Watergate: The Corruption of American Politics and the Fall of Richard Nixon. - book reviews

"There was a whiff of the Gestapo in the chill October air," Fred Emery, then the Washington bureau chief of the Times of London, wired his newspaper after Richard Nixon accepted the resignations of his attorney general and deputy attorney general, dismissed the Watergate special prosecutor, and sent a squad of FBI men in to seal off the prosecutor's office, preventing its stunned staff from taking materials home.

Some in London thought his comparison of the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre to the activities of Adolf Hitler's secret police a bit "excessive," Emery recalls now. Since the skeptics, he suggests, included the paper's editor, William Rees-Mogg, one can imagine with some relish the cables on that subject flashing back and forth across the Atlantic. But Emery thought his arresting comparison perfectly apt, and was pleased to find some time later that Leon Jaworski, who replaced Archibald Cox as special prosecutor, had the same reaction that eventful Saturday evening.

Now, two decades after Watergate and its cover-up compelled Nixon's resignation, the indignant Mr. Emery has written a devastating indictment of the 37th president and his inner circle that goes a long way toward supporting that disputed Gestapo metaphor. Indeed, perhaps more than any book that has yet appeared on this much-chronicled subject, Watergate presents a bleak portrait of the chief executive who--in Jaworski's words--violated his presidential oath "by transforming the Oval Office into a mean den where perjury and low scheming became a way of life."

After the warm bath of forgiveness that attended Nixon's funeral this spring, Emery's book and the recently published Haldeman Diaries are icy plunges into reality, stern correctives in our assessment of a president who betrayed the trust of the American people.

The project grew out of Emery's work on a BBC-TV program about the fall of another leader, Margaret Thatcher. A young associate, after listening to Emery's Watergate stories, said: "We have to tell it again." Four years later, this bears fruit in a television series to air this summer on the Disney Channel and in Emery's simultaneously released book.

Series and book are nourished by fresh interviews with such Watergate principals as G. Gordon Liddy, John Dean, Charles Colson, Alfred C. Baldwin, Eugenio R. Martinez, Howard Baker, Archibald Cox, Robert Bork, Leonard Garment, Gerald Ford, Robert Reisner, and mour Glanzer. Emery also draws on some recently released White House tapes and a host of primary sources, all of which greatly enrich his narrative.

Despite his assiduous research, Emery's account does not significantly alter the broad outlines of the Watergate story as it has come down to us across these two decades (with the exception of a hitherto unreported, and ultimately fruitless, offer by John Mitchell to accept responsibility for Watergate, and to plead guilty, in exchange for the special prosecutor's pledge to eschew further pursuit of the president). Indeed, the net effect of this volume is to reassert the main themes of the Watergate story against certain revisionist efforts that have excited attention in recent years.

An article in The New York Times suggests that the BBC-TV series was inspired, in part, by a provocative theory about what was really behind the Watergate break-in, presented in 1991 by independent journalists Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin in their best-selling book, Silent Coup (and originally explored by Jim Hougan in his maverick 1984 account, Secret Agenda). The Colodny-Gettlin book suggests that one major reason for the Watergate burglaries was efforts by then-White House Counsel John Dean to uncover--and presumably exploit politically--dealings between the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex and a call girl operation located across the street in the Columbia Plaza apartment complex.

Silent Coup was roughly treated by some well-credentialed critics, in part because it was seen as an effort to exculpate Nixon and Mitchell and throw the blame for Watergate on the man whose testimony nearly sealed the president's doom--Dean.

But others were intrigued, among them the most tenacious of our investigative reporters, Seymour Hersh. The "revelations" of Silent Coup were among the factors that led Hersh several years ago to sign a major book contract for a fresh look at Watergate. Hersh has now abandoned that book and says today that he was unable to confirm most of the central tenets of the Colodny-Gettlin version.

Emery is even more disdainful of Secret Coup. Archly noting an "alleged connection between a ... call-girl operation and its links to White House and congressional personalities," he concludes that "hard evidence of the link to Watergate is lacking."

That two reporters as able as Hersh and Emery should find the "hooker theory" wanting does not--in and of itself--destroy the notion's credibility. Those of us who helped tell the Watergate story 20 years ago should, of course, beware any tendency to defend the received version against challenge by latecomers. I, for one, remain intrigued by the sleazy world of prostitutes and private eyes--the underside of the underside--which Colodny and Gettlin explore in their book. Where it all leads I'm still not sure. I am still inclined to believe that the principal motive of the Watergate break-ins was to find out what DNC Chairman Larry O'Brien knew about Nixon's surreptitious dealings with Howard Hughes. But even at this relatively late date, we ought not close the door on fresh avenues of research that may help us better understand the full dimensions of the Watergate story.