Garrett M. Graff - Watergate: A New History

Watergate

A New History

Garrett M. Graff

New York Times bestselling author of The Only Plane in the Sky

The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Governments Secret Plan to Save ItselfWhile the Rest of Us Die

The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War

The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House

Dawn of the Code War: Americas Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat (with John P. Carlin)

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Copyright 2022 by Garrett M. Graff

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Interior design by Kyle Kabel

Jacket design by Alison Forner

Jacket photograph: National Archives via AP

Author photograph Andy Duback

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-9821-3916-2

ISBN 978-1-9821-3918-6 (ebook)

To my editor Jack Limpert, who was right about Watergate and who later opened Washington, D.C., up to me

and

to Jack Shafer, who taught me the lore and mythology of the D.C. press corps

Honesty is always the best policy in the end.

Gerald R. Ford, remarks upon taking the oath of office, August 9, 1974

T ears welled up in Mark Felts eyes as he worked his way through the crowd alongside his wife, Audrey. More than seven hundred current and former FBI agents spread across the plaza outside the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., some from as far away as field offices in Florida, Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Three buses of agents had left Manhattan at 3 a.m. to arrive in time for the court hearing. Now, as Felt arrived, they all applauded.

It was an unprecedented gathering for an unprecedented day: the April 20, 1978, arraignment of Felt, the bureaus former number two official, alongside former FBI acting director L. Patrick Gray III and a third bureau leader, Edward S. Miller, on felony charges that they did unlawfully, willfully and knowingly combine, conspire, confederate and agree together to injure and oppress citizens of the United States by authorizing FBI agents to conduct illegal break-ins and surveillance. Seventy other FBI agents now also faced disciplinary proceedings.

Felt, Gray, and Miller all planned to issue not guilty pleasthey believed their actions had been in keeping with the best interests of the national security of the United States. They hadnt hurt the country, theyd protected it. The agents who now surrounded Felt agreed. When these men acted, they were doing exactly what Attorney General [Richard] Kleindienst, the White House, the Congress, and the American public wanted and needed to have done at that time, the head of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI said after the indictment.

At the courthouse entrance, Felt and his wife paused to hear two agents, one current, one former, read out statements of support. Felt looked out at the men who embodied the bureau to which hed dedicated his life, the men hed once hoped to lead himself as Hoovers handpicked successor as director, an opportunity he had been robbed of.

In the moment there on the courthouse steps, overcome by the support and the spectacle, all Felt could find the energy to say was a simple God bless you all. Then he and Audrey turned and entered the courthouse.

The scene marked a final and dramatic exclamation point on six years in the life of the FBI and the nationa period that had seen the death of Hoover and scandal inside the FBI, the Pentagon Papers and a national loss of faith in its government and its leader, the landslide reelection and then stunning downfall of Richard Nixon, and dozens upon dozens of sprawling court cases that spun out of the related political scandals summed up simply as Watergateand unbeknownst to everyone on the plaza that day, Felt had played a far larger role than anyone imagined. It was a secret that he would hold long after his court case would conclude and he was eventually pardoned by President Ronald Reagan, well into the next century and his tenth decade.

He, William Mark Felt, Sr., of Twin Falls, Idaho, son of a carpenter, also went by one of the most famous names in American politics.

He was Deep Throat.

Richard Nixon was one of the most consequential political figures of the twentieth century. Judged on paper and rsum alone, Nixon should stand among the giants who occupied the White House through the American Century.

As a young congressman, he helped fuel the Red Scare and give life to McCarthyism, turning Communist into a career-ending slur. From 1952 to 1972, he was on the Republican Partys national ticket five times; when he finally ascended to the presidency, he shaped, escalated, prolonged, and eventually wound down the Vietnam War as it roiled the nation; he signed the Clean Air Act and created the Environmental Protection Agency, signed the Occupation Safety and Health Act, transformed the Post Office into a quasi-private government enterprise, hiked Social Security payments, declared war on cancer, signed Title IX to give women opportunities in academia and on athletic playing fields, transformed the military by ending the draft and creating an all-volunteer force, and helped push forward civil rights. He tried to position his government at the forefront of equal opportunityhiring a presidential staff assistant focused solely on bringing more qualified women into government, tripling the number of women in policy-making roles, recruiting one thousand women into previously male middle-management roles, and bringing the first-ever female military aides into the White House. He even wrestled momentarily with the idea of providing a conservative-style universal basic income to lift Americans from poverty. He averted a larger war in the Middle East amid the conflagration of the Yom Kippur War; he calmed the Cold War and signed arms control treaties with the Soviet Union; and he reopened diplomatic relations with China. He was the first president to visit a Communist country, the first to visit Peking, the first to stand in Moscow.

The Nixon presidency was an intense onehardworking, determined, wide-ranging, organized, and creative, concluded his close advisor and onetime cabinet secretary Maurice Stans. I dont believe any man could have been more determined to do the best possible job as president.