Fifty years after Watergate, President Richard M. Nixon’s name is finally being cleared. He has been gone for thirty years, but the spectre of the scandal that forced him to resign the presidency of the United States is still very much alive. Watergate is both the reference point for Washington misdeeds and the white whale of journalism, portrayed in films, documentaries, and scores of books. As it turns out, however, key aspects of the story have been missing—and it turns out that the real Watergate scandal was a complex plot to take down a president. As The Wall Street Journalconcluded in August: “Nixon shouldn’t have resigned.”
The story of what really went down with Watergate has been pursued relentlessly for the past twenty years by Geoff Shepard, the man behind the recent documentaryWatergate Secrets and Betrayals: Orchestrating Nixon’s Demise. I spoke with Shepard recently by Zoom; the former Nixon lawyer was backed by a bookshelf and photos of himself with Nixon and Ford. His collection, he told me, contains every book written about Watergate by someone who was there—a complete library of primary sources. Shepard was there, too. He is now the pre-eminent authority on the Nixon prosecution—although “only because everyone else has died,” he joked. Since 2003, Shepard has spent 27,000 hours poring over documents.
Shepard grew up in Southern California and ended up in the White House by fluke. He attended Whittier College—Nixon’s alma mater—and won the former vice president’s scholarship in 1965. It was presented by the Republican Women’s League, and Shepard ended up sitting next to Nixon and chatting. With his recent loss to JFK, Nixon was out of politics for the moment. By the time Shepard graduated from Harvard Law School, however, Nixon had staged an unprecedented comeback. Shepard applied to become a White House Fellow, one of only fifteen young Americans chosen to spend a year working in the Executive Branch. He was hired in September 1970 by John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs.
Instead of a once-in-a-lifetime experience, Shepard ended up with a ringside seat to an American tragedy. The official version of the story is well-known. Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 to avoid a likely impeachment after assisting in the coverup of the break-in at the Watergate complex, the Democratic Party’s headquarters, by his campaign operatives on a spying mission. The truth, as it turns out, is more complicated. According to Shepard, there are three indisputable truths of Watergate, but everything else is badly misunderstood or not understood at all. “There really was a break-in,” he told me. “Five burglars were caught red-handed in the offices of the Democratic National Committee. There really was a coverup. The worry was: who knew?”
That, of course, was—and is—the million-dollar question. “Some pretty senior people from the president’s re-election campaign—not the White House itself—may or may not have known about the planned break-in,” Shepard noted:
People who were at risk of prosecution, of knowing in advance, were very eager not to be questioned. The cover-up was run by the president’s own lawyer, John Dean—and Dean had a conflict of interest he didn’t disclose. He had been at key meetings where these break-in plans were discussed, so he was really running the coverup to protect himself. Nixon had a problem, because everybody involved had originally had a role in the administration.
Some were assigned to the re-election campaign. They were the ones who were at risk. John Dean did an internal investigation and reported, right away, that nobody then on the White House staff knew about the break-in in advance, conveniently omitting his own involvement. But during the course of his coverup—the lead FBI agent throughout Watergate is on record in an oral history taken by the National Archives saying that 95% of the coverup was John Dean—after assuring the White House that nobody was at risk, in his inept coverup, infected his colleagues. He got them involved. When it collapsed, he turned state’s evidence, ran to the prosecutors, and said: I’m guilty of criminal acts, but I’m willing to testify against my former White House colleagues, and they’re bigger fish than I am.
He became the chief prosecution witness, but amazingly, the prosecutors would not give him immunity. They said: You’re too deeply involved. You must be punished. So his lawyer, a very well-connected Democrat, went to the Senate Irving Committee holding the Watergate hearings, and got immunity from them. They had every reason to portray John Dean as a whistle-blowing hero. Their goal was to void Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972. Two and a half years later, he resigns in disgrace because of this coordinated effort. It was handled through secret meetings, secret memos, from all three branches of our government.
Shepard’s evidence, documented in both books and the new film, is compelling. Much of it derives from documents and source material that has only recently become available to researchers from archives and the personal papers of those involved. Shepard found that special prosecutors were meeting secretly with the judges, as well as Democrat staff on the hill. The judges even worked together to stack the judicial selections on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to ensure that shoddy convictions would not be overturned.
“We can show, with a paper trail, that people working with the Democrats in Congress met secretly with the judges and the Watergate prosecution force,” Shepard told me:
You have a secret cabal of people who set about voiding Nixon’s 1972 election. But because they cheated, because these convictions were invalid, because Nixon never should have been forced to resign, doesn’t mean all of these people were entirely innocent. It means the law was not fairly administered, so the verdicts should have been thrown out. If we had known then about the process what we indisputably know now, the cases should have been retired.
The White House taping system—revealed to prosecutors by John Dean—sealed Nixon’s fate. It was the “Smoking Gun” tape, which for decades was presumed to reveal Nixon and Bob Haldiman discussing the coverup, that “drove Nixon from office.” Shepard was the third person to hear the tape after Nixon and his top lawyer Fred Buzhardt. He prepared the transcript, and he named it the “Smoking Gun.” But what Shepard didn’t know is that for decades, all of them had misinterpreted the conversation on the tape. “Nixon’s lawyers misunderstood,” Shepard told me:
John Dean waited until 2014, in a book he wrote called The Nixon Defence, in a footnote on page 55, to reveal that the “Smoking Gun” tape was misunderstood from the beginning. It was really about something irrelevant to Watergate. He says at the end of this long footnote: “Had Nixon known the real meaning of that conversation, he might have lived to fight another day.” In short, the ‘Smoking Gun’ was shooting blanks! Here you have the lead witness against President Nixon, putting in writing for the first time in forty years, that the ‘Smoking Gun’ had been misunderstood—and he knew it had been misunderstood at the time. He knew it had been misunderstood when he testified as the lead witness at the coverup trial. But he didn’t say so for forty years.
In fact, Shepard also provides evidence—this time from an interview in 2009 from the National Archives—that there is no proof Nixon ordered any coverup payment. “If this had been known, the impeachment would have collapsed.”
The Watergate story gets weirder still. “What’s odd about that very peculiar break-in is that while Nixon and his top staff at the White House knew nothing about the plan, the CIA sure as heck did,” Shepard told me:
They prepared the presentation charts used by Gordon Liddy … Everything that could go wrong, did, and a lot of people think it was deliberately sabotaged. Most of those people think it was deliberately sabotaged by people connected to the CIA. But that’s not my argument. My argument is that the prosecutors cut corners, and that’s what brought Nixon down.
But Shepard is clearly sympathetic to this line of thinking—he’s just too careful and meticulous to stray from the paper trail and what he can document and prove. But why, I pointed out, would the burglary have even taken place when it wasn’t clear what it would accomplish? “It wasn’t even clear to Howard Hunt, and he was one of the masterminds of the burglary,” Shepard replied. “He was opposed to it. He said it was high risk, low reward. If you want to know what the candidates were up to, you’d bug them, not the Democratic committee.” I asked Shepard what his personal theory is, and again, he was careful. “Let me quote somebody else,” he said:
An oral history taken by a National Archivist in 2007 from Angelo Lano, the lead FBI agent from the Saturday break-in arrests all the way to the coverup convictions. He’s asked on tape what’s going on. He says at the beginning of the oral history that the Cubans who were caught red-handed had two hotel keys to Watergate hotel rooms. He took one room, and another agent took the other. He said he opened the door and there, laid out on the bed, was all the evidence you could ever want. They had their wallets, they had their ID, they had all the uncirculated $100 bills, and they had an envelope in a drawer, easily found, connecting Howard Hunt to the Cubans.
It was a payment of country club dues that the Cubans were supposed to take back to Miami and put in the mail. They knew of Howard Hunt’s connection to the Cubans that Saturday morning. They went out to his house and sought to interview him. He wouldn’t cooperate. But Lano says the case solved itself—”like we were expected to go into that room.” Later in the tape—there’s two reels, the beginning of the second reel—the archivist says: “Upon reflection, are there any questions you’re disturbed by?” He says: “Of course, remember what I said at the beginning of this interview? It was too cute. It was all laid out for us.”
There were two people, career CIA officers, who were involved. James McCord, who was caught red-handed, was one of the five, and Howard Hunt, who was one of the masterminds. Lano says one or the other—and he doesn’t use the word sabotage, but that’s what he means—sabotaged it. He goes on to say he thinks it’s Howard Hunt. In light of all my research, I think it’s James McCord. He’s the outsider. He’s the one nobody knew. If you read the other books—there’s two very good books on the break-in itself, one by Jim Hogan, called Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA, and that goes in to the CIA in huge detail, and there’s one by Len Colodny called Silent Coup: The Removal of a President that goes into CIA and the military spy ring that operated in the Nixon White House and the role of John Dean, who was heavily involved in the campaign intelligence plan.
They find that there were all kinds of unanswered questions and propose answers. I’m very careful about that because I have no personal knowledge. But I sure find those two books intriguing.
Why, I asked Shepard, was Nixon hated so much? He was ready for this question and has clearly thought it through at length. “He was hated by the Eastern liberal establishment by the time he first came to Congress,” he told me:
He bumped off Jerry Voorhis, five-term Democrat Congressman, who was voted most popular Congressman by the Washington, D.C. media. Here this guy from Whittier College comes home from the service and beats Voorhis. Then he runs the investigation of Alger Hiss, a Democrat icon, a darling of the far Left, and exposes him as a communist, and they convict him of perjury. Big stuff that makes Nixon a nationally recognized politician so impressive that the Democrats don’t even run a candidate against him in 1948, his first re-election.
Then Nixon runs for Senate in 1950. His opponent is Ellen Gahagan Douglas, a Hollywood starlet who’s been carrying on a flagrant affair with Lyndon Johnson. She calls him Tricky Dicky, he calls her the Pink Lady. A vicious, vicious anti-Communist campaign, and he beats her by 16 points. Eisenhower chooses him to balance the ticket. He serves as Ike’s vice president for eight years. Eisenhower was a military hero who could have won in either party. He rose above politics. He left that to his vice president, so all the partisanship, all the campaigning, all the mudslinging was done by Nixon. And Nixon attracted the mudslinging in return. He’s beaten by JFK in 1960. But when he came back to Washington to be inaugurated in 1969, he was hated and opposed by every institution in our nation’s capital.
