The Rest Is History - 106. Watergate: Part 1

Episode Date: October 11, 2021

What led Richard Nixon into the greatest political scandal in American history? Dominic Sandbrook, acclaimed historian of the period, leads Tom Holland on an extraordinary journey from Nixon’s humble beginnings through his political rise and to the precipice of his downfall. The first in a two part mini-series. A Goalhanger Films & Left Peg Media production Produced by Harry Lineker Exec Producer Tony Pastor *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello and welcome to The Rest Is History. There are bad reviews and then there is the obituary that the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson gave President Richard Nixon. If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, Thompson wrote, his casket would have been launched into one of those open sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was legal he was queer in the deepest way his body should have

been burned in a trash bin and as I read that I hear the laughter from top historian of modern America Dominic Sandbrook and Dominic you gave me that quote I'm not going to pretend I found it myself obviously a favorite of yours um and today's episode it's it's not on nixon per se but it's on watergate and nixon obviously lies at the absolute heart of that scandal um and i thought that maybe the best we've got had loads and loads of questions on this but i thought maybe the way to kick it off is with a friend of the show stephen Jensen, who asks, what is it about Watergate that has made the suffix gate synonymous with scandal? Compared to the alternatives, does it deserve the dubious honour of being the linguistic mother of all scandals? Well, that's a great question, Tom.

As you know, I've been looking forward to doing this since we started this podcast. And just on the Hunter S. Thompson line, I used to get my students, we did a whole course on Nixon that ran all year. We had four hours every week just on Nixon Hunter S. Thompson line, I used to get my students, we did a whole course on Nixon that ran all year. We had four hours every week just on Nixon in their third year. And I used to get them to read that obituary and write kind of comments on it. Hunter S. Thompson actually travelled with Nixon in the 1972 election campaign. He wrote a book about it, didn't he? And they talked about...

Fear and loathing? Yeah, fear and loathing on the campaign trail. And they talked about American football. Hunter S. Thompson was astounded by nixon's knowledge of american football uh so they did have a little bit there was a little bit of common ground between the two of them um but stefan's question which is a great question nixon is at the core of watergate so part of it is the character is this extraordinary shakespearean character um that we'll be talking about in a second it's also because i think watergate is the first great tv scandal so it plays out live on american television

often um the senate hearings are on tv every afternoon where soap operas used to be so there's this sense of this kind of melodrama and these extraordinary characters i mean we're going to come to some of these characters you know the the actual essence of the scandal is actually pretty small but it comes to consume this sort of almost Dickensian cast of kind of misfits and eccentrics and it's not the scandal it's the cover-up that's that's yeah although the scandal itself is a pretty good scandal I mean bugging you know your opponent's headquarters and actually it's also what the scandal reveals about the Nixon White House and Nixon's own bizarre and tortured psychology I mean I think that um I like to think that this uh this podcast is definitely the podcast for 70s political scandals so we've already done the Jeremy Thorpe yeah yeah which features dead dogs fruit machine magnets and all kinds of fruit machine magnets but it's it's I I mean, is as British as a carry-on film. It is.

Whereas this, this is the scandal for imperial America. It is. And I guess that that's why it has the resonance that perhaps the Jeremy Thornton scandal doesn't. Well, it's the combination, actually, Tom. You're absolutely right. It is the climax of what political historians call the imperial presidency,

so the kind of Cold War presidency. But it's the combination of that with the humdrum everyday very human kind of almost petty resentments of nixon himself that drive the scandal i mean i've got so much to say about this but so much of it is about nixon because without nixon there is no watergate he's at the absolute center of it and and lying at the center is his background and his all his pent-up resentments so on that topic we have we have a question from james bagerley i hope i've pronounced

his name right how important is richard nixon's feeling of outsider status in understanding his actions and do you both agree effectively dominic do you agree that what links trump and nixon is that they're both driven by an anger towards a ruling class that will never truly accept them now I think we should just park the comparison with with Trump okay for now yeah that question about about Nixon's upbringing sense of himself as an outsider important uh it's very important and this is great because I can now launch into my hour-long prepared um uh biography of Richard Nixon so as I, I taught this course on Nixon that went all year. And the first thing I got the students to do, I used to say, well, we're not going to call him Nixon. We should call him Dick throughout. Because I really wanted them to empathize with Nixon,

also just amuse me in a very childish way. And I think getting inside, as I used to say to them, you've got to get inside Dick's head and um i thought i think that's absolutely crucial to understanding how the scandal played out so let's talk about nixon nixon is born in 1913 in a place called yorba linda california which is this scruffy um sort of nondescript edge of la kind of now a suburb but then kind of on the edge of la quite rural and he's absolutely one of those people that we talked about in our California podcast and again in our Silicon Valley podcast. He's a white Protestant, kind of Midwestern American stock.

He's Quaker, isn't he? Middle American. He is a Quaker, and that's really important. And Quakers don't swear? They don't. They don't drink. They don't swear. They don't dance. They don't approve of kind of fun to put it bluntly so his parents frank and hannah they've moved from kind of the midwest and they are the classic kind of people who move to california and it doesn't quite work out everything goes wrong so they found a lemon ranch and it doesn't work they don't sell any lemons and then they found

a grocery store and a garage in a kind of garage a gas station attached to it and it's really hard work and young richard has to get up at four o'clock and kind of load i don't know potatoes or whatever it is um so he grows up in relative poverty in this midwest in this quaker family uh midwestern stock in california there's this there's this sense of disappointment that hangs over them in the kind of 1910s 1920s 1930s he's one of multiple brothers you'd enjoy this time they're all named after well four of the five are named after english kings so there's harold arthur um richard and edward and then there's also donald who's so which richard is um is richard nixon named after richard the linehart presumably not rich no no no although that's a great comparison um or indeed richard the second no he's richard the linehart um so two of the brothers die of tuberculosis um harold and arthur and this kind

of hangs over the family it's quite a sort of grim environment nixon says in his memoirs his mother his mother his mother never hugged him or showed him any physical affection but he could see from her eyes that she loved him which i always think is a sort of very telling so a kind of classic upper class british well yes i suppose so except the difference is they're so poor so nixon is that classic is that classic thing he's very driven he's very bright he does very well at school and he's offered a scholarship, I think, or offered a place at Harvard. There's no doubt that he's very clever. I mean, this is where the Donald Trump comparison rather falls down. He can't take it up because he's needed at home to help.

And also because his brother is ill and his mum needs to look after the care and all this kind of thing. So Nixon goes to his local college, Whittier College. And right there you have the, you could almost say watergate starts right there he is um a bit of an outsider kind of a lower middle class kind of poor relatively poor kid although very bright he talks later on about the laughs and slights and snubs that he suffers when he's there he's not allowed he's not invited to join the top fraternity on campus who are called the Franklins. I think we talked about this right at the beginning of the podcast series with Trump and Caesar and all that stuff. So he found his own called the Orthogonians, the square shooters who are for the kind of outsiders. And right there you have this.

He's got that sense. I hate to say this, Tom tom but it's you and your your yachting shoes nixon richard nixon is a man who goes through life permanently in the wrong shoes um there's even a kennedy there's even a very famous story yeah the right ones that nixon is told to do a kennedy style photo op by his aides and he walks onto the beach and he's wearing his shoes are too smart he's wearing smart kind of office shoes when he should be wearing kind of you know deck shoes your yacht your yachting shoes so that that nags at him the whole time he actually does really well he goes to duke law school he goes into the navy he's a lieutenant he's presumably on a scholarship

yeah he's he's very bright. Everybody says he's hardworking. Interestingly, one of the things people say about him at this stage is he's honest. So he's not unpopular, but he's just an outsider. He's that classic heart. He has quite a good war, doesn't he? Yeah. He's a quartermaster in the Navy. So Quakers don't fight either.

So he could have. Right. He overcomes that. And his Quakerism, I think, doesn't matter to him kind of theologically, as it were. I think it matters culturally. And I think there's always this sense of Nixon that he's a bit repressed. Somebody's always having more fun than he is and he's missing out. And it obviously becomes the Kennedys.

And you can absolutely see, I mean, we'll come back to this point, but you can absolutely see he is that classic you know that the self-made driven kid very bright who's conscious that he's missing out that other people have a grace and elegance and ease he's never going to be James Bond okay okay so so so just so he then he kind of gets into Republican yeah because he's a Quaker by the way he makes and he has to go into Republican. Yeah, because he's a Quaker, by the way. He makes, and he has to go into the Republican Party because he's a Protestant, because that's the thing that you do. Okay, so just this idea that the kind of guy who's looking up at the elite. Yeah. I mean, that's, I guess, kind of something that is a feature of the Republican Party now. But not then, you're right.

Yeah, Nixon's one of the people who. So it it's unusual isn't it it's quite unusual he's and it's so so in a sense is he kind of i mean he's a he's a kind of portent of this idea that the deplorables are going to sign up to the republican a little bit yes a little bit he doesn't really emphasize that as much in the 1940s and 1950s but certainly later on um he's he's the man who coins the phrase the silent majority he talks again and again when he's president about the little guy the little man the common man all these kinds of things so absolutely he does that he's absolutely part of that kind of realignment and he's a big anti-communist yeah so here's an interesting thing nixon right from the start is regarded as a deplorable himself by the kind of patrician liberal kind of democratic elite he i think it's

because california politics is pretty rough he uses anti-communism in 1946 and again in 1950 when he runs for the senate um he he always seems to there's this weird thing which i i he always seems to fight a little bit dirtier or to be a bit more competitive than everybody else. And it's not just a question of substance. It's a question of style, actually. So something that you would forgive in a more patrician who would then be able to make a joke about it afterwards. Nixon, there's always this stuff that he starts to be perceived quite early on as kind of dark, jowly, overaggressive. So there's a famous cartoonist of the 50s called Herblock who was always drawing him kind of climbing in or out of a sewer.

And then he really... So that's the thing that Thompson picks up on. Yes, and he really disgraces himself in the eyes of the sort of patrician liberals. In the early 1950s, when he exposes a genuine communist spy, a guy called Alger H hiss in the state department so i thought that was contested it used to be contested but it's not really contested anymore um sort of declassified soviet um archives show that beyond i think i would say reasonable doubt

i mean some people would disagree but beyond reasonable doubt hiss was a fellow traveler probably a communist spy nixon exposes him in a very aggressive way and this is perceived as you know it's in for a dig it's not what you do alger hiss was one of us very well educated nice fellow you know lovely guest at a dinner party nixon's this god-awful hick from you know california um so so people hold that against him but that gets in the place as vice president to Eisenhower. But then when he gets that ticket, doesn't he then run into problems again? He does.

There's some scandal. So this is a nothing scandal. It's a made-up scandal, really, that he has been profiting from a fund for Republican donors in California. But he had the essence of Nixon's appeal. Because what Nixon does, Nixon is terrified that Eisenhower is going to drop him from the ticket eisenhower world war ii general um because he thinks eisenhower has basically made it clear that he thinks of nixon as a kind of an ant beneath his shoe and that he's and he's batman yeah he despises nixon i mean he basically signs up to he's just nick he regards nixon as an unfortunate necessity um so nixon makes this unprecedented live tv address

right okay so dominic and dominic in we mentioned the jeremy thorpe scandal yes which featured a dead dog yeah this features a live you've got to have a dog in every podcast right so this is a live dog nixon basically says there are two there are two great lines so one of them he basically says this is all nonsense there was a fund but I haven't profited from it. You know, it's perfectly legal, blah, blah, blah. He says, people, one of the most damaging allegations is that people say my wife, Pat, has got a mink coat. And he says, she has not got a mink coat. She has a respectable Republican cloth coat.

And all across the land, people are saying, oh, hurrah for Nixon. Isn't this wonderful? And then he says, now, there is one gift that we have that we have taken he said somebody wrote in the newspaper that my girls trisha and julie and they wanted a dog and what did they send us in a box they sent us a lovely dog um and the girls called him checkers and the girls love the dog and whatever they say about it we're gonna keep it or something and of course you see high-minded tom hollandish people across america are vomiting into their waste paper baskets and salt of the earth dominic sandbrooks of wiping away manly tears and saying what a man what a family

so yeah so i think eisenhower was one of these people who's vomiting into a waste paper basket but he's forced his hand has been forced by n so Nixon then stays on as on the ticket um and then of course there's another great sort of crisis in Nixon's life uh so in 1960 he he basically inherits the Republican nomination from Eisenhower has he been a good vice president he's been all right actually yeah he's done more than any vice president before I mean eisenhower treats him like dirt throughout and tries to get rid of him in 1956 but nixon's like a sort of he's like a cockroach he can't be killed so nixon goes on trips and stuff and people throw stones at him in south america um and yeah presumably yeah so he kind of looks he's fine and he's right in the centre of the Republican Party. Standing up to communism. He's a moderate.

He's actually not on the right. He's slap bang in this sort of centre. He'd fit perfectly into the Tory party of the 1950s, actually, in England. So he's the Republican candidate in 1960, and he's against basically his worst nightmare, an East Coast patrician, incredibly handsome. Who absolutely know the right shoes to wear yeah a man who's completely oversexed who's always wearing yachting shoes a man who'd won the

pulitzer prize for something that is did somebody else had written for him a man whose father had got his mates to do his university thesis for him john f kennedy So a man who's got all the grace and elegance and all the connections, everything that Nixon hasn't got. And Kennedy wins by this very tight margin after a debate in which Nixon is perceived to have done better on radio and famously worse on television because he looks sweaty and kind of jowly and stuff. In his shadow.

Exactly. And what's worse, what's even worse for Nixon is that he could have won that election, actually. I mean, what I Nixon is that he could have won that election, actually. I mean, what I mean is he may well have won that election. But didn't Kennedy's daddy buy it? Right. There are allegations of vote stuffing in Illinois and in Texas. Maybe not enough, but enough for there to be a question mark. And Nixon doesn't contest the results unlike donald trump right so i was going

to say because because we we've already had the comparison um with uh with trump raised i mean that nixon doesn't contest it even though he thinks it might have happened for the good of the american republic yeah for the good of the american republic fair but well it's partly that it's also because partly around people around him are saying you know this is we're in the middle of the cold war you know this, you shouldn't really contest it. And it's not like he takes ages to make a decision. He doesn't. Straight away, he basically, or very quickly, he decides he's not going to contest it.

And it is the right decision. It's the patriotic decision. Yeah, it is the patriotic decision. And I think it's also the right decision from his own sort of career point of view. Because, of course, he does then come back eight years later to become the Republican nominee in 1968. So he kind of sort of going off to become I mean, he does go off to become a New York lawyer, but his heart's not really in it. What he really wants to do is get back into politics. He has that.

He runs he runs for the governorship of California. He does in 1962. And it doesn't really work out. That doesn't go well. No. And at the end, and it doesn't really work out. And that doesn't go well. No, and at the end, he loses to Pat Brown. And at the end, he loses it with the press. And he says, you know, you've got what you wanted.

Well, gentlemen, you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore. And they all say, oh, typical Nixon, such a bad loser. He's such a scumbag from Yorba Linda. Of course, he doesn't know how to behave. But that aside aside after that he then kind of slightly reinvents himself as the kind of sane center of the republican party so he basically just the context for this the context for this i guess going into 67 68 is the counterculture yeah protests against vietnam, hippies, all that kind of stuff. And he's a guy who wears business shoes to the beach.

Yeah, exactly right. It's all about shoes. Shoes and dogs are what this podcast is all about. What we really specialise in. That's absolutely right. So America feels like it's unravelling. So it's the culture war. It's the first blast of the culture war as we would now recognise. A little bit, actually. Yes, a little bit. The Democrats are tearing themselves apart. Lyndon Johnson's been booted out because of Vietnam. of the culture war as we would now a little bit actually yes a little bit there were democrats are tearing themselves apart lyndon johnson's been sort of booted out because of vietnam uh

you're right that the the headlines are full of rioting the civil rights movement um has sort of passed its peak and martin luther king has been assassinated and then robert kennedy says and against that background nixon basically says you know I am the 50s in human form I am yeah look I promise law and order he says law and order again and again he says he has a secret plan to end the Vietnam war you won't tell anybody what it is but people say oh that sounds splendid yes um hurrah so he is elected quite a tight election but it's you know it's fine he gets in he gets in um and okay so yeah so he becomes president and i think it's time for another question this time from classicist who asks for most people nixon is synonymous with watergate and nothing else did he have any

significant political achievements during his presidency that have been overlooked or ignored what would his legacy have been if watergate had never happened okay well that's that's a great question um so his presidency is very turbulent but you could argue quite successful so he takes office we get some moon landings doesn't he for a start that's not he must have enjoyed that because because that was a kind of it was a Kennedy thing yes he's unable to pocket yeah I think he has probably has slightly mixed feelings about it because everyone knows it's a Kennedy thing but you're right right. He does sort of... He congratulates the astronauts and stuff. Vietnam completely overshadows his first term,

trying to pull out. I mean, basically, he escalates in order to get out by widening the war into Cambodia. Massive student protests throughout his whole first term. But actually, when you go through i mean i don't think i'm out on a limb here almost all historians of nixon's presidency would say this when you go through policy by policy he's actually pretty moderate so his ambition is to be and these are his kind of words with his aides the american disraeli a tory man with liberal measures and

actually you can look at lots of things he thinks talks about having a guaranteed income which is a thing that people talk about now sort of left-wing idea uh and dominic hadn't he um i mean he'd been in favor of the civil rights yeah he's pretty moderate in the early 60s exactly he's pretty moderate on civil rights when it suits him he bangs the law and order drum and he sort of condemns radicals and all this kind of thing but by and large yes he is on the sort of moderate wing of the republican party on civil rights he's um keen on kind of the environment i mean he sort of moans and groans about it but he does it um he he goes to china well of course this is about to get into his foreign policy achievements are his big thing so he goes to moscow and he goes to beijing i mean amazing and lots of people say only nixon could have done this because he has the anti because the united states had had they recognized china up to that point no no relations so basically

their relations were non-existent utterly non-existent because they'd recognize taiwan as legitimate exactly so he ditches them and gets into bed basically with... But I mean, the imagery. Nixon on the Great Wall of China. Nixon in Beijing... It's a great wall for great people. This is a great wall, as he says. Nixon kind of clinking glasses with Mao Zedong. I mean, that's extraordinary. And then he does the same with Brezhnev in Moscow.

So this is the heyday of detente. And he and Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State, work incredibly... I mean, this is basically their passion. They think they're reordering the world and actually they are. You know, Nixon's meeting with Mao is the moment

that China comes out of the cold. And if you stand right back from this, that's more significant than anything Eisenisenhower kennedy johnson did arguably i mean i know that american listeners will say oh the civil rights movement is the big story and of course in many ways it is for americans but in terms of world politics yeah nixon going to china is absolutely seismic um okay and is that that's in his first term yeah right so 72 he he wins re-election yeah so we're

yet to get to actually watergate itself but right 72 let's just let's just but let's just go through what he does in his presence so 72 the democrats do a sort of they do a british labour party in 1983 so they nominate a very impressive and admirable man who is a ridiculous man to choose as your nominees they nominate a man called George McGovern. He was a bomber pilot in World War II. He's a historian. Tom, he's got a history PhD. He's a very admirable, decent guy,

but he's kind of on the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. He's the Michael Foot. He is the Michael Foot of American politics. And right from the moment they nominate him, it's obvious that Nixon is going to win. The Republicans call him the candidate for the three A's acid amnesty and abortion amnesty for world for vietnam war draft evaders um and nick and mcgovern never shakes the tag and which nixon wins this colossal landslide massive lands biggest republican landslide i think ever at that point and if you want a clue if rich Nixon's tortured psychology, it's this.

What does he do on the night of that landslide victory? He goes alone to his study in the White House and he kind of turns off all the lights except this desk light. So he's sitting like this sort of really kind of rubbishy 1950s, 1960s kind of classical soundtrack, imagining ships clashing in the storm. So he listens to that silent, kind of alone, head in his hands. And then he gets out a pad and he starts writing down what people will say about him, about his failures. So he writes writes the opposition line will be rn let down his party um all this stuff oh if only he'd known what people would write about i know it's dominic i dominic i think that's the perfect note on which to go and take a break

okay so this episode is about watergate so far we haven't got to it's like you and scottish politics i know i know what thermopylae or whatever i know but that's fine i mean if needs be we can go into another episode that's that's i think we're clearly gonna have to do another episode so let's take a let's take a break and then when we come back um are you ready to to actually look i'm absolutely poised i'm i'm pumped okay brilliant okay fabulous when we get back, Watergate. Add free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets. Head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. Our topic today is Watergate and in classic Rest Is History style. We've done half an episode and we're yet to mention it.

So, Dominic, Watergate. What is it? What's going on? So, right from the start of Nixon's presidency, his administration had started crossing the line in terms, as we said before the break, it's an era of intense domestic turbulence but it's also an era when they're in a war okay just on that the question from guillermo

tay avalado we'll never get to watergate tom no no but this i think this ties in richard nixon's personality and anguishes have been storied and abused but how much was his seeming paranoia against his adversaries justified the us were on the height of radical mobilization by the early 70s um so is that the context is is nixon feeling yeah properly paranoid yeah i think it's not the 19 it's not the 1950s i think that's a reasonable point i mean even as henry kissinger famously said even paranoid people do have enemies um and uh they feel embattled at various points in his first term the white house is literally surrounded by student protesters so they can't really go out. And Washington is brought to a halt.

There is some domestic terrorism by kind of far left groups like the Weathermen in the late 60s, early 70s. There are the Black Panthers. I mean, all these things are kind of exaggerated a little bit within the Nixon White House. There's John Lennon. Yes, and Elvis offering to help bring him down um so so yeah so so nixon um i think nixon genuinely feels that nixon and kissinger generally they they feel they're in a war and they also feel that they can't trust the people around them so from 1969 onwards both nixon and henry kissinger are are constantly putting

pressure on other people to find out who's leaking. They call for FBI wiretaps. Kissinger wants his own staff to be bugged to find out who's leaking to the press. And in 1970, the Nixon administration, there's some of his aides talk about setting up their own intelligence service within the White House. Not the FBI, not the CIA, but answerable only to Nixon and his aides that will basically, you know, survey their enemies, sort of do dirty tricks, all these kinds of things. And you get the first.

And how legal would that be? Very completely illegal. But of course, Nixon and his aides are saying to each other, the kind of people in Nixon's White House are really important. So they're not often traditional party political people. They're people he's brought with him from California. They're people who worked in TV or advertising. They're loyal just to Nixon, not to the party or not to...

So who are the most significant? So his chief of staff is a man called H.R. Hulderman. So I think he's a former advertising man. He's loyal purely to Nixon. So this is kind of Praetorian Guard. Praetorian Guard. The Berlin Wall, as they're called. H.R. Hulderman, John Ehrlichman,

who is his domestic policy chief, a guy called Charles Coulson, who everybody calls an evil genius, who basically goes around telling everybody he's an evil genius. Right, like Dominic Cummings. Right, exactly. Who's his political...

Dr. Evil. Henry Kissinger,inger obviously is his national security advisor and a lot of these people don't have maybe not so much kissinger but the others don't have links to the traditional kind of press elite they're not part of that kind of what we in britain would call the westminster bubble they're outsiders okay and so again that is kind of a parallel with Trump. Well... To a degree. I mean, Trump brings in all kinds of odd people who... I suppose to some extent. But I mean, actually, this is...

Because some of these people are very bright people that Nixon has around him. They're bright, talented, self-made people. I mean, they're not the kind of flagrantly corrupt kind of characters. But in 1971, they do their first really big dirty trick the first antecedent of watergate which is there's been leaks from within there's been all these leaks about vietnam and a guy called daniel elsberg links the pentagon papers as they're called this huge

tranche of documents about vietnam to show the government has been lying about vietnam for years but you know going back to kind of kennedy and johnson he leaks it to the press kissinger and um nixon say this is utterly intolerable and they get a unit within the white house who call themselves the plumbers because their job is to stop leaks and the plumbers burgle daniel ellsberg's psychiatrist in i think it's los angeles to look for documents that will smear him and that's the first real serious criminality I would say and and does Nixon know what they're doing well this is the question we don't really know but I think it's I think Nixon definitely not in a wing Nixon undoubtedly knows that something's going on because we know that throughout 1971 he is

haranguing his men and saying i need you to find dirt on the opposition i need to go in and he comes obsessed with this one think tank in washington called the brookings institution which still exists he tells them again and again i want you to get in there and blow the safe and find out what they've got i mean at one point they the brookings is what of the yeah of this at one point they cook up a scheme what's what's why is he so he and find out what they've got i mean at one point they the brookings what of the yeah of this think tank at one point they cook up a scheme what's what's why is he so he doesn't know what they've got but he thinks it might be interesting so um so at one point listen to this at one point they're gonna he says why don't you firebomb it they have this plan to firebomb it and then they'll all be dressed as firefighters and they'll run in steal all the documents and run out again so plumbers and firemen yeah um and the guys he's got doing this are bonkers so one guy is called howard hunt he was in the cia and he was one of the orchestrators

of the bay of pigs shambles at the beginning of the 1960s so that's him the other man is even even more interesting man a brilliant man a man called g gordon liddy are you aware of this man he's the one who who gets nailed for it doesn't he yeah and he ends up being pardoned by reagan i can't remember he's basically he's a nazi he's dead now so i can say so when the bbc filmed him for their watergate documentary he had himself filmed um in front of this huge collection of guns that he owned. And somebody who was involved with that said to me, well, you should think that's bad. In the next room, he had all, like, Nazi flags and pictures of Lenny Riefenstahl and stuff. I mean, he's an absolute lunatic.

And he says on camera in the BBC documentary, you know, if Richard Nixon had told me to go and assassinate such and such a colonist, I was poised to do it. I was waiting for the okay so so you've given the sketch of nixon as a kind of moderate republican yeah with a with a lot of domestic and foreign policy successes to his name i mean clearly a very very able smart guy why is he employing a nazi i mean i know what i know what the counterculture of the hunter s thompson answer to that he's a fascist yeah but because he is a fascist yeah but but i mean he doesn't sound well i think gordon liddy is a bit of an out as eccentric and his and his sort of strange nuts i mean there is a story that he started showing footage of nuremberg rallies or something in the white house um trying for the will not raise eyebrows i think people just thought he's

eccentric they kind of smirked you know i i think they because i mean the rest of them aren't nazis they're nothing like nazis they're actually pretty moderate republicans as well but it's very dr strange it is a bit it is a bit but lydia is uh i mean so so they're hanging around they're hanging around the the nixon white house and and the the presidential campaign comes around and nixon says to his men because nixon believes in fighting really hard if not dirty They're hanging around the Nixon White House. And the presidential campaign comes around. And Nixon says to his men, because Nixon believes in fighting really hard, if not dirty. Even though he must know that he's going to beat the government. But, Tom, he's paranoid. He feels it's always been taken away from him.

He's always been cheated by the Eastern establishment. And right at the beginning of 1972, and he says i mean his the committee to re-elect the president as they call they're actually the crp but everybody calls them creep now because they're just kind of you know great exactly um they're having all these meetings and nixon says you know i need to find out that you're fighting really tough that you're doing tough things so so liddy and hunt have this ridiculous plans got operation gemstone they call it i mean some of it's absurd they're going to deliver i think they do do it they deliver they order a thousand pizzas and have them have them sent to the democratic national committee with a bill

yeah exactly just to kind of bankrupt right just laughable lydie also i mean lydie literally goes into a meeting and says i have a plan to i'm going to um hire a houseboat in miami and have it and have it staffed by the finest prostitutes in florida and then i will lure senior democrats to this house or whatever and they will be which which which presumably is playing into the kind of the dark quaker sense of maybe yeah well nixon's not in the meeting to be fair nixon's not in the meeting about the prostitutes but you're right i think well the amazing thing is that when you hear the Nixon people talking about this, as they do and have done in documentaries since, they don't just say, this was absolutely laughable

and we're all wetting ourselves with amusement. They seriously consider some of these ideas. And they allow Liddy and Hunt, these clowns, to keep kind of, you know, walking around the White House or whatever, suggesting mad schemes. I mean, it's a bit like all the CIA plans to kill Castro. Right, the exploding cigar. I can't believe that these guys are serious.

Remember, there was a seashell. They would plant an exploding seashell on the sea bed that he would pick up. And there was also, they were going to get powder that would make his beard fall out, that would humiliate him in the eyes of his cuban fans yeah i mean you just don't know do you whether people are sitting around in meetings just completely taking the piss or whether they genuinely think these are good ideas anyway anyway so basically they're having all these meetings and they come up with a scheme. They're going to bug the Democratic National Committee.

Now, the amazing thing about this, right, is that at this point, it's pretty obvious that Nixon is going to win the election by a massive margin. You know, he's going to coast. He could just stay in bed. So he doesn't need to stay in bed for six months. He needs to win the election. Everything is a shambles they break into the democratic okay okay so so just just before we actually do this um a question from miguel de miel what did the president know about the break-in and when did he know it so is is so is this being licensed by n? I think it's highly unlikely.

We don't know about how much he knows beforehand. It's highly unlikely that he knows operational details. On the other hand, it is likely that he knows they are going to do something. He knows they're up to no good. He is the very man who has been telling them about firebombing think tanks so he's been leaning on them he's been leaning on them the pressure is coming undoubtedly from the top what are you doing and in a way it's that weird thing where in any organization they just basically need to be able to tick a box that says

have firebombed somebody have ordered pieces you know yes to get nixon off their case because he's pestering them so they break into the democratic national committee in this sort of grim concrete monolith called the watergate building um which is in washington which is in washington and surprise surprise the bugs that they plant this they break in through an underground kind of um car park the garage at the bottom of the building and the bugs don't really they I don't know, they don't work or they can't hear anything properly. And they say, we'll have to go back in and bug it again.

So on the 17th of June, 1972, five men, I've got their names written down somewhere, if you'd like to know who they are. They are James McCord, Frank Sturgis, Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, and Eugenio martinez so they're basically the majority of them are cubans they are people who worked for howard hunt when he was in charge of kind of bay of pigs cuban exile cia stuff they're kind of true believers yeah they're kind of weird kind of cuban exiles sort of hanging around on the fringe of the cia massively

anti-communist massively anti-communist so if they're told they're doing a job for the White House, they'll be delighted. So they break him. And then there's this kind of comedy of errors. So the doors are sort of self-closing doors, sort of self-locking. So they have to put masking tape over the kind of, the bolts.

And the security guard, who was, what's his name? Frank Wills, I think his name is. He spots the tape and he thinks oh that's weird on the on the doors leading from the car the garage underneath the the building and he takes the tape off he then goes off they sneak back again and put the tape the door back again he comes back they've gone he spots the tape again he thinks this is really weird and he calls the police so the cops pitch up up. They arrest these five blokes, the walkie-talkies.

And what then happens is one of them in his address book has H.H., Howard Hunt, the guy who was one of the plumbers. And the FBI start to, they think this is weird. It's kind of some political crime. And they basically trace that number. And they're like, oh, it's a White House number they think this is weird. It's kind of some political crime. And they basically trace that number. And they're like, oh, it's a White House number. That's very weird. So at that point, the interesting point, the interesting question,

which some people have raised, I know, is at that point, what can Nixon do? What can the White House do? It's a difficult one. So six days after that that there's what's called the smoking gun conversation because of course nixon is taping himself he's inherited a taping system from lyndon johnson so what why is he taping himself don't um don't you tape all your conversations tom well i am at the moment um not not always why is he i mean that's a really good question previous

presidents had experimented with taping so lyndon johnson most obviously um nixon does it it's a weird kind of self-protection i think if i record my conversations they can't be used against me i'll have control over them people won't be able to say things that i haven't said um who knows i mean that's that's i mean there's a fatal flaw in that isn't there yeah well if you're saying something that's massively incriminating you just must make sure not to say anything stupid um and uh on the tapes i mean what what it means actually interestingly about nixon is i think richard nixon is probably possibly the most well-documented man who's ever lived in goodness because even even now in uh well maybe maybe social media and well maybe I don't know we have hours we don't have

private I suppose private conversations no that's the gold dust isn't it but the interesting thing is we have conversations that are utterly rambling inconsequential I mean there's some hilarious conversations. Nixon sits there with his sort of the Berlin Wall, as they're called, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Kissinger, and so on. And often they're just wittering in a way that would make us look erudite. I mean, they are. Nixon is sort of saying they're talking about how homosexuality

brought down ancient Greece. Nixon says he won't shake hands with anyone from San Francisco because they're talking about how homosexuality brought down ancient greece nixon says he won't shake hands with anyone from san francisco because they're all gay they have these ludicrous conversations about um which had more influence television or socrates um they're just sort of wittering good question and nixon is and they're always nick all his he's also slightly showing off to them because he's always got that thing of he's the school swat who wants to prove he's a kind of man's man so he's always he's the president isn't he yeah he's he's always kind of trying to show off and say you know but he's also trying to be more aggressive and reactionary i think than he is in reality so he says lots of anti-semitic things lots of racist things um which i which which people in other contexts have said

god i can't believe nixon could have been saying that because he was never like that but i think he's so it's like someone going going on a cricket tour tom no not on a cricket tour on social media or something and showing off exactly that's exactly what he's doing a lot of the time but anyway um that's a bit of a sidetrack so on the 22nd of june 1972 he has the crucial conversation with hr hulderman his chief of staff hulderman basically says to him he says what's going on with the watergate thing now i think that the way this conversation goes you can read the transcript suggests that nixon didn't have a lot of prior knowledge of the burglary he knows they're his

guys and he's like what are we going to do to fix it and hulderman says well it's not great you know the fbi are tracing the leads they've traced them to they're tracing them to hunt and liddy you know it's going to come inside the white house and nixon says well okay here's how we can shut this thing down what we'll do is we will get we'll call this you call the CIA, the head of the CIA, and you say to him, call the FBI and tell him this is a top secret kind of CIA-ish operation involving our Cuban guys. Don't follow this. It's national security. It's a whole can of worms.

It's just a bit of a mess. It's also a storm in a teacup. It's nothing. Don't get into it. Just off that's his that's his plan and um and that of course is the incriminating thing because that shows that nixon is right then trying to obstruct justice and that's the conversation the revelation of that conversation which we'll get to later on that's what really brings him down the fact that he knew straight away and he tried to stop the investigation in its tracks okay dominic you said later on we've i think we've we've recorded 50 minutes worth have we 43 minutes according to my 43

minutes okay well i reckon i reckon that this i think we should stop here and i think we should put out another episode to follow on tomorrow. Okay. And when we come back, we'll look at the attempts to cover up how it comes out. Yeah. And then how the process of the pardon and the afterlife of Watergate. Cool. I'm looking forward to it. I'm very excited about tomorrow's episode now.

And the reason this pleases me is that you were very rude at me. Because I didn't get to the Battle of Thermopylae and Salamis in time. No, you didn't. So I feel it's great. But we did get to the Watergate break-in. Come on, give me a bit of slack. Yeah, we did. We did.

Yeah, you did. You're better than me. All right. So thanks for listening to this episode, guys. We will be back tomorrow with the uh the aftermath of the watergate break-in see you then bye thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.