Assistant to President Nixon for Urban Affairs - shared their memories; observations and thoughts about Richard Nixon. I can't express how incredibly fascinating their talks were - and will return to some of them in later posts.

The video below shows Butterfield before the Senate Watergate Committee - and captures the moment when the investigation takes a completely new turn - and the rest, as they say is history...

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APG Conference

I have returned from an excellent conference held in Oxford. The American Politics Group has its annual conference early in January each year. Last year we met in Leicester; and in 2012 in Manchester. (Previous posts here, here, and here.)

This year's conference theme was " The 50th Anniversary of Lyndon B Johnson's 'Great Society'". Professor Richard Blackett got the conference to a great start on Sunday with a lecture on "The Long Struggle". It give a fascinating insight to the 19th Century struggles for racial equality.

Many papers dealt with LBJ, but there were also papers on other areas of American politics and political history. I gave a paper on the 1974 Election at which the Democrats made sizeable gains in the wake of the Watergate Affair. While I dealt with the short term context and the details of the results - I also looked at how the policies of LBJ had set in train events which has had an effect on the election 10 years later.

There was a host of excellent papers. The trouble with conference like that, is that there is so much that it is impossible to get to hear all the papers and the following discussion. Hence I was at another session when Ursula Hackett delivered her paper, which won the Neustadt Postgraduate Paper Prize. I have subsequently read the paper - and it provides an excellent analysis of the different meanings which have been attached to LBJ's phrase.

There were for me many highlights. As a law lecturer I enjoyed the panel on law issues - which ranged from a discussion of the approach taken by Supreme Court Justice Kennedy in the recent ruling on the Defense of Marriage Act in US v Windsor (Helen Knowles); though the thwarted Bork nomination to the Supreme Court (Joe Ryan-Hume, who is doing a Ph.D. at Glasgow University and who will soon be taking up a Library of Congress research fellowship)) and the idea of the "lost constitution" in the philosophy of the Tea Party in the USA and Britain's UKIP (Jamie Fletcher).

Kevin Baron presented a very good paper on Presidential vetoes - which has prompted me to think about the issue for my own research. Patrick Andelic also gave a paper on the Watergate Babies - and I look forward to attending the conference at the Rothermere American Institute which he is organising about Watergate. Tom Packer gave a fascinating presentation about Jesse Helms and his response to the Great Society measures.

...and there was so much more! A great way to start the year!!!!

Freedom of the Press

Of late, freedom FROM the Press, has become an important issue. Over-powerful media figures have, it is alleged, abused their positions of power - and ridden roughshod over the privacy rights of others; used their priviliged position to dictate to elected Governments; and misrepresented the truth to advance their own political agenda.

BUT

while "power tends to corrupt", we should be wary of rushing to shackle the Press. It can play a very important role in uncovering what "governments" (be they of Kings; Dictators or elected politicians) wish keep from us. There is an honourable history of the press standing up to the powerful (I continue to be inspired by the work of the Washington Post and other papers in uncovering Watergate). In Britain John Wilkes was an important 'hero' in the fight for freedom of the press. I've posted a few articles about him in the past - worth reading (IMHO)

http://washminster.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/english-heroes-john-wilkes.html

This comment appeared in the Australian Financial Review (though about Britain) -

"We have far too many laws in this area circumscribing free speech – not just Labour’s hate crimes legislation, or the Public Order Act, but also the Communications Act 2003 and the Malicious Communications Act 1988.

As a result, the police and prosecutors are able to move from one to the other to close down views deemed to be unacceptable. The fault here lies with the foe that Wilkes fought, even though he was a member of it: Parliament… We do not have a written constitution – or rather we do not have a constitution that is codified. But as Lord Judge, the Lord Chief Justice, said in an important and insightful speech shortly before the Leveson Inquiry began its work, “the fact that there is nothing in statute which states expressly that the independence of the press is a constitutional principle does not diminish the principle”. Lord Judge also quoted Wilkes: “The liberty of the press is the birthright of a Briton and is justly esteemed the firmest bulwark of the liberties of this country.”

Philip Lacovara

I'm currently making (I hope) final amendments to my Ph.D. dissertation on Whips in the UK Parliament and US Congress. While searching for the date of a particular event (the event was described in a previous section on 95th Congress, but is being shifted to a description of the challenges faced by John Brademas [Majority Whip in the 95th and 96th Congresses], so I needed the date) - I discovered an interview in the "Washington Lawyer" of January 2005.

It was given by Philip Lacovara. My interest in him resulted from his resignation as head of an investigation into the Koreagate scandal. A South Korean, Tongsun Park, had been seeking to buy influence with members of Congress. He was ultimately indicted for bribery and corruption. [He escaped punishment in exchange for testimony but reappears in the Iraq "Oil for Food" scandal, for which he served time in prison]. Lacovera resigned because of disagreements he had with the Ethics Committee chair, John J Flint. John A Farrell ["Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century"] says the argument was "over [Lacovara's] aggressive pursuit of John Brademas and John McFall", while contemporary newspaper stories refer to concerns that Lacovara had about the infrequency of committee meetings hampering his investigation. [Congressional Quarterly Almanac 1977] In the 2005 article he said "I had a flap with the committee chairman, who, in my view, was obstructing the investigation"

Lacovara had been an assistant to the Watergate special prosecutors, Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski. He appeared before the Supreme Court to argue that Nixon should be ordered to hand over the tapes of meetings he had been involved in. [US v Nixon]. At the time of his involvement in investigated Watergate and Koreagate, he was only in his early thirties. The interview can be accessed here.

What I'll be watching today....

John Dean at the Watergate Hearings

More from the Senate Hearings on Watergate

Congress uncovers....

Could Watergate Happen Again?

This series began with my concerns about the dangers of abuses of power. We need to be eternally vigilant. Last week, as part of an anniversary event, the question was posed - Could Watergate happen again?




My argument is that there will always be the temptation to abuse power - and human nature being what it is - such abuse will be self-justified. Since Watergate we had the Iran-Contra Affair - in my view a more serious matter. The participants broke the law; lied to the American people - but convinced themselves that what they were doing was right.

We need investigative journalism; we need active committees (and their members and staff) in Legislatures; most of all we need people to demand accountability.

Woodward and Bernstein

Woodward and Bernstein spoke at a special anniversary event at the Watergate Building earlier this week

Spencer Oliver

If you visit the website of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, you will see that the Secretary General is R Spencer Oliver, and that he has been in post since 1992. His biography though doesn't give the reason why he is the subject of this post, which is part of a series on a 40th anniversary which occurs this coming Sunday.

In 1972 Mr Oliver was the Executive Director of Association of Democratic State Chairmen. He worked in the offices of the DNC in the Watergate Building. His phone had a bug placed on it. The other bug was placed on the phone of the DNC Chairman, Larry O’Brien.

Oliver started a lawsuit against those who had bugged his phone. The new Chair of the DNC tried to persuade him to drop the lawsuit, even cutting off his salary to force his hand. I found this interesting article online -


“In an interview with Robert Parry, the author of Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq (2004) Oliver suggested that the wiretap was connected to his attempts to head off the nomination of George McGovern. Oliver was concerned that McGovern would be easily defeated by Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election. He was therefore involved in a plot to replace McGovern with Terry Sanford.


Oliver believes that Nixon wanted to gain information about his plans so that he could undermine the plot to stop McGovern's candidacy. According to Oliver, John Connally and Robert Strauss, were using their influence behind the scenes to get McGovern the nomination. He points out that McGovern got his share of the Texas delegates on 14th June, 1972. Later that day, Gordon Liddy told the burglars that they needed to return to the Democratic offices at Watergate. Three days later, James W. McCord, Frank Sturgis, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez and Bernard L. Barker were arrested while breaking into the Watergate offices. Does this mean that the purpose of the second break-in was to remove the bug from Oliver's phone?


Spencer Oliver was convinced that the full story was not being revealed about Watergate. He therefore started a lawsuit against those involved in placing a wiretap on his phone. As he pointed out: "I realized that anybody who received the contents of the intercepted telephone conversation and passed them on, in other words, the fruits of the criminal act, was also guilty of a felony. So that meant that if someone listened to my phone, wrote a memo like McCord had done and sent it to the White House or to CREEP, everybody who got those memos and either read them or passed them on was a felon."


Robert Strauss, who was now Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, tried to persuade Oliver to drop the lawsuit. When he refused, Strauss cut off his pay as executive director of the Association of State Democratic Chairmen. Strauss also worked behind the scenes in order to arrange a negotiated settlement with the Republican Party.


At a press conference in April, 1973, Oliver declared: "I am appalled at the idea of ending the civil suit in the Watergate case through a secretly negotiated settlement and thereby destroying what may be an important forum through which the truth about those responsible may become known. I do not know what motivated Robert Strauss to even contemplate such a step."


Robert Parry (Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq) has pointed out that "Oliver said it was not until spring 1973 that he began putting the pieces of the Watergate mystery together, leading him to believe that the events around the Texas convention were not simply coincidental but rather the consequence of Republican eavesdropping on his telephone. If that was true, Oliver suspected, Strauss may have been collaborating with his old mentor Connally both in arranging a Texas outcome that would ensure McGovern's nomination and later in trying to head off the Watergate civil lawsuit."”

In 1976 Spencer Oliver was appointed as Chief Counsel of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US House of Representatives and during the Iran-Contra Scandal he instigated an investigation of CIA Director, William Casey.

A few years ago, I had to ring Mr Oliver, as we were talking the thought did pop into my head, “I hope nobody’s listening in to our conversation.”

The Watergate Building

“Watergate” is not just the name of a scandal that brought about the only Presidential resignation in US history, but is an iconic building in Washington DC. I used to stop close to the Watergate (not in, out of my price range!) during my early visits to the city. It isn’t a single building, but a complex of five buildings., covering a site of 10 acres. There is a hotel as well as apartments and offices. There used to be a Safeway supermarket (where I discovered ‘Red Rose Tea’), but that closed a few months ago. It was built in the 1960s, final completion coming only in 1971.

But it was the early hours of June 17th 1972 that made it a household name around the world. The Democratic National Committee had its headquarters on the sixth floor of the Hotel and Office Building (the 2600 Virginia Avenue building) . The famous break in that occurred 40 years ago this weekend was not the only one. In fact it took place because one of the original bugs, placed on May 28th, was not working properly. There is a fascinating 20 page article on the earlier burglary, which seeks to bring together the evidence about what happened where and when at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_burglaries

The famous burglary was monitored from the Howard Johnson Hotel across Virginia Avenue. It is now student accommodation. The burglars were arrested after a security guard, Frank Wills, found that duct tape had been left on the door between the garage and a stairwell. (He played himself in the film "All the President's Men")  The door can now be seen in the Newseum. And as they say, the rest is history…..

Watergate - Let us never forget

From the time the story was developing (I was a schoolboy at the time), I have been fascinated by Watergate. I might even go as far to say that it developed my life long interest in both US Politics – and the issue of how to control the abuse of power. [I am a lecturer in Constitutional Law – and I always stress (some might say ‘bore for England’) the importance of the first part of Lord Acton’s dictum that “Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely” – and the consequent need for scrutiny of the use of power].

Over the years I have collected a number of books and other resources about the break in and the subsequent events. If you look at my Facebook profile – (jdavidmorgan) you’ll see that I list “All the President’s Men” as one of my favourite films – I watch that as often as some people watch “The Sound of Music”. If you haven’t watched it – I thoroughly recommend that you do so. Guess what I’m planning to do on Sunday? I have the autobiographies of Richard Nixon, Chuck Colson, G Gordon Liddy, Mark Felt (‘Deep Throat’), H R Haldeman’s “The Ends of Power”; and a copy of the Ervin Committee Report (and of course Woodward and Bernstein’s two books – ‘All the President’s Men’ and ‘The Final Days’). I have the Frost interviews as well as the more recent book and film about them, and many books about Nixon.

It can be too easy in a mature democracy to forget how far people are prepared to go to acquire and hold on to power. Too often we can concentrate on describing political events and procedures; discuss policies and personalities – but we should never forget the importance of scrutinising and controlling the use of power.

Richard Nixon

As February 6th approaches, expect to hear from conservatives about the birthday of Ronald Reagan - it will be the centenary of his birth. We probably won't hear too much today about another Presidential birthday. Richard Nixon was born on this day in 1913 (yes, that's right - the Vice President from the 1950s was younger than the 1980's President!)

Whatever else may be said about the 37th President - he was most of the most interesting characters of the Twentieth Century.

Final Address to Staff



Books about Nixon









One of my favourite movies of all time

94th Congress

1974 was a dramatic year in American politics (it was pretty dramatic in the UK too - with two General Elections!). President Nixon was brought down by the Watergate Scandal - and President Ford's honeymoon came to a sudden end when he pardoned the former President. The Elections on November 4th brought in a wave of young Democrats - the "Watergate Babies". The Democrats gained a net of 49 seats in the House of Representatives and 5 seats in the Senate.

The new Congress met for the first time on 14th January 1975. The Democratic caucus had agreed a number of rule changes in December, including

• stripping the Democratic members of the Ways & Means Committee of their power to make committee assignments (a power held since 1911). Instead the Steering & Policy Committee - a partly elected & partly leadership appointed body - got the power.
• making the election of all Chairs by secret ballot. This was to be automatic
• nominations of Appropriation sub-committee Chairs had to be approved by a caucus vote
• the Speaker was given the power to nominate all Democratic members of the Rules Committee

In January the freshman class invited all the Chairs of committees to meet them. In the first few days of the new Congress three Chairs were not re-elected! (see post on Wright Patman)

Later in the Congress both parties in the House of Representatives opened their party meetings (Democrats - Caucus; Republicans - Conference). In the Senate the filibuster rule was modified on March 7th - bring the number required down from 67 to 60 (2/3rds to 3/5ths). It was supposed to reduce the impact of the filibuster! As a recent Washminster post outlines - it was not successful - and new moves may come in 2011.

Despite the large Democrat majority in the House, there were problems in getting legislation through. Partly this was due to internal divisions within the Democratic caucus - something President Ford was able to exploit in his use of vetoes. Farrell notes that "By Election Day, 1976, Ford would veto 59 bills and have but 12 vetoes overridden."

At the November 1976 the Democrats gained one seat in the House and one seat in the Senate.

93rd Congress

Election Day (November 7th) 1972 saw a massive landslide for the incumbent President, Richard Nixon. He carried 49 States - winning 520 votes in the Electoral College. His Democratic opponent, George McGovern gained just 17 Electoral College votes on 37.5% of the popular vote. He didn't even win his own state of South Dakota.

On the face of it, Nixon couldn't have done better - but problems were not far from the surface. The greatest, the Watergate Scandal, was growing - and just 20 months later Nixon had become the first US President to resign in disgrace. The Vice President elected that November day (Spiro Agnew) was himself out of office after being charged with bribery and pleading "no contest"  to a single charge that he had failed to report $29,500 of income received in 1967.

The Watergate scandal involved the bugging of the Democratic National Committee office in the Watergate Building in Washington DC. The arrest of the burglars in the office occured on June 17th - and the conversation which was to bring down Nixon occured on June 23rd - accessible here. Watergate was to dominate the work of the 93rd Congress.

The elections of November 7th 1972 had not been as bad for the Democrats as the disastrous Presidential Election. They lost 13 seats in the House of Representatives, but still held a comfortable position with 242 seats to the Republicans' 192. (51.7% of the popular vote - down a mere 1.3%). In the Senate the democrats gained a net two seats - resulting in a 56-42 split. Joe Biden was one of the newly elected senators who defeated a Republican. The Senate results though saw the Democrats' popular vote fall by 6.9% while the Republicans increased their popular vote by 12.5%.

Before the Congress came into existence, the ruling Democratic caucus had elected Tip O'Neill as the new Majority Leader. It has also made changes to the seniority rules which were to be further reformed at the start of the 94th Congress. New members entered the House which set the scene for major changes in the House's  practices. In February the Democratic caucus voted to to require all House Committee hearings to be open (unless for National Security or Personal matters). A bipartisan committee was set up under Richard Bolling to consider reforms to the House Rules - which recommended major changes, but this was sidelined by the Democratic caucus. Instead the matter was referred to the Hansen Committee - which was more modest.

Congress had already attempted to investigate aspects of Watergate. An earlier Washminster post has considered the investigation in the summer of 1972 by the Committee on Banking and Currency. It ended its investigation - but the 93rd Congress saw the establishment of the Ervin Committee in February 1973. The hearings were televised. In 1974 the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee were authorised to investigate whether sufficient grounds existed to impeach President Nixon.

It was also in Congress that the fate of Agnew was sealed. He had come under investigation in August 1973 after a federal Grand Jury looking at claims that Maryland public officials had received kickbacks from architects and engineers who had gained contracts for public works projects, had found evidence of payments to the (former) Governor of the State. In order to forestall indictment, Agnew came up with the idea of submitting his case to the House of Representatives. While he could face impeachment, the process could have been dragged out for many months. In late September he called on the Speaker, Carl Albert, and requested that the House, rather than the Baltimore grand jury, judge his case. There was an 1826 precedent for this. Tip O'Neill, who was later to be Speaker, was sceptical of the request. An attempt by Albert to the Judiciary Committee was out-manouevered by O'Neill. Days later Agnew resigned the vice-presidency. A detailed description of the events can be found in John A Farrell's "Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century".



The 93rd Congress also passed much legislation - the most well known today being the War Powers Resolution. It was vetoed by Nixon - but the veto was overridden on 7th November 1973. A Congressional Research Service paper on the topic - prepared in 2004 - is available here.

Wright Patman

When the 94th Congress first met in January 1975, the Dean of the House was Wright Patman, a Democrat from the first district of Texas (In the North East corner of the State - including the towns of Marshall, Paris, and Texarkana). He had served in the House since January 1929. He was a supporter of FDR's New Deal and his first piece of legislation was  the Veteran's Bonus Bill, which required the immediate payment of a bonus promised to World War One veterans. It didn't pass during the Hoover Administration - but eventually passed in 1936.

He chaired the Committee on Banking and Currency from 1963 to 1975, but was one of the first victims of rule changes in the Democratic Caucus. That year they voted to make all nominees for committee chairmanships subject to automatic, secret ballot election by the caucus. This was the end of the 'Seniority System'. The Freshmen Group [new members elected to the House that had not been members of the House in any earlier Congress] invited all the Chairs to address their group - some performed better than others. (Edward Hebert made the mistake of patronisingly calling them 'boys and girls' in his 'interview'). Three existing Chairs failed to be re-elected. The 81 year old Patman was one of them.

Patman's committee had played an important role in the early stages of the Watergate affair. It sought to trace the money found on the burglars to the Committee to Re-Elect the President. The initial letter containing the details of the staff investigation is available here. The inquiry was shut down. Patman's efforts may have influenced the later inquiries which blew the scandal apart.

Wright Patman died on March 7th 1976.

Explaining the 1974 Midterms

As part of my background reading for my studies on whips - I've been looking at the Watergate and post-Watergate Congresses. At its centre is the November 5th 1974 landslide for the Democrats - which brought in the freshman class known as the "Watergate Babies". In the aftermath of the Watergate hearings; the resignation of President Nixon and President Ford's pardoning of his disgraced predecessor, Democrats gained 49 House and 4 Senate seats. How significant was the scandal in producing this result?

The conventional wisdom is that "voters treated [the Midterm election] as a referendum on Watergate and the economy."

Jacobson and Kernell however have contended that "the strategic decisions of candidates and contributors, guided by expectations about how Watergate and the economy would affect electoral odds, had an important effect on 1974 election results quite independent of voters' direct reactions to national issues" - in other words, expectations of a public reaction brought forward better candidates and more funding to take advantage of a likely swing to the Democrats. The anticipation of a win, caused the win!

There is an interesting debate on the issue in "American Political Science Review" Vol 80 No 2 (June 1986) - which is available via JSTOR (access from most academic institutions) - 'Interpreting the 1974 Congressional Election'. Another interesting article on voter attitudes at the time can be found in 'Watergate and the 1974 Congressional Elections' (McLeod, Brown & Becker) POQ 41 (1977) pp181-195.