[Punctuated by Watergate, the Nixon Administration has been
evacuated of its historical import]
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THE BURGLARIES WERE NEVER THE STORY  
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Andrew Elrod
July 13, 2022
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_ Punctuated by Watergate, the Nixon Administration has been
evacuated of its historical import _

A window display in a menswear shop in London, during the Nixon
dollar crisis.,

 

Book Review

Garrett M. Graff. Watergate: A New History Avid Reader Press, 2022.

Jefferson Morley. Scorpions’ Dance: The President, the Spymaster,
and Watergate. St. Martin’s Press, 2022.

IN 1951, C. VANN WOODWARD published a large volume on the
transformation of the former Confederacy from its “Redemption”
decades of the 1880s to the Jim Crow era of the late 1890s and 1900s.
The Compromise of 1877, which had hitherto puzzled historians of the
end of Reconstruction, became in Woodward’s telling a skeleton key
to the patterns of national development at the end of the century and
beyond. Prior historians had asked only narrow questions about the
Compromise: had the promise of withdrawal of federal troops from the
former Confederacy decided the election, or was it fraud? Woodward
looked to the interests at play in the Congress, and found a concerted
lobbying campaign by Tom Scott, President of the Pennsylvania
Railroad, for the federal rescue of the Texas and Pacific truckline to
the west coast, which had effectively gone bankrupt after the Panic of
1873. The removal of federal forces, Woodward found, were mere
sweeteners to the promise of investment by Northern capital in the
decimated former confederacy. All the Southern Democrats had to do was
return to their Whiggish roots, deliver the Presidency to Rutherford
B. Hayes, and vote for the Scott Plan. Along the seams of an emerging
capitalist society, the business leaders of the South wrenched
themselves from the tenant farmers, manumitted slaves, and embryonic
urban proletariat to join in the construction of the Eastern
manufacturing empire.1
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followed the inevitable allegations of fraud and corruption that
dogged the electoral college was the Populism of the 1880s and 1890s,
whose defeat saw the recrudescence of racism and white supremacy in
the Jim Crow laws of the Progressive Era.

Turning points in history require distance to understand their full
complexity. For Watergate, the initial arrests of which mark their
fiftieth anniversary this summer, there is yet no similar judgment on
the magnitude of Woodward’s telling in _The Origins of the New
South_. The historical insights of one era have been lost to the
journalistic instincts of another. Whereas we understand how a growing
country in the late 19th century could be brought together by open
collusion of business interests, we give little attention today to how
changing commercial opportunities during the Vietnam War might have
torn apart the political accommodations that followed World War II.
 Watergate’s place in this history today is but a hairline fracture
to the New Deal Order; a symbol rather than a decisive moment. This is
a serious misinterpretation that leaves unexamined the universal
business consensus behind Richard Nixon in both 1968 and 1972.

Watergate was nothing less than the visible manifestation of a
hypogeal realignment. A basic continuity in American trade and
financial policy has persisted ever since the Nixon–Ford
Administrations. In foreign policy, the historian Bruce Cummings
faithfully describes the period after Watergate as “Nixonism without
Nixon.” Most potently for a present reacquainted with the
discomforts of inflation, planned recessions and stagnation remain the
preferred tool among policy experts for regulating growth since our
trust in price freezes and direct controls on wages and prices has
never recovered from the Nixon scandal. The narrowing of our
understanding of the import of the investigations that followed the
1972 campaign to the quirky personality and outrageous private
pronouncements of Richard Nixon himself leaves these legacies
unexplained.

The break-in’s fiftieth anniversary marks a new occasion for taking
stock. Alongside a fiftieth anniversary edition of Bob Woodward (no
relation) and Carl Bernstein’s canonical account of the
investigation at the _Washington Post_, Washington journalists
Garrett M. Graff and Jefferson Morley each published their own updated
investigations into the presidential entanglements of the early 1970s
this year. Yet to the disappointed eye of the trained historian there
is no semblance of a synthesis on the horizon: the basic contours of
interpretation remain those set during the spectacle itself, in the
Senate hearings and their exclusions. If there is debate about the
subject of these books, it will unfold on those vintage terms of 1973
and 1974—the pliability of patriotic fervor and its tendency towards
fascism; the roles of fear and vanity in political leadership; the
importance of the CIA and its exact role in the burglary and the
cover-up. In its narrow focus on process—the motions by which the
37th President violated civil liberties, extorted donors, lied to
Congress, and obstructed justice—Watergate’s prevailing
interpretation also invites an easy analytic leap to Donald Trump. The
neat portability of this historical analogy obscures not only the
historical significance of the Nixon helmsmanship at a critical moment
of capitalist transformation, but our own understanding of economic
interests today and their relationship to modern party politics.
Woodward and Bernstein give this reductive interpretation of the
present their own authorial imprimatur: “Both Nixon and Trump have
been willing prisoners of their compulsions, to dominate, and to gain
and hold political power through virtually any means.”

Yet the burglaries were never the story. Control of the executive
branch remained critical at a moment of global shift: détente, the
end of the gold-dollar standard, the rise of government economic
planning across the global south and its threat to corporate autonomy
at home, and the challenge to the material basis of organized
labor’s power in the old manufacturing industries of the US
Northeast and Midwest. The money from Nixon’s election campaigns
that paid for the Plumbers was, after all, donated by blue-chip
corporations, intent on ensuring their man remained at the wheel to
steer the nation through the moment’s economic dislocations and the
ascendant social pressures to transform the American welfare state
into something more capable of ensuring stability on popular terms.
For all this, the Democrats’ media spectacle failed to alter the
course of economic development or fundamentally challenge the emerging
social order—a historic failure for which the ablutions of
impeachment hearings have never quite absolved American democracy.

TO TRULY UNDERSTAND the public appetite for scandal and the
congressional persistence to pursue it during the Nixon
Administration, one must begin with the tremendous social upheaval of
the era and the public challenge to apprehend it. For seven years, the
United States military, drafting men under longstanding cold war
practice, had occupied the cities and airfields of South Vietnam: in
1968, over 500,000 American servicemen were stationed in the country.
Public opposition to this war grew during the last year of Johnson’s
Administration, but its nakedly colonial character intensified under
his Republican successor. In May 1969, the _New York Times _revealed
that the war in Vietnam had expanded to a war in Cambodia, a third
country whose government was not party to the conflict.

The military escalation had, like all those before it, coincided with
an increase in the cost of living for working-class Americans. During
the Korean War, Congress had quickly granted wartime control powers to
freeze and adjust prices, expand productive capacity, and allocate
resources and labor. No such powers accompanied Johnson’s
lackadaisical escalation of the war in Vietnam, and by the time Nixon
entered office, inflation had continued for nearly four years. Rather
than pursue the kind of mobilization planning that characterized past
military booms—business opposition to which had cornered LBJ into
allowing the inflation to unravel—Nixon chose to cut government
spending on civilian programs and leave Johnson’s consumption and
income taxes in place, while the Federal Reserve raised interest
rates. The continuity in basic policy, as LBJ’s chief economist
Arthur Okun wrote, was seamless.

These twin crises—of managing the stability of prices and employment
at home while defending the corporate fiefdoms of American businessmen
in foreign lands—shaped public perception of the global disorder and
primed it against the Republicans in the 1970 midterms. Among the
Democrats, representatives from the Northern industrial cities were
demanding immediate wage-and-price controls and an increase in top-end
taxes. The party expanded their majorities in both houses that
November, and for a second time in early 1971 passed legislation
authorizing the President to impose controls on wages and prices.

Caught between an inflation from below and an expanding public
regulation of business from above, where was a centrist executive to
turn? In August 1971, the President relented and ordered a ninety-day
wage-price freeze, to be followed by a stabilization program timed
with his election campaign. A decisive political swing came from the
AFL-CIO, whose leaders were then engaged in a fratricidal war within
their own Democratic Party over the Vietnamese intervention. Another
came from the success of the price control program, which brought down
inflation as employment recovered during 1972. And a third came from
organized business, whose donations flowed in an unprecedented
sixty-million-dollar torrent into the coffers of the Committee to
Re-Elect the President (CREEP).

FOR A DECADE AFTER THE EVENT, the journalists and intellectuals of
the New Left offered partial and alluring explanations of the 1972
election. Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff thought the post-election
Congressional hearings an opportunity for capitalists to bring to a
close the war jeopardizing the dollar, which Henry Kissinger insisted
on prolonging; the editors of NACLA saw in CREEP a joint effort by
Humphrey and Nixon, on behalf of Yankee imperialism, to stop
McGovern’s brand of Midwest-Scandinavian social democracy; Carl
Oglesby wrote of the “Yankee-Cowboy War” in Washington between
Southern and Western oilmen and Eastern financiers; Kirkpatrick Sale
wrote of the “Power Shift” signaled by the “Rise of the Southern
Rim”; the editors of _Ramparts_ surveyed the debate and found a
common element in the growing power of “Big Brother and the Holding
Company”—the national security state and monopoly capitalism.

For all the narcotic paranoia of counterculture, we know a remarkable
amount from these books. And yet almost none of it gets reiterated in
contemporary accounts of the period. Where should we place the
sprawling corruptions revealed by the investigations, in the story of
our national maturation from a commodity-exporting, tariff-protected,
developing society to the technological and military center of a
global empire? Our existing historiography of the “Rise of the
Right” rarely accords Watergate this climacteric impact. Yet the
financial interests revealed by the scandal betray a decisive conflict
over national policy at a turning point in twentieth-century global
history. Our understanding of political competition today should turn
on this broader question of interpretation, as the course of history
appears once again to be crashing against uncertain embankments.

Consider what we do know about the situation that produced the
scandal. The complex of interests behind both the victorious election
campaigns of 1968 and 1972 includes not only white-shoe law firms
instrumental to the period’s wave of corporate mergers, and a new
wing of the financial services industry (mutual funds); but also an
older, Southern and Midwestern opposition to the nation’s New Deal
labor laws. This opposition manifested as an open-shop movement that
saw, through the era’s inflation, an interpretation of economic
instability that has survived long past Nixon’s political career.
What we should be talking about when we talk about Watergate includes:

* Maurice Stans, Dwight Eisenhower’s Budget Director, and a leading
accountant and investment banker in the 1960s, who was one of the
original four Republicans to establish the Nixon for President
committee in 1967. Stans raised $6 million (roughly $51 million today)
of the total $35 million for the 1968 election. The victorious Nixon
selected Stans as Secretary of Commerce, and the $1.7 million of
Stans’s receipts which remained after the election became the basis
for the action fund spent on the USC law students brought into the
White House to sabotage the election campaigns of various White House
opponents in the 1972 primaries. Stans pioneered a newly ambitious
fundraising program for Nixon, nearly doubling the campaign’s take
over the 1968 total. As a Gulf Oil executive told the Congress after
the 1972 election, Stans “indicated he was hopeful of obtaining
$100,000 from [each of] the large American corporations” for the
campaign. “The implication was that this was the kind of a quota
they were expecting from a large corporation.” The deadline for
these contributions, Stans told executives, was April 7, 1972, after
which new disclosure requirements would come into force. In the weeks
before that date, Stans directed CREEP staff to shred these records.
Thus the thirteen blue-chip “corporate contributions” listed in
the Senate Select Committee’s _Final Report_ represent but a small
portion of the total Nixon fundraising.
* Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander, and Mitchell—the Wall
Street law firm where Nixon worked from 1963 to 1968, and the offices
of which served as Nixon’s campaign headquarters—became the
guiding institution for the course of the first Nixon Administration.
The firm had been Mudge, Stern, Baldwin, and Todd in early 1963, when
Nixon first joined at the recommendation of pharmaceutical executive
Elmer Holmes Bobst—the namesake of NYU’s brutalist library on
Washington Square Park—to senior partner Randolph Guthrie. Donald
Kendall, chairman of Pepsico, had offered Nixon a $100,000 retainer
after the politician’s 1962 defeat in the California gubernatorial
race, and on this basis Guthrie readily accepted Nixon. Over the
course of the next five years, the firm’s business expanded from 57
to 120 lawyers, as Nixon’s name brought in lucrative corporate
clients. In 1966, the group merged with the bond-finance law firm
Caldwell, Trimble and Mitchell, whose namesake partners included
Arkansas attorney John Mitchell, a specialist in municipal bonds
through whom existed a connection to the finance offices of the public
sector across the states, including New York, Nebraska, Kentucky, New
Jersey, and West Virginia. Among the clients of Mudge Rose (as the
firm was called) was Solomon Brothers, in 1972 the second-largest
investment house as measured by profits, which then housed the
world’s largest securities-price quotation board in its offices at
One New York Plaza. On the non-financial corporate side, Mudge
Rose’s clients included Studebaker, the emerging industry of mutual
funds, and Penn Central, the product of the largest corporate merger
in the country by 1970.
* Sam Ervin, the Senator from North Carolina, later celebrated for
leading the Select Committee’s investigations on behalf of the
Democratic Party. Ervin was deeply devoted to curtailing the national
power of organized labor. In March 1968, he held hearings in his
Senate subcommittee on behalf of the corporate executives of the Labor
Law Study Group (LLSG)—one of the two precursor business lobbies to
the Business Roundtable—who would line up behind Nixon in 1968 and
1972. The pre-Watergate Ervin hearings investigated the NLRB and the
so-called “union abuses” it enabled; witnesses testified to the
expanding scope and tactics of union negotiations during the 1960s,
and the necessity this created of removing language from the preamble
of the National Labor Relations Act that the law’s purpose was to
“encourage” collective bargaining. The LLSG hired the Madison
Avenue advertising firm Hill & Knowlton to place stories in national
magazines muddying labor’s image, using the records of the Ervin
committee hearings, and even worked with television writers to
“focus gentle derision” on organized labor in their sitcom
dialogue. “The time is now,” the National Association of
Manufacturers (NAM) proclaimed in March 1968. “Let it not be said
that industry sidestepped the challenge for major labor-law reform
when both the need and the opportunity were so clear.” At Ervin’s
suggestion, the members of the LLSG kept secret their participation in
the media campaign and the planning of the Senate hearings. By 1975,
this politicization of labor law spearheaded by the senior Democratic
Senator from the open-shop South was shaping the mainstream as the
Republican-Party primaries, where candidates debated “curing”
inflation through weakening the minimum wage and “Big Labor.”
* Winton Blount, owner of a large Alabama construction firm, and
President of the Chamber of Commerce in 1968, had urged a
“showdown” with organized labor during that year’s presidential
election. _Newsday_ reported that the Chamber under Blount’s
leadership had “already drawn up a document on ‘labor law
reform’ and [was] conducting business workshops throughout the
country.” As part of the Ervin-LLSG campaign for employer-friendly
labor-law reform, two hundred industrial owners (“construction
users”) and contractors attended the Houston conference of the
Employers’ Council of the Gulf Coast Area of Texas to discuss the
potential cartelization of local construction markets to reassert
power against the building trades unions. By November 3, just days
before the election, the _Los Angeles Times_ reported that 35
employer associations—including Blount’s Chamber of Commerce, the
National Association of Manufacturers, the National Small Business
Association, and the American Retail Federation—and national
corporations such as AT&T, GM, Sears Roebuck, and General Dynamics,
had contributed $500,000 to a campaign for labor law reform. The group
sought to use national economic problems, namely inflation, as a
pretext for altering labor’s legal organization. The Chamber’s
publicity man described Hubert Humphrey as “the closest we have ever
come to having a labor candidate for President,” explaining to
the _Times_ that “If we can show that inflation is due to the
imbalance of strength between labor unions and management, we hope to
get changes again [to the labor law] next year.” After the election,
Nixon appointed Blount Postmaster General.

These business relationships lie far afield from James McCord, E.
Howard Hunt, and their careers with the CIA. Yet they are the pillars
of the establishment that not only brought Nixon into the White House
but kept him there atop the national security apparatus during the
growing controversy of the expanding Indochina war. In 1968, Mitchell
ran Nixon’s election campaign with the funds Stans raised, and in
1969 Nixon appointed Mitchell Attorney General. Leonard Garment,
Thomas Evans, and John Sears—all of Mudge Rose—followed Nixon into
the government.

At the Department of Justice, Mitchell swiftly oversaw a few choice
decisions from the antitrust department, such as defending the
billion-dollar merger of Bobst’s Warner-Lambert pharmaceutical
company with Parke Davis & Company. When the Securities and Exchange
Commission threatened to include mutual funds under its regulations on
corporate acquisitions and capital structure, the Department of
Justice filed a brief with Mudge Rose client Investors Diversified
Services (a future property of American Express, IDS was then the
largest mutual funds company in the world) favoring an exemption for
the industry. When the Congress in 1969 attempted to end the tax
exemption for state and municipal bonds—which non-union localities
used to offer incentives for companies fleeing the union
strongholds—Mitchell intervened, ensuring the Treasury Department
attorneys would preserve the exemption for his favored asset class. El
Paso Natural Gas, yet another Mudge Rose client, had spent nearly a
decade fighting the Kennedy-Johnson Department of Justice over its
pricing policies; in March 1969, the Mitchell-run DOJ announced it
would no longer appeal the case in the courts.

And then there is the Penn Central collapse, probably the best-known
example of the increasing corporate concentration and financial
fragility at the peak of the Vietnam War boom. The Department of
Justice had opposed the merger in 1966, but Lyndon Johnson and Walter
Annenberg intervened in favor, and it was ultimately approved in 1968.
Yet by 1970 the conglomerate was driven into bankruptcy with the
recession the Nixon Administration induced to stem inflation. Senior
Mudge Rose partner Randolph Guthrie arranged a bailout—Penn Central
chairman Stuart Saunders told his board Mudge Rose was “close to”
the White House and had “been influential” in negotiating
government rescue—but the open corruption such a deal entailed was
too much for even Nixon, who was then worried about the midterm
elections. The firm filed for bankruptcy that summer, while the
Federal Reserve, in a pattern soon to be repeated across the business
cycles of recent history, prevented a generalized panic in the bond
market with the offer of emergency rescue funds to banks for
distressed firms.

In the lead-up to Nixon’s reinauguration, the administration hired
Solomon Brothers’ senior partner William Simon as Deputy Secretary
of the Treasury. A year prior, as Penn Central’s officers pleaded
with the Cabinet for emergency loans, Congress had, at the
President’s request, completed the semi-privatization of the post
office—ending the old Post Office Department and creating the United
States Postal Service, now partially dependent on private financing.
To underwrite the first bond issue of $10 billion for the corporation,
Postmaster General Winton Blount oversaw the hiring of Solomon
Brothers, who in turn hired another firm to do the legal work of
placing the issues: Mudge Rose.

While the revolving door might seem mundane, its revolution in the
critical years of the Nixon Administration has a potent legacy.
Blount, a construction executive, had overseen the growth of a
non-union sector in commercial construction under the Associated
Builders and Contractors (ABC), today the nation’s second-largest
construction lobby. Jimmy Carter’s director of the OMB, Georgia
attorney James McIntyre, took a job representing the ABC after the
1980 election. Donald Rumsfeld, Nixon’s director of the price
control program, became Ford’s Chief of Staff and later Secretary of
Defense in both the Ford and George W. Bush Administrations.
Rumsfeld’s assistant and replacement was Richard Cheney. Simon’s
libertarian influence survives today across the Republican Party
apparatus, from the Heritage Foundation to Texas Senator Ted Cruz,
whose 2015 campaign book _A Time for Truth_ is named in homage to
Simon’s 1978 manifesto.

This future of open-shop corporate capture in Washington was not
obvious to the public during the early Nixon years, when the
administration was preoccupied with political and financial
reinforcement of a creaking business establishment. Those efforts laid
the kindling that would engulf the White House after the election. In
late 1971, for example, Mitchell was concerned with arranging bond on
behalf of the financier Robert Vesco, director of the mutual fund
Investors Over Seas Limited, who was jailed in Geneva for violating
that countries’ fiduciary laws. In exchange, Vesco donated $200,000
to CREEP, while Mitchell and Stans prevailed on SEC Chairman William
J. Casey to end the US investigation into Vesco’s mutual funds
business.2
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post-election hearings would expose this corruption, but already in
early 1972 the columnist Jack Anderson published a corporate memo
detailing the payment of $400,000 to the Republican National Committee
from International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), after which the
Department of Justice closed an antitrust investigation into one of
the donor’s large acquisitions. The magnitude of Washington’s
salability was by then straining the standards of respectability:
Nixon’s Department of Justice was departing from decades of
antitrust precedent to usher forth a new wave of super-conglomerates
(the phrase “multinational corporation” was only then becoming
popular), offering to rescue those that failed, while his political
party’s national convention was being financed by a giant whose very
legality was a product of DOJ discretion.3
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BUT IF IT IS THE CASE that the tight employment and price controls of
1972 secured Nixon’s landslide, then what did rat-fucking Eugene
McCarthy matter? If control of the economy is decisive in politics,
then our attention must follow debates in Congress and within the
regulatory agencies over actual economic management. Instead, we have
narrowed our focus on the Watergate investigations at the precise
moment when such debates were taking place—evacuating our political
understanding of the complex of business interests that placed the
President in power and substituting for it a morality play about
executive overreach.

Economic stabilization structured the entire event. At a moment of
national upheaval, it was control of the federal planning apparatus
birthed by the New Deal and cold war that locked corporate America
into the Committee to Re-Elect the President. The month of August
1971—when Haldeman approved Liddy and Hunt’s burglary of
Ellsberg’s psychiatric records in Los Angeles—saw two other
important decisions that shaped the course of the decade. First was
the decision to control wages and prices to stop inflation. Second was
the release of a memo by Justice Lewis Powell, written in response to
the price-control announcement, warning of an “attack against the
free enterprise system” and urging business political spending and
organization.

Powell’s memo was prescient. While economic historians limit the
realm of “politics” to the existence of controls and stimulus, the
Nixon-Ford program for “decontrol” and austerity firmly asserted
political interests through the restoration of private power in
regulated markets. Self-serious liberals have taken the lesson of 1972
to mean that control over the economy should not rest with elections
and popular policies, placing on the side of prudence the general
interest of corporate executives in favor of growing unemployment in
controlling inflation. This is less than a half truth, since the
strategy for economic stabilization shifted sharply in the midst of
the controls program. While the 1972 stabilization was celebrated, the
1973 relaxation of controls was deeply unpopular, and the ire directed
at the administration during the Watergate hearings took place in the
context of gasoline shortages and a rapidly accelerating inflation.
Contemporaries understood what so infuriated the public was the way
the controls had been used to protect business profits, allowing price
increases but not wage increases. After re-election was secured, it
took real intellectual work and popular persuasion to explain the
accelerating inflation as the fault of excessive government spending
and power of organized labor. To describe this as a return to
“neutral” management of the economy, as we have done, blurs the
very boundaries of politics and assumes as historical truth what was
for contemporaries a shocking conception of the public interest.

Recognition of such politically contested control of the economy
points away from the lessons of both economic historians and our
current historiography. During the summer of 1973, just as the
Watergate investigation revealed the existence of a presidential
taping system, the Senate opened the first of a year-long set of
hearings into the oil industry to investigate whether the shortages
and price increases of petroleum, gasoline, and heating oil were
deliberately exacerbated by the nation’s twenty-some large,
vertically integrated oil corporations. By December, the Democrats
were openly discussing the establishment of a public option in energy
and an excess profits tax on oil. Treasury Secretary William Simons
intervened at the FTC to stop the investigation of the oil majors,
prevent congressional passage of the profits tax, and preserve the
partial and dysfunctional regulation of oil price controls—without
the establishment of a national oil corporation. Political control of
the economy was decisive. But the Democratic Party, whose senior
leaders divided over their New Dealish proposals, found unity instead
in the Watergate hearings.

The explosion of rage and cynicism that burst forth after the 1972
presidential campaign was, ultimately, rooted in this historic
bait-and-switch. Nixon had been re-elected on a promise of stability,
but continuing the type of stability Nixon promised required not only
police terror in the streets but greater expansion of government
control of the economy, of public spending and taxes, and of
integration of the conflicting interests at root of inflation into
common management of social concerns. This was the very opposite of
what business had sought in continued Republican Party control in
Washington. The administration had no intention of pursuing such a
planned economy. And popular support for such planning was complicated
by the chasmic separation between the vibrant protest movement and its
representatives in Washington. By the spring of 1974, as the law
authorizing price controls neared expiration, the Senate Select
Committee hearings had managed to displace the politics of inflation
control with a sweeping expose of Washington corruption. To slow
inflation, the nation had turned instead toward deliberate recession.
The disgraced Nixon had “impounded” appropriated funds and cut
vital public spending. Now the Federal Reserve raised interest rates
to 12 percent, and when Nixon resigned in August, the nation was nine
months into the deepest depression since before World War II.

CLEARING THE SMOKE of a national myth requires placing the enormous
sums pouring into CREEP in the historical context of the evolution of
American capitalism. While Garrett M. Graff, in his _Watergate: A New
History_, fleetingly mentions the 1974 amendments to the Federal
Election Campaign Act of 1971, passed in response to the Watergate
revelations, he does not note how this statutory tightening was
immediately scaled back by the Supreme Court in 1976 in _Buckley v.
Valeo_—much less the role this precedent played in
2010’s _Citizens United_.

To his credit, Graff thoroughly recounts decisive events in the
spiraling Nixon paranoia, and each pivotal decision in the
investigation itself, such as Majority Leader Mansfield’s to hold
the Watergate investigations in a new select committee under the
conservative Democrat Sam Ervin, rather than in the Judiciary
Committee where Ted Kennedy sat or in Government Operations Committee
led by the opponent of the oil industry Henry Jackson. Likewise, in
his new _Scorpions’ Dance: __The President, the Spymaster, and
Watergate_, Jefferson Morley assiduously reconstructs the known
unknowns about the CIA’s involvement in the break-in and its
coverup: we see Nixon invoking apparent knowledge about the Kennedy
assassination, in his attempt to secure the agency’s compliance in
stopping the FBI investigation; we see CIA Director Richard Helms
lying, to an executive session of the select committee, that the
Agency did not participate in the coup against Salvador Allende.

And both Morley and Graff mention the crash of Flight 553 in December
1972, the commercial jet carrying Dorothy Hunt (wife of E. Howard), on
whose person was found $10,000 in cash for hush payments. But given
their focus on the de-mythologizing the scandal, it is curious that
neither seriously consider the then-published claims of the
administration’s relationship to the flight—from the executives of
Northern Natural Gas (the company which lost out to El Paso Natural
Gas under Mitchell’s antitrust program) who were said to have died
in the crash, to Nixon’s appointment, the day after the event, of
Egil Krogh—Haldeman’s assistant—to Undersecretary of
Transportation, which oversaw the National Transportation Safety Board
charged with investigating the crash during 1973.

The corruption scandals of the 1970s began with exhortations to
national unity and patriotism of a very different nature than those
which ended the crisis of capitalism during the 1930s. Historians have
all too readily brushed aside the upheaval and what it revealed about
the fragile political order of a supposed Golden Age. In the century
of depression and global war that separated the Gilded Age from the
Nixon era, the nature of power in America had shifted: from the
simpler remits of elections and legislation, through the mixed,
military economy of the Cold War, power migrated to the foggier
corners of administrative rulemaking and national intelligence,
landing finally in a government historically unique in its servility
to preserving and augmenting the fragile power of multinational
capital. Perhaps the interpretation of the events in Washington during
1973-’74 that comes closest to capturing this shift in the national
mood emerged not from an historian or journalist at all, but the
filmmaker Robert Altman. His fictionalized one-man play _Secret
Honor_ portrays a drunken Nixon lamenting his sacrifice to a
businessman’s cabal, the Committee of One-Hundred, which actually
existed and played an instrumental role in Nixon’s red-baiting
congressional campaigns of the 1940s (though no record exists of its
participation in the White House twenty-five years later).

There is harsh dissonance between our instinctual understanding of
Richard Nixon as the corrupt businessman’s President and our
fixation on the Watergate break-ins as evidence of that corruption.
For this we can thank the spectacle of the investigative hearings
themselves, whose influence remains a historical problem in its own
right. How did the centrism Nixon preached to such electoral success
sour so rapidly? Why did the businessmen who lined up so loyally
behind him in 1968 and 1972 turn so quickly against him? The break-ins
offer few new answers to these historical questions. Whether any
historians working today are inclined to ask is another matter.

*
The Scott bill never became law; in October 1877 President Hayes,
securely inaugurated, turned against the bill as too redolent of the
railroad jobbing of the Grant Administration. But the promised removal
of federal troops from the South had worked to break the Democratic
Party filibuster in the House designed to pre-empt the decision of the
Electoral Commission and the counting of the votes of the Electoral
College. In February, the party split, and in April Hayes was
inaugurated. Though the decision was decided by what Northerners
called “Tom Scott’s Democrats” in the South, the southern
railroad would ultimately be completed by Samuel Huntington. ↩
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*
Stans later told SEC investigator G. Bradford Cook that he, Stans,
would recommend Cook to replace Casey as SEC chairman if he closed the
investigation into Vesco. In early 1973, right after the election,
Casey was hired into the State Department, and Cook became chairman of
the SEC until the Watergate hearings brought the arrangement into the
open. ↩
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*
What is most remarkable about the transformation of the United States
since Watergate is how _normal_ the corrupt campaign finance
practices have become in the decades since. The world explored in the
oeuvre of journalists like Jane Mayer or Jesse Eisenger can be seen,
in its adolescence, in these stories about influence-buying in
Nixon’s Department of Justice. ↩
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ANDREW ELROD holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of
California, Santa Barbara and is a 2016 Washington Center for
Equitable Growth grantee. Elrod, in the fall of 2021, completed his
dissertation on the history of wage and price controls in the United
States between 1940 and 1980. He works in the research department at
UTLA, a 36,000-member public-sector labor union in Los Angeles.

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