Everything we have found out in recent decades about the press’s role in Watergate has tended to confirm what Edward Jay Epstein suggested at the time: There is not really any such thing as “investigative journalism.” At least, the process through which such stories are crafted has little to do with our familiar media-flattering mythologies. It does not begin with a journalist hunting down a source. It begins with a disgruntled member of the power structure, eager to unload on his bureaucratic rivals, looking for a journalist to serve as an unwitting accomplice. Seymour Hersh, the greatest investigative journalist of his age, who produced forty New York Times front-page Watergate investigations in just over two months in 1973, had this explanation for what was going on that year: “Nixon was being fed to the wolves by his friends and enemies.”
Perhaps it has taken fifty years to gain the necessary perspective, but Graff is the first historian to have stressed what is now surely the most curious aspect of the Watergate scandal: We still do not know many of the basic facts about the burglary that gave rise to it.
What were the burglars actually looking for? Who ordered them into the building? And who on the burglary team knew what? . . . No one was ever charged with ordering the break-in, nor has anyone ever confessed or presented conclusive evidence one direction or another about what the burglars hoped to accomplish that night.
G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt led the Watergate break-in crew. Liddy was a very good lawyer. Hunt was a sophisticated thinker and a successful novelist, who recruited the burglars among commandos he had organized for the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba a decade earlier. Yet there is something almost comically adolescent about some of their plots to wrong-foot Nixon’s Democratic foes. Liddy imagined they would rent a glamorous apartment to entrap some of the hot young babes who worked for the Kennedys. He kept these plans in folders marked in big red capital letters “SENSITIVE MATERIAL.”
Much about the break-in makes no sense. If Liddy, Hunt, and McCord were bugging phones to gain an advantage in the coming election, then why did they tap the party headquarters rather than the campaign headquarters? Why did they tap the line of Spencer Oliver, a mid-level coordinator of state parties, rather than that of Larry O’Brien, his boss? Why did Liddy, Hunt, and McCord insist they were working on a CIA operation? Graff does not dismiss out of hand the allegations raised by Jim Hougan in Secret Agenda (1984), that the burglars actually were working for the CIA, or those raised by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin in Silent Coup (1992), that White House counsel John Dean had ordered the break-in for personal reasons involving the DNC’s management of a “call-girl ring” for visiting bigwigs.