Disturbing History - Richard Nixon: Watergate Was Only the Doorway

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

Most people think they know Watergate. They don't. They know the headline. The break-in, the tapes, the resignation, the wave from the helicopter on the South Lawn. They know the word. They've seen the photograph. What they don't know is that the burglary was never the story. It was the doorway.In this episode of Disturbing History, we walk back into the White House for another stop on our tour of presidential history you wish we'd forgotten.onight, we open the door at 1:30 in the morning on 6/17/1972, where a young security guard named Frank Wills pulls a piece of tape off a stairwell latch for the second time and decides it's worth a phone call. Five men in surgical gloves are arrested inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Across the street, two of their handlers watch through binoculars and run.The story has begun, but only by accident. Richard Nixon had already been building the machine that produced it for years.We pull the camera back from the burglars and walk you through the building behind them. A White House that wiretapped journalists without warrants after the Cambodia bombing leaked in 1969. A secret unit called the Plumbers that broke into a psychiatrist's office in Beverly Hills on 9/3/1971 to dig through the medical files of Daniel Ellsberg.A Committee to Re-Elect the President that ran a nationwide campaign of political sabotage they called, in their own words, ratfucking. A formal list of American citizens marked for harassment by the IRS, journalists and actors and senators and labor leaders whose only crime was disagreeing with the man at the desk. Hush money carried in cash. Tape machines hidden inside the walls of the Oval Office that the staff didn't know about.An 18 and a half minute gap on a tape that nobody to this day can explain.We sit with John Dean's testimony, the Sam Ervin hearings that stopped the country for a summer, Alexander Butterfield's quiet answer that revealed the recording system on 7/16/1973, the Saturday Night Massacre on 10/20/1973, the unanimous Supreme Court decision on 7/24/1974, the smoking gun tape that ended it all on 8/5/1974, and the helicopter that lifted off the South Lawn on 8/9/1974.Brian closes the episode where he started it. With the question that Watergate forces us to live with for the rest of American history. Was Nixon uniquely paranoid, or did the office itself produce a man who couldn't sit in it without breaking something. Was the scandal the disease, or just the diagnosis. Public trust in the federal government collapsed during the Watergate years and has never returned to where it was before. That's the deeper damage. Not the resignation. The belief. This is the kind of story we built Disturbing History to tell. The headline you think you know, taken apart slowly, until you see the architecture underneath.Settle in, and walk through the doorway with us.Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

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Gofundme.com. This is a commercial message brought to you, go fund me. Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian. Investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corners of our collective memory.

Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes, the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place.

History isn't just written by the victors. Sometimes, it's rewritten by the disturbed. Tonight, we're heading back to the White House. Yeah, again. I know how that sounds. I can already hear some of you sighing. We just keep finding ourselves at that address, don't we? You'd think the building would have warned us off by now.

You'd think after the last few stops on this tour of ours, we'd have learned to keep walking, head down, eyes forward. But here we are. same gravel drive, same iron gate, same big White House at the end of it. The thing about the White House is that the marble cleans up easy, but it doesn't forget. Whatever happens behind those windows, the building holds on to. The wallpaper changes. The carpet gets replaced. New staff come in with new bosses, and somehow the rooms remember everything.

That's the part of presidential history that gets left out of the school books. The rooms remember. So pull up a chair. Pour something strong. Get comfortable. Because tonight, we're walking into a story almost everyone in this country thinks they already know, and I'm telling you right now, you don't. Not the half of it. You know the headline.

You know the word. Watergate. You can probably picture the hotel sign, that curved lettering, that wedge of a building sitting on the Potomac like a sliced wedding cake. You can probably picture Nixon waving from the helicopter. That awkward double-handed salute. That wide, forced,

smile he wore like a mask that didn't quite fit. You know the broad strokes, the break-in, the tapes, the resignation, the pardon. What most people don't know is that the burglary wasn't the scandal. The burglary was the symptom. It was one small leak in a much bigger pipe, and behind that pipe was a presidency that had quietly turned itself into a surveillance machine. A man at the center of it who believed his enemies were everywhere, a staff who learned to feed him names. A White House that built lists of citizens to be punished, hired men to spy on its rivals, broke into a psychiatrist's office in California, paid hush money to burglars in plain envelopes, and then, when the walls began to close in, tried to lie its way out of every camera in Washington.

So tonight, we're not just walking you through the break-in. We're walking you through the building that produced it. The paranoia, the resentment, the leaks, the lists, The wire taps. The tape machines hidden inside the walls of the Oval Office. The 18 and a half minutes of evidence that vanished. The men in three-piece suits who started showing up in courtrooms and stopped showing up in offices. Watergate wasn't the scandal. Watergate was a window.

And tonight, we're climbing through it. Let's start with the flashlights. It's about half past one in the morning, June 17, 1972. The lobby of the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. is quiet. Not the kind of quiet you get in an empty park at night, the other kind. The kind of quiet you only get in office buildings after midnight, where the air sits still and the elevators hum to themselves, and the fluorescent lights make a sound you only notice when there's nothing else to hear.

A young security guard named Frank Wills is making his rounds. He's 24 years old, African American, soft-spoken, He's been on this job a little under a month. He walks past a stairwell door on his way through the building, and he notices something strange. A piece of tape. Stretched across the latch. Horizontal.

Holding the bolt back so the door can't lock from the inside. He pulls the tape off. Doesn't think much of it. Probably maintenance. Sloppy work. Some guy on the night crew didn't want to fumble for keys on the way back from a smoke break. He keeps moving. A little while later,

He comes back through. And the tape's back. Same door. Same spot. Somebody's put it back on after he took it off. Now he stops. That's the moment. Right there.

That's the moment everything turns. A young rent-a-cop working overtime for, depending on the source, somewhere around $2.50 an hour, looks at a piece of tape on a door for the second time and decides that this is no longer a maintenance problem. He picks up the phone. He calls the deal. DC police. Up on the sixth floor, behind that taped door, five men are inside the Democratic

National Committee headquarters. They've got surgical gloves on. They're carrying walkie-talkies, lockpicks, cameras, listening devices, and cash, crisp $100 bills, sequential serial numbers, the kind of money you can trace back to one bank if you've got the time and the patience to do the work. Their job tonight is to fix a faulty bug they planted there weeks earlier. photograph some documents and slip back out the way they came. These weren't kids. These weren't street criminals. These were professionals.

Several of them were Cuban exiles with CIA ties going all the way back to the Bay of Pigs. Bernard Barker. Virgilio Gonzalez. Eugenio Martinez. Frank Sturgis. All of them with operational experience, training, and the kind of background that makes a federal investigator pay attention. Their leader on the ground was a man. named James McCord, former FBI, former CIA, currently the security coordinator for the

committee to re-elect the president. That last part's worth saying twice. The man caught inside the offices of the opposing political party, wearing surgical gloves, holding a bug, worked for the president's own reelection campaign. The DC police rolled up, plain clothes detail. They came in quiet, the way good cops do when they don't know what they're walking into. The burglars heard them coming. McCord whispered into his walkie-talkie. Across the street in a room at the Howard Johnson Hotel overlooking the complex, two other men, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy watched it all unfold through binoculars. Hunt was a former CIA officer with novels to his name and grudges to match. Liddy was a former FBI agent who'd later

hold his hand over an open flame at parties to show you what willpower was. looked like. They watched the cops climb the stairs. They watched the lights move through the windows of the sixth floor. They watched their men get cornered, and then they did what panicked operatives do. They ran. The five burglars inside that office were arrested with their hands up on a balcony near the DNC suite. And right there, in that moment, on that quiet Saturday morning, the doorway opened. What the country didn't know yet, what almost nobody knew yet, was that this break-in wasn't a one-off. It wasn't rogue. It wasn't a few crooks freelancing on the side. It was part of a much larger machine. A machine that had been built quietly, deliberately,

over the previous three years, inside the White House itself. And to understand that machine, you have to understand the man who sat at the center of it. You have to understand the resentments he carried, the wounds he protected, the way he built a worldview out of the people who'd heard him. You have to understand Richard Milhouse Nixon. Now here's the thing about Nixon. He was not a stupid man. Far from it. He was in some ways, one of the most politically gifted figures of the 20th century. He understood the country in a way most politicians never do. He understood resentment. He understood the way ordinary Americans felt overlooked, lectured to, condescended to by people who'd never lived a hard day. He built a career on that understanding.

the room. He read the country. He won the presidency in 1968 after losing it eight years earlier to John F. Kennedy in one of the closest elections in American history. He'd lost a race for Governor of California in 1962. And the night he lost, he stood in front of reporters at the Beverly Hilton and said, you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore. He thought he was done. The press thought he was done. Almost everyone thought he was done. But he wasn't done. He clawed his way back. He He won the White House, and he carried into that office something he'd been carrying his whole life. A list. A long, patient, internal list of every person who'd ever wronged him, doubted him, mocked him,

snubbed him, or written him off. He came from nothing. That part matters. He grew up in a small house in Yorba Linda, California, and later in Whittier. His father was a hard man who ran a gas station, and then a grocery store, and never quite made it out from under his own anger. His mother Hannah was a quiet Quaker woman with a kind of moral seriousness that Nixon idolized and never quite lived up to. Two of his brothers died young, one of meningitis, one of tuberculosis. The family didn't have money for the kind of care that might have saved them.

He worked his way through Whittier College. He worked his way through Duke Law School on a scholarship, sometimes sleeping in a tool shed behind a house on campus because he couldn't afford rent. He graduated near the top of his class. He applied to the big New York firms. None of them hired him. And every step of the way, he watched men with easier lives, men with prep school accents and family connections, and last names that opened doors, slide past him.

He never forgot. He never quite forgave. By the time he reached the White House, that resentment had calcified into something colder, something operational. Inside the Oval Office, Nixon talked about his enemies constantly. The tapes, when they came out, made this part undeniable. He talked about the press.

He talked about Jews, in language that's hard to listen to even now. He talked about the Ivy League. He talked about the Eastern establishment. He talked about Democrats, of course. But he also talked about Republicans who doubted him over the years. He talked about Henry Kissinger's network of European intellectuals. He talked about. talked about reporters by name. He kept score. He nursed the wounds. And the people closest to him,

men like H.R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, and John Ehrlichman, his domestic policy advisor, and Charles Colson, his special counsel. They learned to feed that resentment. They learned to bring him names. They learned that the way to please the president was to find him an enemy and offer him a way to hurt one. Coulson once said famously that he would walk over his own grandmother to get Nixon re-elected. He meant it as loyalty. It reads now as a confession. This was the atmosphere.

This was the staff. And this was the building. Long before Watergate, that building had already become something the founders never imagined. A pressurized chamber where the president's worst instincts weren't checked,

they were encouraged. Where the answer to a moment of paranoia was never, sir, take a breath. The answer was, sir, Here's what we can do about it. And then came Vietnam.

You cannot understand Watergate without understanding Vietnam. The two are wired together at the spine. The war was eating the country alive. By 1969, when Nixon took office, the United States had been fighting in Vietnam for years. Tens of thousands of American soldiers were already dead. The draft was tearing apart families. Campuses were on fire.

The evening news was full of body counts and body bags and footage that no American family was ready to watch over dinner. Lyndon Johnson had walked out of the presidency rather than face another term, and Nixon inherited the war, with no easy way out and no public mandate to keep fighting it. He had a plan, or at least, he said he did. He called it Vietnamization. The idea was to slowly hand the fighting back to South Vietnamese forces while pulling Americans out. Reduce the casualties.

Take the air out of the protest movement. By time for an honorable settlement. That was the public version. The private version was different. Privately, Nixon believed the only way to force the North Vietnamese to negotiate seriously was to convince them he was unstable enough to do almost anything. He called it the madman theory. He wanted his enemies to believe he might be just crazy enough to use a nuclear weapon.

He talked about it openly with Haldeman, and in March of 1969 he authorized something the American public would not learn about, for over a year. A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia, a neutral country, sovereign territory. The campaign was codenamed menu. The targets had names like breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, and dessert. There's something almost obscene about that when you sit with it. Pilots dropped bombs on breakfast and went back to their barracks for actual breakfast. The records were falsified to hide what was happening. Congress wasn't told. The American public. wasn't told. The bombing went on for over a year before it became public, and by then, tens of

thousands of Cambodian civilians were dead. When details of the bombing leaked to the New York Times in May of 1969, Nixon went into a rage. Real, sustained, operational rage. Not just embarrassment, not just political damage control. Rage. Because to Nixon, the leak wasn't an inconvenience. It was a betrayal from inside. Somebody in his own government had talked. Somebody he'd trusted. Somebody he couldn't yet name. Stay tuned for more disturbing history.

We'll be back after these messages. So, working with Henry Kissinger, his national security advisor, he ordered wiretaps, wiretaps on journalists, wiretaps on his own staff. 17 people at minimum were placed under surveillance with no warrants, no judicial oversight, no probable cause beyond the fact that the president wanted to know who had talked. The TAPs stayed on for months. Some stayed on for years. They produced almost nothing of intelligence value. What they produced instead was a habit, a muscle memory.

The White House learned that it could spy on its own people, and the sky didn't fall, and the press didn't find out, and the Justice Department didn't ask questions. That muscle memory mattered. It mattered enormously. because in 1971, something happened that pushed the paranoia from a habit into a doctrine. In June of that year, the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers. The Pentagon Papers were a classified 7,000-page internal study of American decision-making in Vietnam, commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

They didn't expose anything about Nixon directly. They were about the administrations before him, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson. They showed in flat bureaucratic prose that successive American presidents had lied to the public about the war, about the scope of it, about the chances of winning, about the reasons they kept escalating. The paper showed in essence that the war the American people had been told about was not the war that had actually been fought. The kids dying in the rice patties had been sent there on the back of decisions that nobody in power had ever truly believed would work. The man who leaked the papers was Daniel Ellsberg. He was a former Marine, a military analyst at the Rand Corporation,

a man with a top secret clearance who'd helped write parts of the study. He'd believed in the war. He'd been a hawk. And then he'd had a slow, painful change of heart that came from sitting through too many briefings where the numbers didn't match the reality. He photocopied the papers, page by page, on a primitive copier in an office at night, sometimes with his children helping him sort the pages on a kitchen floor. He gave them first to a senator, William Fulbright. The senator didn't act, so Ellsberg gave them to the New York Times. The papers didn't damage Nixon, not on their own. They damaged everyone who'd come before him. If anything, politically, the leak should have helped Nixon. Here was a chance to step back, fold his arms, and let the previous Democratic administrations

take the heat for the mess he'd inherited. Any normal politician would have welcomed him. it. Any normal politician would have let his predecessors do the bleeding. But Nixon didn't see it that way. What Nixon saw was a man who'd taken classified material and given it to a newspaper and gotten away with it. He saw the precedent that established. He saw what could happen if other people in his own government decided to do the same thing. He saw the possibility, real and growing, that his own secrets, the Cambodia bombing, the wiretaps, the back channel deals with foreign powers. The things he and Kissinger said behind closed doors when they thought nobody was listening could end up on a front page someday, and he wasn't going to allow it. The administration first tried to

stop the times from publishing through the courts. They got a restraining order, briefly. Then the Washington Post started publishing the same material. They went after the post. Other papers picked up the story. The legal efforts spread thin. The case went to the Supreme Court at extraordinary speed. The court ruled six to three that the government couldn't prevent the press from printing the papers. Prior restraint, the court said, was nearly impossible to justify in a free society. So if Nixon couldn't stop the papers through the legal system, he was going to stop the leaks another way, from inside, with his own people. That's where the plumbers come in. In the summer of 1971, the White House created a small secret unit

that operated out of a basement office in the executive office building. Room 16. The room was small, cluttered, and unmarked. The unit had no official name in any government document. Someone allegedly joked that they were there to fix leaks, and the nickname stuck. The plumbers. The plumbers reported ultimately to John Ehrlichman.

The unit was run day-to-day by two men. Egel Krog, a young White House aide, and David Young, Another aide. But the operational muscle came from two outside contractors. E. Howard Hunt, the former CIA man with the binoculars. G. Gordon Liddy, the former FBI agent with the hand over the flame routine. The same two men who'd later sit across the street from the Watergate complex watching their burglars get arrested. The first big job the plumbers took on was Daniel Ellsberg.

The White House wanted to destroy Ellsberg, not just prosecute him. destroy him. They wanted to make him a household name for the wrong reasons. They wanted dirt. Anything they could use to discredit him in the public eye. Anything that would turn him from a whistleblower into a punchline. They wanted to make sure that the next person who thought about leaking from inside the government would think first about what they were willing to lose. And someone, somewhere in the planning, had the idea that the place to find that dirt was inside the office of his psychiatrist. interest. Dr. Lewis Fielding practiced in Beverly Hills, California. He'd been treating Ellsberg.

His files contained sessions, notes, personal disclosures, the things people only tell a man bound by professional confidentiality. If you wanted to weaponize a man's private life against him, those files were the gold mine. On the night of September 3rd, 1971, the plumbers broke into Dr. Fielding's office. Hunt and Liddy supervised. The burglars, including some of the same Cuban exiles who would later be caught at Watergate, jimmied the door, rifled the filing cabinets, and tossed the place to make it look like a drug-related robbery. They found nothing useful. They photographed the operation. They sent the photos back to the White House. Hunt got a commendation. Operatives of the President of the United States broke into a doctor's office in California

to dig through the private medical files of a private American citizen. not because that citizen was a foreign agent, not because there was a legitimate national security operation in motion, but because the president and his men wanted leverage. They wanted to humiliate a man who'd embarrassed them. And no one in that chain of command stopped to ask whether that was something an American government should be doing. That break-in is in many ways the original sin of the Nixon White House. Watergate is the famous one. But the fielding break-in came first. It established what the building was now capable of. It told the staff that no rule was real if the president wanted it broken. And once that became true, everything else was

just a matter of time. While the plumbers were doing that work, another track of operations was running in parallel. The committee to re-elect the president, known, with absolutely no sense of irony by the acronym CREEP, was running a campaign of political sabotage against potential Democratic challengers. The campaign was being financed with millions of dollars in cash. Much of it raised illegally. Some of it laundered through Mexican banks. Some of it stuffed into safes inside CREEP's own offices. They called it rat fucking. That's not my word. That's the word the operatives themselves used. The most prolific of them was a young California lawyer named Donald Segretti. Segretti was recruited and paid out of secret creep funds. His job was

to do whatever he could to make Democratic candidates fight each other. Look ridiculous. Drop out of races or implode in the press. He sent forged letters on stolen campaign letterhead. He printed up fake leaflets accusing candidates of fathering children out of wedlock. He arranged for prank calls in the middle of the night to voters in primary states, pretending to be a rival campaign. He spread false rumors about candidates' wives, their drinking, their mental health.

He once printed a letter on what looked like Edmund Muskie campaign stationary, accusing one rival Democrat, Henry Jackson, of being a homosexual, and another, Hubert Humphrey, of being arrested with a prostitute. Both stories were complete inventions. He didn't care. He wasn't trying to inform the public. He was trying to poison the well. Edmund Muskie was the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in early 1972.

He was a senator from Maine, solid, steady. By Nixon's own internal polling, the most dangerous opponent on the Democratic side. Segretti and others went after him with everything they had, forged letters, false accusations. A particularly vicious letter, later attributed to a creep operation,

accused Muskie of using a derogatory slur for French Canadians, a key voting block in New Hampshire. The Manchester Union leader, a hard-right newspaper run by William Loeb, ran with the story and added an attack on Muskie's wife on top of it. Muskie stood outside the offices of the paper in a snowstorm, gave a press conference, and either cried or didn't cry, depending on whether you believed it was tears or melting snow on his face.

Either way, the moment broke him in the eyes of the press. He never recovered. He didn't win the nomination. The eventual Democratic nominee was George McGovern, a senator from South Dakota, a genuinely decent man, a bomber pilot in World War II, an academic, a liberal of the kind that Nixon's operation viewed as gift-wrapped. Nixon's people considered McGovern far easier to beat than Muskie would have been, which they did. Nixon won 49 of 50 states in the general election that November. McGovern carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

Nixon won in one of the most lopsided landslides in American history. He didn't need to cheat. He didn't need to spy. He didn't need to break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the middle of the night. He was going to crush his opponent without any of it. And he had his men do all of it anyway. That's the part that should disturb you most about the Nixon White House. The crimes weren't strategic.

They were temperamental. He didn't break the law because he had to. He broke the law because he wanted to. The break-ins weren't necessary. The dirty tricks weren't necessary. The enemy's list wasn't necessary. None of it served any clear electoral purpose. It served his appetite.

His need to humiliate the people he believed had humiliated him. To grind in private, the people who dismissed him in public. And then we come back to that night in June. The story of the actual break-in is, in its own way, almost embarrassing. There's an old saying that history is what happens when stupid people meet powerful people in a small room. And Watergate is the working definition. The plumbers by mid-1972 had been semi-formally rolled into operations under Liddy at Creep. Liddy had been pitching wild, expensive, almost cartoonish plans to John Mitchell,

the former Attorney General of the United States, who was now the chairman of Creep. Yes, you heard that right. The man who used to be the chief law enforcement officer of the country was now running the political dirty tricks operation. Mitchell sat through Liddy's presentations, which included IDE, like kidnapping anti-war protest leaders and dumping them in Mexico, hiring prostitutes to compromise Democrats at the convention in Miami, chartering a yacht to host the operation, and bugging the headquarters of every major Democratic figure they could think of.

The plan had a name, gemstone. The budget was a million dollars. Mitchell, to his credit, if you can call it that, rejected most of it. He approved eventually, a stripped-down version that included surveillance of Democratic National Committee. The first break-in actually happened a few weeks before the famous one. The team got in. They planted two bugs in the offices of the DNC chairman, Lawrence O'Brien.

One of the bugs didn't work, so they had to go back. The second time, that early morning of June 17th, they had to fix the bad bug and photograph some additional documents. And that's when Frank Wills found the tape on the door. The men they caught that night were not low-level criminals. James McCord, again, was the head of security for Creep. Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, and Frank Sturgis had backgrounds in CIA-connected anti-Castro operations going back to the Bay of Pigs.

They had cash in their pockets that traced back to Creep. They had address books in their hotel rooms across the street, in rooms registered to E. Howard Hunt, with phone numbers and names leading directly back to Hunt himself, whose name and number were written in one of those books. books next to the initials, W.H., which stood for White House. The trail wasn't subtle. It wasn't even hidden. It was on a napkin in a man's coat pocket. Within 48 hours, FBI agents were following the threads. Within days, two young reporters at the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, were chasing them too. Woodward had been at the courthouse for the burglars arraignment.

He was a Yale graduate, recently hired working the Metro Desk. He heard one of the of the men, asked by the judge what he did for a living, muttered that he was anti-communist, and then, more quietly, almost under his breath, the letters, CIA. That was enough to make Woodward pay attention. He and Bernstein started working the phones. They worked addresses. They worked old colleagues. They knocked on doors at night, on weekends, off the record. They came at the story from the bottom up rather than the top down, which turned out to be the right call. They didn't try to interview senators or White House officials who would have shut them down inside of a sentence.

They interviewed secretaries, drivers, low-level bookkeepers, the accountants who handled the creep funds, the receptionists who saw the men come and go. They were polite. They were patient. They went back two, three, four times to the same houses. Sometimes a person who'd slammed the door the first night would call the paper a week later and ask if they could meet somewhere quiet. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

They were helped along, famously, by a senior FBI official who would give Woodward background information in an underground parking garage in Rossland, Virginia. Woodward would signal a meeting by moving a flower pot with a red flag on the balcony of his apartment. The source would signal back by drawing a clock face on page 20 of Woodward's New York Times.

It sounds like fiction. It sounds like a movie. It became a movie. But it was real, and the meetings happened in the dead of night, in a garage that smelled like motor oil and damp concrete, with cars occasionally rumbling past the entrance. Years later, that source would be revealed to be Mark Felt, the associate director of the FBI,

who was furious that Nixon had passed him over for the top job and was using the press to fight back from inside the bureau. The press named the source Deep Throat, after a pornographic movie that was in the top job, theaters at the time, and the nickname stuck the way nicknames do when nobody quite wants to think about where they came from. But all that, the reporting, the headlines, the slow drip leaks. That was the surface of the river. Underneath the surface, inside the White House, the cover-up was already in motion. The cover-up is in many ways the part of the story that matters most.

Watergate, the burglary, was a stupid crime. Stupid because it was unnecessary. stupid because it was sloppy. Stupid because the men involved left a trail a child could follow. But the burglary, on its own, would never have brought down a presidency. Burglaries get prosecuted. The men go to prison. The system absorbs the damage. Done.

What brought down the presidency was the cover-up, and the cover-up started fast. Within days of the arrests, John Dean, the Young White House Council, was deeply involved in coordinating the research. response. Money was being moved. Cash was being delivered to the families of the burglars to keep them quiet. Hush money in envelopes, sometimes left in airport lockers, sometimes passed hand-to-hand on park benches, like something out of a bad spy novel. The president's chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman was meeting with the president to figure out how to box in the FBI's investigation. On June 23rd, just six days after the break-in, Nixon and Haldeman had a conversation

in the Oval Office that would two years later become the smoking gun. In that conversation, Haldeman proposed that they have the CIA tell the FBI to back off the investigation on national security grounds. The grounds were fake. There were no national security concerns. They were just trying to shut down the federal investigation by claiming that pursuing it would expose unrelated intelligence operations. Nixon agreed, said it was a good idea, said, go ahead.

He asked questions. He helped refine the plan. That was obstruction of justice in plain English, sitting on a magnetic tape, recorded in his own voice, in his own office. And he didn't know it was being recorded. None of them did. For months, the cover-up worked. The burglars went on trial in early 1973 under Judge John Serica, a federal judge who quickly figured out that he was being lied to by everyone in the room. Sarika was famous in Washington legal circles for being a hard-nosed, no-nonsense judge,

who took it personally when people lied to his court. They called him Maximum John for his sentencing habits. He'd grown up the son of an Italian immigrant. He'd worked his way through law school. He had no patience for fancy lawyers protecting bigger fancy lawyers. And these guys, the ones in front of him, they were lying. James McCord, in particular, was clearly going down for the... others. Sarika hit him with a long sentence as leverage, and McCord, looking at decades in prison,

broke. In March of 1973, McCord wrote Sirica a letter. The letter said, in effect, that there had been political pressure on the defendants to plead guilty and stay quiet. That perjury had been committed at the trial, that others higher up had been involved, that this wasn't just a burglary. That letter cracked the dam. By April John Dean, sensing that the president was preparing to make him the scapegoat, started cooperating with prosecutors. The Senate had already, by that point, created a special committee to investigate Watergate, chaired by Senator Sam Irvin of North Carolina, a foxy Southern Democrat with a sharp legal mind and the kind of slow draw that lulled witnesses into thinking he wasn't paying attention.

But trust me, he was paying attention. The committee held public hearings starting in May of 1973. They were televised, gavile to gavel. Almost the entire country watched. Daytime soaps were preempted. Bars set up televisions in the front windows. Diner stayed open with the sets on. For a few months in the summer of 1973, the country didn't watch much else.

John Dean testified for days, calmly, methodically. A 34-year-old man with a young blonde wife who sat directly behind him in the hearing room every single day. Her hair pulled back tight, her face composed, watching her husband incriminate the most powerful man in the country. He sat at the witness table with a stack of binders in front of him and read his prepared statement in a flat, almost emotionless voice. The opening statement alone ran 245 pages. He read it for nearly a full day. The room sat in something close to silence. Reporters were scribbling.

Senators were leaning forward. Dean kept reading. He laid out the cover-up. He described conversations with the president, sometimes word for word. He used the phrase, a cancer on the presidency, to describe what he told Nixon in March of 1973. He named names. He gave dates. He described meetings in the Oval Office, in the executive office building, in the old executive mansion.

Senator Howard Baker, the Tennessee Republican on the committee, kept pressing him with the question that became the line of the era. What did the president know, and when did he know it? Dean answered. He gave specific dates. He named the men in the room. He described the discussions of hush money and clemency and how to keep the burglars quiet. The room watched.

The country watched. And when Dean was done after long days of cross-examination by skeptical Republican senators trying to break his story, his account had held. Every detail he gave that could be checked, checked out. The Republican senators began, slowly, quietly, to look at each other differently. He described the enemy's list, which was a real thing, an actual document drafted by Charles Colson and expanded by Dean himself, with names of journalists, activists, Hollywood figures, business

leaders, and political opponents intended for use in what the White House called, in chillingly bureaucratic language, the use of available federal machinery to screw our political enemies. That phrase was real. Those were the words. The use of available federal machinery, meaning the IRS, meaning tax audits, meaning FBI files, meaning whatever lever the federal government could pull. That's what they planned to pull against private citizens whose only crime was disagreeing with Richard Nixon. The list included the actor Paul Newman, the CBS journalist Daniel Shore, the columnist Mary McGrory, Senator Ted Kennedy, the president of the United Auto Workers,

various foundation heads, professors, editors, athletes who'd spoken out against the war. By the time the list was fully expanded, it had over 200 names. There was a master list. There were sub lists. There were notes on how to target each person. For most of the people on the list, the inclusion didn't lead to anything tangible. Some of them didn't know they were on it for years. It was, in some cases, more humiliating than damaging.

Paul Newman would later say, with a kind of dark humor, that being on the Nixon enemies list was the highest honor of his life. But that joke obscured something serious. The presidency had built a list of citizens to be punished. The presidency was treating dissent as a threat to be neutralized, and in some cases the machinery did get pulled. Tax audits were ordered, information was gathered. The IRS commissioner at the time, Johnny Walters, was pressured to act on the names.

He refused. He took the list to the Treasury Secretary who told him to put it in a safe and forget about it. Walters did. But the fact that the order existed at all is the thing that should stay with us all. Dean's testimony, devastating as it was, was still in the eyes of the White House, one man's word against the presidents. The White House dismissed it, said Dean was lying, said Dean was protecting himself, said the president had nothing to do with any of it.

It was Dean's word against Nixon's, and that's where the case might have sat. Word against word. Two men. No proof. And then came July 16, 1973. On that day, a former White House aide named Alexander Butterfield was being interviewed by Senate Watergate Committee staffers. It was supposed to be routine, a background interview. Butterfield had served as deputy assistant to the president. He'd been in charge of, among other things, the administrative details of the Oval Office. A young staff lawyer named Donald Sanders asked him, almost as a throwaway question at the end of a long afternoon, whether there was any kind of recording system in the White House. Butterfield paused. He thought about the question. He'd been dreading the question for months.

He decided in that moment that he wasn't going to lie under oath, and he said, yes, there was. There were tape machines hidden throughout the Oval Office, the cabinet room, the President's private office in the Executive Office building, the Lincoln Sitting Room, and Camp David. They were voice activated. They turned on automatically when people started talking. They had been installed in 1971 on the President's orders for historical purposes, to capture the record of his presidency for the eventual presidential library. In other words, Richard Nixon had been bugging himself. Every conversation, every meeting, every offhand remark for years. When that fact became public on July 16th, the implications were obvious to everyone in the country. The tapes existed.

The tapes had everything on them. The tapes could settle the question of whether Dean was lying or Nixon was. And the question instantly became, who gets to listen to them? What followed was a months-long legal war over access to the tapes. The new Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, a Harvard law professor with a bow tie and an unshakable sense of his own integrity, subpoenaed them. The Senate subpoenaed them. The White House refused. The president cited executive privilege. He argued that the confidentiality of presidential conversations was so essential to the functioning of the office that no court could pierce it. He offered as a compromise summaries of the tapes prepared by Senator John Stennis, an elderly Democrat with poor hearing.

The compromise was insulting. Cox refused it. So in October, Nixon tried to break the situation by firing Cox. He ordered his Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, to do it. Richardson, who had personally promised Congress during his confirmation hearings that he would not interfere with the special prosecutor, refused and resigned. Nixon ordered his Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to do it. it. Rookles House refused and resigned. The third in line at the Justice Department was the Solicitor General, Robert Bork. Bork did it. He fired Cox. That night on the evening of Saturday, October 20, 1973, became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. The country watched

in real time. The phrase on the evening news that night was that the office of the special prosecutor was being abolished. FBI agents were sent to seize the office and secure the files. The reaction was immediate and ferocious. Telegrams flooded into Congress, more than at any moment in American history up to that point. Bar Association's past resolutions calling for impeachment. The next morning, even Nixon's own staff understood that something had broken.

The president couldn't be seen firing his way out of an investigation. It looked like a coup against the rule of law, because, in some real sense, that's what it was. Within a week, he had to appoint a new special prosecutor. His name was Leon Jaworski, a Texas lawyer, a Democrat, a man who had prosecuted Nazis at Nuremberg. He was not going to be intimidated. Jaworsky picked up exactly where Cox had left off.

The subpoenas continued. The legal fight continued. While that was going on, the public got its first taste of what was actually on the tapes. Some of them were released under pressure in late 1973 and early, 1974. Transcripts were made public, edited, and sanitized for language, with the phrase, expletive deleted, appearing on page after page after page. Americans had imagined that the president, behind closed doors, spoke with some elevated dignity. The transcripts revealed a man who cursed like a longshoreman, plotted petty revenge against private citizens, made off-color

jokes about ethnic groups, and circled again and again back to who could be hurt, who needed to be hurt, who was disloyal, who was in the way. That was its own kind of damage. The transcripts didn't even contain the worst of the criminal evidence yet, and the public was already turning. It wasn't just about the law anymore. It was about the man. The dignity, the gravitas, the assumed weight of the office was bleeding away in real time on the front page of every newspaper in America. People who had voted for Nixon twice started telling pollsters they were uncomfortable, then embarrassed, then disgusted. There was a moment in November of 1973 that crystallized what the country was watching. Nixon, sweating under the lights at a press

conference at Disney World in Orlando, in front of an audience of associated press editors, looked at the cameras and said the line that would follow him for the rest of his life. People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook. I have earned everything I have got. He thought he was defending himself. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The country heard a man pleading. The country also heard a man putting the word crook into his own mouth, in his own voice, on national television, in a sentence about himself. You don't say that line if you've never been worried about being one. The phrase replayed on the news for days, then weeks. It became shorthand, then a punchline.

then a kind of national wound. The president was on television, in Florida, in front of newspaper editors, telling the country he wasn't a criminal. That's not where presidents are supposed to find themselves. And once a president has been there, the country can't quite put him back where he was before. And then there was the famous gap. On one of the subpoenaed tapes,

a conversation between Nixon and Haldeman from just three days after the break-in. There was a stretch of 18 and a half minutes that was missing. Erased. The president's longtime personal secretary, Rosemary Woods, testified that she might have accidentally erased part of it while reaching for a phone. She demonstrated the supposed accident for photographers in her office, contorting her body. One foot stretched out to reach a pedal under the desk. One arm extended across to a phone on the far side, in a pose so awkward it immediately became known as the Rosemary stretch. Experts later determined that the erasure could not have been done by a size.

single accidental contact. The tape had been erased over at least five separate manual operations. Somebody had stood there. Somebody had pushed the button. Somebody had pushed it again. And again. For nearly 20 minutes. 18 and a half minutes of evidence, gone.

Nobody to this day knows exactly what was on it. We can guess. We can speculate. But the fact that it was erased at all is enough. Somebody, inside the White House. decided that this conversation could not be allowed to exist. The slow collapse of loyalty inside the administration is, in some ways, the most American part of this story. Because for all the dirty tricks, for all the secret money, for all the lists and the bugs and the burglars,

the thing that finally took Nixon down was the simple, stubborn refusal of certain individuals to do what they were told. Frank Wills, a 24-year-old security guard, picked up a phone. Judge John Serica refused to accept easy answers from witnesses who were obviously lying. James McCord wrote a letter from jail rather than take the fall for men he didn't know. John Dean told the truth on national television, even though he knew it would cost him his career, his freedom, and most of his friends. Elliot Richardson resigned rather than fire Archibald Cox. William Ruckelshaus did the same. Alexander Butterfield answered an honest question with an honest answer.

Senator Howard Baker, a Republican on the Watergate committee from Nixon's own party, asked the question that became the line of the era. What did the president know, and when did he know it? The IRS Commissioner refused the audit list. One by one, the people Nixon had counted on to protect him, peeled away. Some peeled away out of conscience. Some peeled away because they realized he was going to throw them under the bus first. Some peeled away because they were going to prison and decided they weren't going alone.

The mechanics of the collapse weren't always noble. Some of it was self-preservation. But the collapse happened, person by person, sometimes name by name, in a way that, when you step back from it, looks almost like a system saving itself. By the summer of 1974, the special prosecutor had subpoenaed 64 more tapes. The White House refused. The case went to the Supreme Court. On July 24, 1974, in the case,

of United States v. Nixon, the court ruled, unanimously. Eight to nothing, with one justice, William Rehnquist, recused because he had worked in the Nixon Justice Department. The president had to hand over the tapes. Executive privilege was real, the court said, but it didn't extend to evidence of criminal conduct. The decision was read aloud in the courtroom by Chief Justice Warren Berger, a Nixon appointee. Three of the eight justices on that case had been put there by Nixon himself. They voted against him anyway. Three days later, the House Judiciary Committee approved the first article of impeachment. Obstruction of Justice. The vote was 27 to 11, with six Republicans joining all the Democrats. Two more articles followed. Abuse of power, contempt of Congress.

The room where those votes were taken was packed, cameras on tripods, reporters in every seat. A young chief counsel for the committee named Hillary Rodham was sitting at one of the tables. And then, on August 5, 1974, the White House released the smoking gun tape. The June 23rd, 1972 conversation in which Nixon, in his own voice, on his own recording system, had instructed Haldeman to use the CIA to obstruct the FBI investigation of Watergate. That was the end. The remaining Republican support evaporated with the United States. hours. The Senate, which would have to vote to convict if the House impeached, had been holding

the line. After the smoking gun tape, the line broke. On the evening of August 7th, three senior Republicans, Senator Barry Goldwater, Senator Hugh Scott and Congressman John Rhodes, walked into the Oval Office to deliver the message. They were not there to argue. They were not there to negotiate. They were there to tell the president, with as much grace as they could muster, that he didn't have the votes. He was going to be impeached by the House. He was going to be convicted by the Senate. There was no path forward.

Goldwater, by some accounts, was blunt. He told Nixon that he might have, at the absolute most, 15 votes in the Senate, possibly fewer. Conviction would be a foregone conclusion. The Republicans were not going to sacrifice themselves on his behalf. They liked him. They had supported him, but they weren't going down with him. Nixon listened. He didn't argue. He thanked them. The next night, August 8th, 1974,

he addressed the nation. He sat at the resolute desk in the Oval Office. He looked older than he had a year earlier. The skin around his eyes was loose. The jowls hung heavier. He read from a prepared text. He said he was resigning, effective the following day at noon. He said he had always tried to do what was best for the nation. He said he hoped that history would judge him fairly. He didn't apologize. He didn't admit wrongdoing. The closest he came was an admission that some of his judgments had been wrong. The next morning, he stood in the east room of the White House

and gave a rambling, emotional farewell to his staff. He talked about his mother. He talked about his brothers who died. He talked about Theodore Roosevelt. He cried. At one point, he said, in a line that became famous, others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. and then you destroy yourself.

It was, in a sense, a confession. The most honest thing he'd said in years. Then he walked out to the South Lawn. He climbed the steps to Marine One. He turned, raised both arms, gave that double V for victory salute that he'd used at the height of his political career. He stepped onto the helicopter.

The doors closed, and the helicopter lifted off the lawn, taking with it the only American president ever to resign the office. Gerald Ford, the vice president, who had himself only been the vice president for about eight months after Spiro Agnew resigned in a separate corruption scandal, was sworn in within the hour. He gave a short speech. He said, Our long national nightmare is over. A month later, Ford pardoned Nixon. A full, unconditional pardon for any crimes Nixon may have committed against the United States during his presidency.

The pardon was deeply controversial. It almost certainly cost forward his own election two years later. He always said he did it to spare the country a long trial of a former president. He said the country needed to move on. He said he was thinking of national healing. Some people believed him. Some people thought there had been a deal. The historical evidence on that is, to this day, contested.

But the practical effect was clear. Nixon never spent a day in a courtroom. Nixon in California accepted the pardon. He did not, in his initial statement, admit guilt. He expressed regret. He said he'd made mistakes. He hoped history would understand. Several of his men did go to prison.

Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Dean, Colson, Liddy, Hunt, Magruder, Krog. The list went on. Most of them served less than two years. Some came out and wrote books. Some became evangelical preachers. some became radio hosts. One, Liddy parlayed his prison time into a long second career as a kind of conservative folk villain. None of them, as far as I can tell, ever fully understood what they'd done to the country.

Nixon lived another 20 years. He wrote books. He gave interviews. He recast himself as a foreign policy elder, a wise old man on Asia and Russia. He kept working at it, the long project of rehabilitation, right up until his death. death in 1994. Some of it worked. By the end, plenty of people were willing to say nice things about his foreign policy. His opening to China, his detente with the Soviets. They were real accomplishments. They were also done by the same man who built the enemies list. Both things are true. History doesn't

tidy up its men into clean piles. And here's where I want to slow down. Because the part of this story that gets lost in the resignation and the helicopter and the wave, The part that I think matters most is the part that's still with us. Watergate wasn't the scandal. Watergate was the window. Before Watergate, most Americans, even cynical ones, believed that the office of the presidency carried a built-in dignity. That whatever the man's failings, the office itself had a weight to it

that pulled him toward conduct worthy of it. That belief was a kind of national reflex. You stood when the president entered the room. You called him, sir. You assumed, even in disagreement, that he was carrying something larger than himself, that the office had a soul, separate from whoever happened to be living in it, for four or eight years. After Watergate, that reflex was broken. Not because Nixon resigned. Resignations come and go.

The reflex was broken because the country had spent over a year watching what the office looked like from the inside. The cursing. The petty rage. The conspiracies against private citizens. the lists, the hush money, the lying day after day into the cameras with that careful, tight smile that you could now see, in retrospect, had been hiding all of it the whole time. The country looked at the inside of the building and saw that it wasn't full of statesmen. It was full of men.

Frightened, resentful, vindictive, ordinary men, sometimes worse than ordinary, granted enormous power and very few internal limits. And once you'd seen that, you couldn't unsyced. it. The country has never quite recovered from it. Every president since has had to govern in a country that no longer assumes the best. Polls show that public trust in the federal government collapsed during the Watergate years and has never returned to where it was before. In the early 1960s, around three-quarters of Americans said they trusted the government in Washington to do what was right most of the time. Three-quarters. By the time Nixon resigned, that number

had collapsed into the 30s. It has never, in the 50 years since, climbed back up. There have been brief upticks after September 11th, briefly during certain national emergencies. But the long downward slope has continued and the assumed dignity of the office has never quite returned. That is Nixon's deepest legacy, not the break-in, not the tapes, not the resignation, the damage to belief, the damage to the assumption that the building meant something. And the more disturbing question, the question that I think this episode really wants us to sit with, is whether Watergate was the disease, or whether it was just the diagnosis. Whether Nixon was uniquely paranoid, or whether the office itself in the modern era,

tends to attract or produce men who can't withstand its pressures without breaking something. The CIA operations, the FBI wiretaps, the IRS audits, the surveillance, the dirty tricks, None of those tools were invented by Nixon. He inherited them. He used them more brazenly than his predecessors, but he didn't build them from scratch. The machinery of presidential abuse was already there, in the building, waiting. He just turned on more of it and got caught. Reforms followed, a whole generation of them. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was supposed to put warrants between the government and the surveillance of American citizens. The war powers which was supposed to put Congress back into the loop on military action.

The Ethics and Government Act. The strengthening of inspectors general inside federal agencies. The creation of independent special prosecutors. The expansion of the Freedom of Information Act. Which was supposed to keep the government's papers open to the public it served. For a generation, the country tried to build legal fences around the office to make sure another Nixon couldn't operate the way Nixon had. Some of those fences have held.

Some have been quietly worn down. Some have been openly torn out. Every president since has tested them in some way. Some have probed gently. Some have rammed them. The question of whether the office can ever again be trusted to police itself, or whether that idea died on August 9th, 1974, when one helicopter lifted off one lawn,

is a question that hasn't been settled. It may never be. What we can say would be. the full weight of the historical record sitting in front of us is this. Watergate, the thing most Americans think they know, was not the story. It was the doorway. Behind that doorway was a White House that had been quietly turning itself into a surveillance organism for years. A staff trained to find enemies for the man at the top, a president who carried a lifetime of resentment into the office and used the office to feed it. A list of citizens marked for harassment by

their own government. A break-in at a doctor's office in California. A campaign of sabotage against opposing politicians run by men in nice suits with secret budgets. Hush money carried in cash. Tape machines hidden in the walls. An 18 and a half minute gap nobody can explain. A Saturday night massacre, a unanimous Supreme Court, a helicopter on the south lawn. And underneath all of it, The simplest, most disturbing fact. The man at the top didn't have to do any of this. He won that election by 49 states. He had the country.

He had the office. He had the power. And he used it to spy, to lie, to punish, to break the law. Not because he needed to, but because something inside him needed to feel like he was getting away with it. That's the part you should carry out of here tonight. The man who had everything and still couldn't stop reaching for the things. things he didn't need. The presidency that was supposed to be a public trust used instead as a private weapon. The break-in that was only the smallest visible piece of a much bigger machine.

And the country that finally looked through the window saw what was on the other side and never quite looked at the building the same way again. Frank Wills, the security guard who started it all, struggled for the rest of his life. He never quite caught a break. He had trouble finding steady work after the fame faded. People didn't want to hire the man who'd taken down a president. He died in 2000, in poverty, at the age of 52, of a brain tumor. Most of the country had forgotten his name long before. But the tape he pulled off, the phone call he made on a quiet Saturday morning in June. That's the moment everything turned. One 24-year-old man doing his job. Looking at a piece of tape twice, deciding it was worth a phone call.

That's Watergate, not the scandal, the window. And once you look through it, you don't quite see the building the same way again. Thank you for spending this time with me tonight. Stay safe out there. Stay curious. And we'll see you on the next one.