Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Mayhem: The 1970s You Never Knew, Episode 4

Episode Date: October 30, 2023

Deep Throat, Operation Gemstone, two valiant reporters, and a secret 30 years in the making. Watergate was not a single scandal, but rather an avalanche of events and co-conspirators, all engaged in corruption to keep President Nixon in office. The stakes were so high that Nixon’s Special Security Advisor, G. Gordon Liddy, lived under fear of being assassinated, and the wife of Nixon’s Campaign Director & Attorney General was drugged and held captive in a hotel room to keep her silent. What was the “smoking gun” that led to the toppling of this enterprise? Was it the tapes Nixon secretly recorded, and the 18-minute gap, that ultimately pushed Nixon to be the first and only President to resign? Writer, Host, and Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Writers and Researchers: Amy Watkin, Mandy Reid, and Kari Anton Production Coordinator: Andrea Champoux Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a Fizz member, you can look forward to free data, big savings on plans, and having your unused data roll over to the following month, every month. At Fizz, you always get more for your money. Terms and conditions for our different programs and policies apply. Details at Fizz.ca. Visa and OpenTable are dishing up something new. Get access to primetime dining reservations by adding your Visa Infinite Privilege Card to your OpenTable account. From there, you'll unlock first-come, first-served spots at select top restaurants when booking through OpenTable. Learn more at OpenTable.ca forward slash Visa Dining. Hello friends and welcome to the fourth episode in our series about the 1970s.

It was a secret 30 years in the making. When the Watergate scandal broke, two intrepid reporters sought to find and reveal the truth. And to do that, they spent years cultivating a source. Over time, this source has grown beyond a mere person with a role in bringing the corruption and Watergate to light. In popular culture, the source became mythical, Someone whose identity was unknown for over three decades. And the myth had a name. Deep Throat. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. There are two things you need to know about Watergate from the outset. It wasn't just one scandal, hearing, or event, but numerous things that snowballed into one giant entity. It involved many people engaged in a conspiracy to keep President Nixon in office.

And what you need to know about conspiracies is that they invariably collapse, because eventually evidence is discovered and participants admit what they did out of fear. Earlier in this series, we explored the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page document about a three-decade-long U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo leaked the 7,000 pages to the press at great personal risk because they believed Americans had a right to know that their government was not being truthful with them. Nixon was outraged and, in response, created a special investigations unit, later nicknamed the Plumbers, because their job was to stop leaks. The Plumbers were tasked with breaking into Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office and later the office of the Democratic

National Committee, which was housed in the Watergate building. The plumbers and their associates weren't just dudes off the street, okay? They included ex-CIA and ex-FBI agents and people in positions of power who worked closely with Nixon. Watergate is a complicated story made even more so by the large cast of characters. It can be challenging to keep names and roles straight when dealing with so many people, so I'm not going to bombard you with lots of things to remember. One name that you do need to know, G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent who served as a special security advisor to Nixon. He helped plan the events that collectively came to be known as Watergate. His co-conspirators included a White House lawyer and those who worked for

CREEP, which is an acronym for the Committee for the Re-election of the President. It's an unfortunate acronym, by the way. Don't choose CREEP as the name of what you're going to use to re-elect yourself. CREEP? No. The burglars all shared anti-Castro, anti-communist beliefs. So they were convinced by Creep that electing Nixon's opponent, George McGovern, would be disastrous, and they had to do anything, anything to help Nixon win. They successfully broke into the DNC offices twice, the first time

to plant recording devices, and the second time to replace a faulty one and take photographs of anything that might help Nixon's campaign. It was during this second break-in that Frank Wills, the security guard, spotted something amiss and called the police. The men were arrested with $2,300 in sequential bills, recording equipment, sophisticated photography equipment, including a surplus of film and a radio they used to communicate with a lookout who was unable to alert them in advance because the police arrived in an unmarked car and were not in uniform. left behind an address book with phone numbers, including numbers with notes like HH or George or WH, which stood for things like Howard Hunt or G. Gordon Liddy and White House. It's not quite the same as the burglar who leaves his driver's license at the scene of a crime, but it did not take investigators long to crack the code. When the co-conspirators learned the break-in was a bust, they feared the worst. One tried to spin it by speaking on behalf of Creep and saying,

they were not operating on our behalf, with our consent. There is no place in our campaign or in the electoral process for this type of activity. for this type of activity. G. Gordon Liddy assumed that he would be assassinated and openly asked that nobody assassinate him at his house because he didn't want his kids to see that. Imagine living your life feeling like, well, I'm probably going to be assassinated. The best I can hope for is not being assassinated in front of my children. It's one thing to be unsuccessful at work, but it really illustrates the high stakes. When a failure leads someone to think, well, I'm probably going to be murdered now. Breaking into offices was one of the most benign acts that creep under G. Gordon Liddy's direction considered taking. that creep under G. Gordon Liddy's direction considered taking. Liddy actually proposed a multi-stage plot that he named Operation Gemstone to make sure that Nixon won by a landslide. Have

you heard of Operation Gemstone? This plot was made up of multiple illegal activities, each identified by its own specific gem. Operation Copaz called for kidnapping the major anti-war protest organizers and holding them in a location in Mexico for the duration of the Republican convention so that their protests wouldn't detract from the convention or be publicized on television. Operation Crystal planned to use a luxury boat in the waters near the convention as a home base for listening into conversations in and around the gathering. Operation Ruby's premise was to install moles within the Democratic campaigns in order to gather insider information. Operation Coal sought to send laundered money through Shirley Chisholm's campaign, have their moles go public about it, and to spread vicious rumors through letters

to magazines targeting Black audiences about Chisholm's personal life and finances. And if you haven't heard of Shirley Chisholm, she was the first Black woman elected to Congress in 1968 and the first to seek election to the presidency in 1972, although she did not get the Democratic nomination. Naming this plan Operation Coal was a reference to the fact that she was an African-American woman. Operation Sapphire plotted to use prostitutes to lure top-ranking Democrats onto the fancy boat, where, you guessed it, listening, recording, and photographic equipment would already be in place. Operation Turquoise planned to sabotage the HVAC system of the Democratic National Convention in Miami with the help of a, quote, commando team of Cubans, helping to carry things out.

These schemes seemed like great ideas to the Nixon team, except for one thing. The cost. John Mitchell, who was the Attorney General and Nixon's campaign director, told G. Gordon Liddy, go back to the drawing board and come up with something cheaper. Your ideas are great, but we can't spend this much money. Not go back to the drawing board and come up with something that's not illegal. Not go back to the drawing board and like come up with non-criminal ideas. Not go back to the drawing board and come up with something that won't send us to prison. No, no, come back with something cheaper. G. Gordon Liddy revised his

plans until he got the cost down to a quarter million dollars and had the Defense Department secretaries type it up for the next meeting. The break-ins at the Watergate building were the cheaper approach. The prostitutes and the boats and the spy activities were scrapped because of the budget. Except the burglars were caught red-handed, and as they waited in jail, their bosses waited to see if they would divulge their secrets and jeopardize Nixon's re-election campaign. The Washington Post reported on the break-in at the Watergate building, and President Nixon read it while he was vacationing in Florida. He immediately called G. Gordon Liddy, who couldn't really offer Nixon the reassurance he desperately wanted,

word that his people were not involved. Meanwhile, the young journalist Bob Woodward and his colleague Carl Bernstein investigated the identities of the burglars. Luckily for the men, the country, and the truth, a secret informant, long known to Woodward, offered up valuable insider information. To ensure that the identity of his source remained confidential, Bob Woodward took multiple taxis, getting out and hailing a different one so he would be harder to follow. He went to elaborate lengths to make sure no one was on his tail when he arrived at 2 a.m. at the appointed underground parking structure in Virginia. Deep Throat had to be extraordinarily careful, as his job was at risk every time he met with

Woodward. Anyone who saw the two of them together could figure out his identity, jeopardizing not only his employment, but also his ability to help the reporters uncover the layers of the break-in and its cover-up. Nixon and his chief of staff strategized to tell the acting director of the FBI to back off on investigations of the burglaries for the good of the country. As additional insurance against themselves and their colleagues, they considered making G. Gordon Liddy their scapegoat. He was actually right to suspect that an assassination might be his fate. Someone had to be the foul guy, and his fingerprints were all over the plot.

But the FBI didn't bite, and they continued their investigation. They quickly found direct links between Nixon's re-election campaign donations and the burglars. Nixon insisted that the power of the presidency meant that the FBI should do as instructed. This time, they reached out to the deputy director of the FBI with a directive to back off. Now. But that didn't fly. John Mitchell, the man who told G. Gordon Liddy that his plot, his gemstone plot, cost too much money, often traveled with his wife, Martha. And John and Martha Mitchell were at a fundraiser in Newport Beach, California, when John was handed a phone and informed that the Watergate break-in was not only unsuccessful,

but that the plumbers were sitting in jail. John Mitchell took off, but not before making sure that his wife, who was very fond of the press corps, was locked in her hotel room under a former FBI bodyguard's supervision. Martha read the newspaper and saw images of the captured burglars. One of them was immediately familiar to her, James McCord. McCord had only recently been Martha's personal security guard and did things like drove her children to school.

After being trapped in this hotel room for five days, Martha Mitchell managed to call Helen Thomas, a friend and one of the first female reporters who worked for United Press International. Often, Martha and Helen were the only women on Air Force One, and Martha trusted her. But the bodyguard overheard Martha, and Martha screamed as he struggled to get the phone away from her, and then the line went dead. Unable to reach her friend, Helen Thomas called John Mitchell, who continued to insist that Martha was just ill and there was really nothing to worry about. In reality, In reality, John had been drugging Martha.

When Martha was escorted back to Washington, D.C., she told Helen that she was leaving John unless he resigned. And she also made a public statement about her captivity and drugging. The Nixon administration called it the Martha issue. People surrounding Nixon suggested that they use her to make John Mitchell look like a doting husband. Oh, look, she's mentally ill, and he's standing by her. And John Mitchell resigned in order to care for Martha. to care for Martha. From 1971 to 1973, Martha Mitchell was mentioned over 100 times in White House recordings. Martha insisted it was the White House who was responsible for making her look mentally ill, but what could she do? While the arrested burglars plus White House insiders were indicted on federal charges, our intrepid reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, in part due to the confirmation of info they got from Deep Throat,

realized that this was way more than what was originally dismissed by the White House as a third-rate burglary. was originally dismissed by the White House as a third-rate burglary. Woodward and Bernstein wore out their shoe leather by knocking on the doors of potential witnesses' homes in order to gain information. It paid off, and they uncovered that five prominent men in and near Nixon's inner circle had access to a $350,000 slush fund, which was used to pay for the burglary. G. Gordon Liddy and other members of CREEP were tried. The Washington Post published each new discovery as it unfolded, from the revelation that the break-in was authorized by CREEP personnel and White House aides, to the evidence that the Nixon administration was actively covering up their connections to the criminals. Nixon won re-election by a landslide, and the electoral map was awash

in red as Nixon claimed over 520 electoral votes and his opponent only got 17. McGovern won Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., and the rest of the entire country went for Nixon, in large part because of the peace accord that, in his words, would end the Vietnam War and bring peace with honor in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Remember how I recently mentioned in a previous episode that the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18? Well, the thousands of young people now given the ability to vote didn't swing for McGovern in large part because the Nixon campaign targeted them. They actively talked about the peace agreement that they were working on with Vietnam, and the young voters for the president organization hammered this idea. With Nixon, we have peace, and peace means no more draft.

And as you can imagine, 18 to 21-year- old voters cared deeply about the draft. At the time of the election, more Americans were concerned about Vietnam than at a break-in at a Washington DC office building. The judicial system moved quickly once the burglars and their accomplices went to federal court. Most of them pled guilty, and only two of them opted to go to trial. This may come as a surprise. You may want to be seated. At some points in United States history, elected officials opt to put the good of the country over that of their political parties. So weird, so strange, didn't know it was possible, but it did happen in the 1970s. And one of those times is when the Senate unanimously voted to create a committee to investigate the Watergate allegations. Nixon tried to reassure

the press and the American public that they had already done their own investigation. So you don't need to trouble yourself. Like, don't worry about it. We have nothing to see here. We already did the investigation. We figured everything out. But that is not how this story ends. nixon's top aides devised a strategy appear to go along with requests for information while delaying as long as possible they also waged war against the press especially the washington post

by drowning them with subpoenas for all of their sources and confidential information the nixon administration sued both Creep and the newspaper, whose owner, Catherine Graham, claimed ownership of all of Woodward and Bernstein's notes in order to protect them. And it worked. The acting FBI director was questioned by the Senate and revealed that the White House was interfering in the FBI investigation and that he shared FBI files with White House counsel who was present during FBI interviews of the Watergate burglars. Nixon's lawyer informed him that the burglars and their associates were blackmailing the White House and some of those involved had retained lawyers. The men wanted financial assistance,

money to provide for their families while they were in jail, and also an incentive to keep quiet about how far up the political chain responsibility for this break-in actually went. They had the upper hand. If they went public, Nixon and his administration would face a catastrophe. This is how criminal enterprises are toppled. The people at the bottom are pressured and roll over on the higher-ups in order to protect themselves. So while they could, those who were arrested and incarcerated tried to get as much money out of the White House as possible. While no one had explicitly implicated Nixon yet, co-conspirators realized that eventually they, like the burglars, would face consequences. would face consequences. This was made explicit when one of the burglars, facing 45 years in prison and without any hush money that he had been previously promised, wrote a letter to the judge

informing him that people in high positions knew about the break-in and helped to cover it up. The judge read aloud the letter, which did not explicitly name names in open court. It stated in part, there was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent. Later that week, the letter writer did name names, and they were those of people who served closest to the president. Another Nixon insider met with a Washington, D.C. defense attorney and spilled almost everything in the hopes of getting a plea deal, including giving federal prosecutors the insider information they needed about the break-ins at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrists and also the Democratic National Committee offices. At this point, only misplaced loyalty

to Nixon kept the informant from revealing Nixon's personal involvement in the cover-up. The FBI director resigned after the news published information that he took files containing evidence about political sabotage and espionage from the White House to his own home, where he burned them in the fireplace. That's not, no, nothing suspicious about that. That's not, no, nothing suspicious about that. The FBI director testified that Nixon's advisors assured him that the files did not relate to Watergate. And the rest of us are supposed to believe that he just needed, what, some kindling to build a fire? Okay. Like rats fleeing a sinking ship, participants in the cover-up began turning on each other in an attempt to save themselves.

Woodward and Bernstein reported that Nixon's right-hand men were the masterminds behind the cover-up, and immediately people in Nixon's inner circle began resigning. The president addressed the nation, proclaiming his innocence and promoting his former Secretary of Defense to be the new Attorney General, tasked with learning the whole truth about Watergate. Remember when I said that the Senate voted unanimously to create a committee to investigate Watergate, they were tasked with issuing subpoenas for witnesses and documents with the understanding that they were to write a final report at the end of February 1974. Their purpose was to investigate any criminal activity and subsequent cover-up, in addition to all other illegal, improper, or unethical conduct occurring during the presidential campaign of 1972, including political espionage and campaign

finance practices. The committee's lawyers stressed the importance of public education on political processes, and to that end, helped to coordinate a two-fold approach to making sure that Americans knew what was happening in the government by getting both newspapers, who reported investigative stories, and public television, PBS, to broadcast the hearings live. The two weeks of daily broadcasts, which preempted other entertainment, The two weeks of daily broadcasts, which preempted other entertainment, garnered a wide audience. The plan to educate Americans worked. A poll showed that a month after the hearings began, 97% of Americans had heard of Watergate. And of those, 67% thought that Nixon was involved in the cover-up.

And who was testifying at the hearings? Woodward and Bernstein's informant. The informant said that they had spoken about the break-in and cover-up in Nixon's presence well over 30 times, and that Nixon approved large sums of hush money and brainstormed ways of getting more. The saga took on a new sense of urgency when, under oath, Nixon's former appointments secretary disclosed that the president had secretly taped conversations, and that he had done so since 1971. Everyone wanted to know what is on those tapes. The special prosecutor subpoenaed them, but Nixon balked and balked hard. Nixon claimed executive privilege, and then the judge ordered the tapes to be turned over. The Nixon

administration appealed. The appeals court upheld the lower court ruling and Nixon offered a compromise. Listen, I'll transcribe them for you. You know, I'll save you the trouble of having to listen to them. Or I will have a senator, this guy over here who is actually known to be hard of hearing to listen to them and he'll transcribe them. The special prosecutor was like, um, no thanks. I'll take the tapes. And so Nixon retaliated. In what would become known as the Saturday Night Massacre, Nixon ordered his attorney general and later his second-in-command to fire this special prosecutor. Both the attorney general and the second-in-command resigned on the spot rather than fulfill that order.

And eventually, Nixon found somebody willing to carry out his orders, Solicitor General Robert Bork. Public pressure led the administration to release some, but not all, of the tapes. And of those tapes, one had an 18-minute long gap. Nixon's secretary, Rosemary Woods, allegedly was to blame for a mishap during her transcription of the tape. A photo reenactment of her reaching across her desk, and her testimony that it was her mistake were supposed to suffice when the gap was questioned. Over 50 years later, with untold technological advancements, and we still don't know what was erased during those 18 minutes. Meanwhile, a grand jury returned a sealed indictment of Nixon as a co-conspirator, along with the unsealed indictments of White House staff close to him. While transcripts of some of the tapes were released, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled

that Nixon had to release an additional 64 tapes. On one recording, not quite a week after the break-in, Nixon told one of his closest staff members to direct the CIA to go to the FBI and say, hey, your investigation of this whole Watergate thing, it might interfere with national security, and you guys should probably back off. And that was it. Evidence that Nixon knew about and participated in the cover-up of a crime. Almost immediately, Nixon's congressional support disappeared, and the House began making moves towards impeachment. Nixon faced a monumental decision. Would he stay in office and try to move the country beyond Watergate, or would he resign and lose everything he had worked for? support in his own party, the smoking gun tape which proved his prior knowledge of the break-in and participation in the cover-up, and with charges of obstructing justice and the near

certainty of publicly being found guilty in an impeachment trial. Nixon went on television on the night of August 8th to tell the American public that he would resign, effective the following day, at noon on August 9th, 1974. He remains, to date, the only president to resign office. Vice President Gerald Ford took office immediately after Nixon's resignation, and a month later, Ford pardoned his predecessor. Nineteen other people went to prison. In 2005, the identity of Deep Throat was revealed to be Mark Felt, who was the second-in-command FBI official that Nixon had ordered to back off of the Watergate investigation. Remember, Nixon had said, oh, it's a CIA investigation.

You might be compromising national security. He was saying that to Mark Felt, who was Deep Throat. In 2011, a historical marker was put up outside of the parking garage where Deep Throat and Bob Woodward met. It reads, Mark Felt, second-in-command at the FBI, met Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward here in this parking garage to discuss the Watergate scandal. Felt provided Woodward information that exposed the Nixon administration's obstruction of the FBI's Watergate investigation. He chose the garage as an anonymous secure location. They met at this garage six times between October 1972 and November 1973. The Watergate scandal resulted in President Nixon's resignation in 1974.

Woodward's managing editor, Howard Simons, gave Felt the codename Deep Throat. Woodward's promise not to reveal his source was kept until Felt announced his role as Deep Throat in 2005. announced his role as Deep Throat in 2005. In 2013, the garage was torn down. And in 2017, Jeff Bezos, who now owns Amazon and the Washington Post, bought at an auction the original Watergate lock, on which Frank Wills spotted tape and set in motion the investigation that would lead to Nixon's resignation. Bezos paid $62,500, a sum he could well afford. While Watergate dominated the headlines of 1973, other notable events

occurred. President Nixon signed an executive order establishing the DEA, or Drug Enforcement Agency, in order to crack down on the increased presence and trafficking of drugs from the 1960s onward. In Boston, professional women started talking about pay inequity, about how caring for sick kids always fell to them, not their husbands, often at the risk of losing their jobs, and how male colleagues harassed them with impunity. They were sick of it, and they created an organization called 9 to 5 to fight for equal pay and equal treatment. It inspired both the film and the song, and it's still active today. And future president Jimmy Carter came forward about his 1969 UFO sighting, which he witnessed with 10 other individuals at the Lions Club of Leary, Georgia, where he was giving a speech. Carter called it the

darndest thing I have ever seen. He filed both handwritten and typed reports complete with his name and occupation as governor of Georgia. He said, it seemed to move toward us from a distance, stopped and moved partially away, it returned, then departed. It came close, maybe 300 to 1,000 yards, moved away, came close, and then moved away. Join me next time for another story that dominated the 1973 headlines, one of the most famous Supreme Court cases that is still on the minds of people today, Roe versus Wade. I'll see you then. The show is written and researched by Sharon McMahon, Amy Watkin, Mandy Reed, and Kari Anton.

Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder, and it is executive produced and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. If you enjoyed today's episode, we would love for you to hit the subscribe button, leave us a review, or share this episode on your favorite social media platform. All of those things help podcasters out so much. We'll see you again soon.