Watergate at 40

Last week marked the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break in.  This remains one of the chief scandals in American politics in which everyone seems to think they know what happened, but the truth is that we still don't know that much about the purposes or reasoning behind it all.  Steven Hayward explains more about this:

Watergate remains the Jack the Ripper of political scandals, with many unanswered questions and inexplicable anomalies—and a pattern of anomalies, as my late great teacher Harold Rood taught us, usually add up to something that is not random.  Above all, just what the heck were the burglar/buggers after?  The infamous “call girl ring” story remains alive, though the favorite theory is still that the Nixon campaign wanted to see what information Democratic National Committee chairman Lawrence O’Brien might have had about Nixon, and particularly Nixon’s connections to Howard Hughes or to a Greek tycoon, Thomas Pappas, whose secret contributions to Nixon’s campaign would have been embarrassing if publicly revealed.  Maybe so, but here’s one of the anomalies: According to some accounts, O’Brien’s office was never bugged (other accounts say a bug was planted, but didn’t work), and the burglars were caught far from O’Brien’s office on that fateful night.  The original bug the burglars thought had malfunctioned—but which had in fact been removed—had been placed in the office of a low-level subordinate employee who was seldom at the office.  Maybe the burglar/buggers were just incompetent?  Perhaps.  After all, why did veteran CIA agent James McCord do something as stupid as tape a door open a second time, which would be an obvious tip off to Watergate security?  This has always unfolded onto a Hollywood-like conspiracy theory that the CIA was behind the whole thing, because The Compnay (sic) thought Nixon was trying to exert too much control over the agency, which Nixon disliked.  A faction of the military is also alleged to have helped exploit Watergate as a means to derail Nixon’s arms control efforts.  (This was, coincidentally, the line the Soviet press adopted.)  “If we didn’t know better,” Nixon remarked on one of the famous tapes, “[we] would have thought it was deliberately botched.”

Of course, as Hayward points out, the damage Watergate did to constitutional government was vast.  We still live in the rubble caused by Watergate, which has manifested itself in the usurpation of executive power by administrative agencies and Congress alike.  And the other thing caused by Watergate is the still too pervasive respect and adoration heaped upon Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward for outing the crook that was Nixon.  As Hayward notes, the FBI was already many steps ahead of their reporting.