Deliberate Sabotage
Four forces worked to achieve this symbolic murder of presidential authority, driving Nixon from office and enshrining the mythology of Watergate in America’s collective psyche. In the bureaucracy, it was the national security apparatus; in culture, rising anxiety over authoritarianism; in media, the hegemony of network television; and in law, the fanaticism of the college-educated elites.
When we dig into the origins of the Watergate affair, we see not an “imperial presidency” controlling the national security agencies, but an institutional conflict between the White House on the one hand, and the military, CIA, and FBI on the other. In this conflict, the president was not winning.
That was the atmosphere that prompted the creation of the Special Investigative Unit, first run from the White House, then from CRP. After the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Defense Department study on America’s involvement in Vietnam, were leaked to The New York Times in June 1971, Nixon, mistrustful of the other national security agencies, directed his domestic advisor John Ehrlichman to create this special unit. Members were called “Plumbers” because they were tasked with stopping leaks.
Nixon wasn’t wrong to mistrust the agencies. From at least November 1970 to December 1971, the Joint Chiefs of Staff ran a spy ring against the president. Led by Admiral Thomas Moorer, the military was worried about Nixon’s foreign policy shifts and his planned withdrawal from Vietnam. Collecting documents from the White House via Navy yeoman Charles Radford, they leaked to the press to compel the White House to change course. The Moorer-Radford affair, as it’s called, was wartime espionage on the commander-in-chief. It was, as a furious Nixon put it, “a federal offense of the highest order.” The president, however, opted not to publicize this scandal or to open prosecutions.
There was also considerable tension between Nixon and the CIA, arising over the agency’s intelligence failures and Director Richard Helms’s desire to guard the agency’s past secrets. The CIA was also adept at using the administration’s concerns about rising leftist violence to justify their current domestic activities. The Huston Plan condemned by Senator Ervin was not some sinister invention of Nixon’s but one that matched requests from the intelligence agency, giving it powers it was already using. And as the Senate later reported in 1975, the CIA “paid no heed” to Nixon’s revocation of the Huston Plan: “the decision of the President seemed to matter little.” An Inspector General’s Report also revealed that the CIA, like the military, spied on the president and may have known about Nixon’s secret taping system.