TO BE A FLY ON THE WALL
FLY ON THE WALL: It is hard to say when a historical event begins, but one place to start the story of Watergate might be February 16, 1971. On that day, President Richard M. Nixon and his faithful aide Alexander Butterfield stood by the president’s desk in the Oval Office. They were staring at the new, up-to-date recording device that the Secret Service had installed at the president’s request and hidden under his desk.
Nixon (turning solemnly to Butterfield): Mum’s the word.
FLY ON THE WALL: Some leaders, such as pharaohs and kings, have built pyramids or monuments so history will remember them. Nixon got a monument of his own words. He wanted a record of everything that was said in the Oval Office. According to H. R. (Bob) Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, the president wanted to use that record to write his own history.
Haldeman (looking back on Watergate): Nixon and I agreed something had to be done to ensure that we possessed an accurate record of what was said … for his eventual memoirs.
FLY ON THE WALL: Nixon didn’t want anyone except a few people on his staff to know about the devices recording thousands of hours of conversations—3,700 hours, to be exact. There’s so much tape that the recordings are still being transcribed to this day. There were seven microphones in the Oval Office: five in Nixon’s desk alone and one on each side of the fireplace. Dozens more were scattered around wherever Nixon might go. All of these microphones were hooked up to recorders hidden in a White House locker room that nobody used anymore. Almost every single word that Nixon or anybody else said in the Oval Office, including each phone conversation, would be recorded day and night. And everybody, especially a president, says things they don’t want certain other people to hear.
Haldeman: Mr. President, you’ll never remember to turn it on except when you don’t want it, and when you do want it, you’re always going to be shouting.
FLY ON THE WALL: Other modern presidents before Nixon had also had taping systems in the Oval Office. The two previous presidents, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, could turn their voice-recording devices on and off whenever they wanted to. But Nixon’s aides, including top aide John Ehrlichman, were afraid that the president wouldn’t be able to handle that kind of system. Nixon was a physically awkward human being. At award ceremonies during his presidency, he dropped so many medals (or accidentally stabbed the recipients) that his staff had to retrofit all ceremonial medals, like the Medal of Honor, to make them clip-ons.
Ehrlichman: We knew he’d never be able to operate the bugging equipment on his own.
THE GANG THAT COULDN’T BURGLE STRAIGHT
I don’t think I had ever seen middle-aged burglars in suits and ties. It was bizarre.
—Police sergeant Paul Leeper, who arrested the Watergate burglars
FLY ON THE WALL: Richard Nixon, a Republican, had been elected president of the United States in 1968; four years later, in 1972, he was running for reelection. That year, on May 25, a team of henchmen working for the White House gathered at the Watergate Hotel to break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), located on the sixth floor. They were especially interested in bugging the phone of Larry O’Brien, head of the DNC. Their plan was to rent a banquet room at the Watergate Hotel, sneak up the stairs to the offices of the people in charge of the Democratic campaign for president—Nixon’s rivals—and bug their phones. As long as they had to be in the banquet room (which they’d rented for only a few hours), they decided to have a fine lobster dinner with a nice selection of wines.
Security guard (poking his head in at the end of his shift): Your rental time is up.
FLY ON THE WALL: The men made a big fuss as they got ready to leave. During the confusion, two of the men—E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy (who’d planned the operation)—hid in a closet. They planned to wait until the hotel went quiet before sneaking up the stairs. In the middle of the night, they tried to leave the closet, only to discover that they were locked in. They had to wait until the cleaning crew came in the morning to let them out.
Hunt: Gordon, I know you like scotch, but don’t ever drink it at the Watergate Hotel.
Liddy: Why not?
Hunt: Because last night in that damn closet, I had to take a leak in the worst way. I was desperate. I finally found a nearly empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Red. It’s quite full now.
Liddy: Ah, I can see Larry O’Brien now with a puzzled look on his face, saying, “Funny, if I didn’t know this was scotch, I’d swear it was piss.”
FLY ON THE WALL: The determined burglars didn’t give up. They tried again after two days, and this time they got in and placed their listening devices. Later, they found out that one of the bugs didn’t work—maybe it was broken, or maybe it was the installation. A few weeks later, they tried again. They rented two rooms at the hotel. They also took a room across the street at the Howard Johnson Motel in order to have a lookout.
This time they relied on room service for their meal, and they avoided the closets. At 12:45 A.M. on June 17, the burglars moved into the stairwell of the Watergate. James McCord, a former agent with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), used masking tape to hold open the latches of the sixth-, eighth-, and ninth-floor stairwell doors—just to be sure the burglars wouldn’t lock themselves out. Unfortunately, he placed the tape horizontally across the latches, instead of vertically, which would have hidden it. A security guard named Frank Wills saw the masking tape. He took it off, thinking it had been left by the cleaning crew, and went on his scheduled break.
A few minutes later, when the burglars checked to make sure one of the doors was open, the tape was gone. So they replaced it.
A big mistake.
When Frank Wills came back from his break, he saw that the tape had reappeared. It made him suspicious.
Wills (in 911 call to police): There’s a burglary in progress at the Watergate.
FLY ON THE WALL: Upstairs, unaware that the cops had been called, the burglars couldn’t pick the lock to the DNC office, so they decided to completely remove the door. They heard footsteps in the stairwell and got worried, but now that the door was off its hinges, they were committed. They turned off their walkie-talkies so nobody would hear them.
Another mistake, as noted by police sergeant Paul Leeper.
Leeper: We didn’t jump out of the car and go running up there. You get so many calls like that—“burglary in progress”—and 95 percent of them aren’t worth anything.
FLY ON THE WALL: The fact that the burglary was at the posh Watergate Hotel, however, made the police decide to check it out. When the lookout across the street at the Howard Johnson saw some unknown men, he called Liddy and Hunt, the two in charge in the room they had rented at the hotel. The lookout wasn’t sure at first that the men were cops; Leeper was working undercover in his usual disguise—that of a hippie—which he often wore to blend in with drug dealers or political protesters. He was accompanied by Officer John Barrett.
Lookout: Hey, any of our guys wearing hippie clothes?
Liddy: Negative. All of our men are in business suits. Why?
Lookout: They’re on the sixth floor now. One’s got on a cowboy hat. One’s got on a sweatshirt. It looks like … guns … guns … They’ve got guns.… It’s trouble.
Liddy: [Expletive deleted] … Hunt and I realized that something was very wrong.
Barrett (shouting): Police! Come out with your hands up.
Wills: Five middle-aged guys stand up. They were wearing suits and ties and blue surgical gloves, and they had walkie-talkies and all this electrical stuff.
FLY ON THE WALL: The cops ordered the five burglars to face the wall. The cops were nervous because they had only two pairs of handcuffs between them, and there were five burglars.
Wills: Officer Barrett eyed one man with a black overnight bag in one hand and a trench coat draped over the other. Barrett yelled again, to raise his hands, and the man didn’t move. Barrett aimed his pistol at the man’s chest. Another man said something in Spanish, and his hands flew up.
Leeper (patting down the men): I found penlights, tiny tear gas canisters, the keys to Room 214 at the Watergate, and a spiral notebook with a key taped to the cover. I don’t think I had ever seen middle-aged burglars in suits and ties. It was bizarre.
FLY ON THE WALL: The burglars were carrying a stack of crisp, sequentially numbered hundred-dollar bills. This was not something the cops were used to finding on burglars. Usually burglars take money—they don’t arrive with it. When asked their names, the burglars gave fake identities. Unfortunately, two of them picked the same name.
Barrett: I said, “Wait a minute, fellow, you’ve got to get your stories straight,” and they giggled.
FLY ON THE WALL: While the burglars in the Watergate building had their hands up, Liddy and Hunt, who had arrived at the Howard Johnson lookout room, knew they were in trouble.
Liddy: We began packing everything of an incriminating nature that we could find. Howard slipped an antenna down his pants leg, which gave him a stiff-legged gait. We walked out. The place was swarming with police and squad cars.
FLY ON THE WALL: When Liddy got home, his wife woke up and asked if anything was wrong.
Liddy: There was trouble. Some people got caught. I’ll probably be going to jail.
FLY ON THE WALL: He would go to jail, and so would the burglars he had abandoned at the Watergate. When the police checked the burglars’ pockets, they discovered that the cash wasn’t all they were carrying. They had an address book that included the White House telephone number. Officers Leeper and Barrett called in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The Watergate scandal had begun.
The morning after the break-in, the five Watergate burglars—McCord, along with four men who lived in Miami and had ties to Cuba (Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martínez, Frank Sturgis, and CIA agent Bernard Barker)—appeared in court before Judge James Belson. The government, represented by prosecutor Earl J. Silbert, presented its case against the Watergate burglars. People called Silbert “Earl the Pearl” for the courtroom entertainment he provided.
Silbert (to Judge Belson): They should not be released on bond. They have given false names, have not cooperated with the police, possessed $2,300 in cash, and have a tendency to travel abroad. They have been arrested in a “professional burglary” with a “clan … des … tine” purpose.
Belson: What are your professions?
Barker: Anti-communist.
FLY ON THE WALL: The other burglars nodded.
Belson (beckoning McCord to step forward): Your occupation?
McCord: Security consultant.
Belson: Where?
McCord (softly): I’ve recently retired from government service.
Belson (loudly): Where in government?
McCord (in a whisper): CIA.
FLY ON THE WALL: Bob Woodward, a twenty-nine-year-old reporter from the Washington Post, was sitting in the courtroom. He leaned forward.
FLY ON THE WALL: At the time of the break-in, Nixon was relaxing in Florida. He did read a small article in the Miami Herald:
MIAMIANS HELD IN D.C. TRY TO
BUG DEMO HEADQUARTERS
Nixon: I dismissed it as some sort of a prank.
FLY ON THE WALL: Still, Nixon was worried. The first person he called was an old friend named Charles (Chuck) Colson, who served as special counsel to the president, meaning he advised the president on legal matters related to the administration.
Time magazine: Of all the sordid Watergate cast, Charles Colson was widely viewed in Washington as the wiliest, slickest operator and thus the least likely to be charged with a crime.
FLY ON THE WALL: Colson acted as Nixon’s “hatchet man”—a person hired to carry out disagreeable or underhanded tasks. His attitude might have been summed up by a sign he had on a wall in his house:
Nixon (to Colson about the Watergate scandal): This is not one that is going to get people excited because they don’t give a sh*t about repression and bugging and all the rest.
Colson: I think they expect it.… They think that political parties do this all the time.
Nixon: They certainly do.
FLY ON THE WALL: This was—and still is—a big problem. When people assume their political parties are corrupt, and when they worry about their own government eavesdropping on them, then if that society happens to be a democracy, the whole system falls apart. Democracy demands trust in the government’s essential honesty. But that didn’t seem to matter to Nixon.
Text copyright © 2019 by Andrea Balis and Elizabeth Levy
Illustrations copyright © 2019 by Tim Foley
