RICHARD NIXON WOULD LATER CALL the Watergate operation “a comedy of errors.” It was an understatement.
Howard Hunt had his wife call the Watergate Hotel to rent a banquet room for the night of May 26. Bernard Barker and his recruits returned to Washington. The plan was for Hunt, Liddy, and the men from Miami to enjoy dinner in the rented room, lingering until late at night. When the halls were empty, Barker’s team would sneak through an underground corridor connecting the hotel with the Watergate office building next door. They’d climb the stairs to the sixth floor and break into the offices of the Democratic National Committee—the objective was to place listening devices and photograph key documents.
A complication arose at ten thirty when a hotel guard told the guests he was locking up; everyone had to leave. Hunt and one of Barker’s men stayed behind, hidden in a liquor storage closet. They hoped to wait until the coast was clear, then tiptoe out and let the others back into the building. But the guard locked the banquet room door. They were unable to pick the lock, and the guard kept making his rounds, shining a flashlight into the room every hour. So Hunt and his associate spent the night in the liquor cabinet. When he could no longer resist the call of nature, Hunt reached for a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Red.
Early the next morning, after the guard had unlocked the banquet hall, the exhausted operative returned to the hotel room he was sharing with Liddy.
“Gordon,” he said, “I know you like scotch, but don’t ever drink it at the Watergate Hotel.”
* * *
The Plumbers tried again the next night. Barker and his men got inside, made it up to the door of the DNC offices, but couldn’t pick the lock.
They returned the next night with better tools. They got in, took photos of files and papers, and placed bugs in the office.
But the bugs didn’t work well. James McCord, a former CIA technician now working with the Plumbers, set up a listening post in a room of the Howard Johnson’s motel across the street from the Watergate. McCord could barely make out what was being said in the DNC offices.
So they went in again on the night of June 16. Before the building was locked for the night, McCord put electrical tape over the bolt of a door in the parking garage that opened to an inside stairwell. The tape prevented the door from locking. At 1:30 a.m., McCord, Barker, Eugenio Martinez, and two more Miami men went into the Watergate office building through the garage door.
McCord forgot to remove the tape.
On the balcony of a hotel room at Watergate, Liddy set up a walkie-talkie antenna. He went inside and clicked on the television, with the sound turned low. Hunt flipped through a newspaper. They waited.
From the window of the listening post in the Howard Johnson’s, McCord’s assistant watched the Watergate building through a pair of binoculars. At 2:00 a.m., he saw something.
“There’s flashlights on the eighth floor,” he reported to Liddy by walkie-talkie.
Just a routine door check by guards, Liddy assumed.
“Now they’re on the seventh floor.”
Liddy still wasn’t alarmed—not until the next communication from Howard Johnson’s a few second later:
“Hey, any of our guys wearin’ hippie clothes?”
Hippie clothes? That’s when Hunt and Liddy knew something was terribly wrong. As they would later learn, a guard had spotted the tape on the garage door. Suspicious, he’d called the police. The first officers to respond had been working undercover, thus the “hippie” clothes.
“Negative,” said Liddy. “All our people are in business suits. Why?”
“They’re on the sixth floor now. Four or five guys. One’s got on a cowboy hat. One’s got on a sweatshirt. It looks like … guns! They’ve got guns. It’s trouble!”
Liddy cursed. “Are you reading this?” he called to the entry team. “Come in!”
Nothing. Liddy tightened his grip on the walkie-talkie.
“Come in. That’s an order!”
Finally, there was a response from the entry team. Three whispered words. “They got us.”
Hunt and Liddy ran down to the street, jumped in their cars, and sped off. Liddy made it home, walked into his bedroom, and undressed quietly, hoping not to wake his wife.
“Is that you?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Anything wrong?”
“There was trouble,” Liddy told her. “I’ll probably be going to jail.”
He got into bed.
* * *
Richard Nixon walked into the kitchen of his home in Key Biscayne, Florida. He poured a cup of coffee and looked over the front page of the Miami Herald. The main headline was a routine update from Vietnam: “GROUND COMBAT ROLE NEARS END FOR U.S.”
Beneath that, and to the left, a smaller headline caught Nixon’s eye: “MIAMIANS HELD IN D.C. TRY TO BUG DEMO HEADQUARTERS.”
He started reading. Five men had been arrested in the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex. One of the men had identified himself to police as a former CIA agent. Several others were Cubans from Miami. They were carrying locksmith tools, electronic surveillance equipment, and, between them, fifty-three crisp, sequentially numbered hundred-dollar bills.
June 17, 1972. Police check the offices of the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s Watergate building after a break-in.
“It sounded preposterous,” Nixon later wrote. “Cubans in surgical gloves bugging the DNC! I dismissed it as some sort of prank.”
By the time he got back to Washington on June 20, the Watergate story no longer seemed funny. The ex-CIA agent had been identified as James McCord, currently employed by the Committee to Reelect the President—which was headed by Nixon’s former attorney general, John Mitchell. Two of the Cuban burglars had been carrying notebooks in which the name Howard Hunt was written. Hunt, known to be a consultant to White House Counsel Charles Colson, had since disappeared.
For the rest of his life, Richard Nixon would insist he had played no role in the planning or approval of the Watergate break-in. The evidence suggests this is true. He quickly realized, though, that close advisors within the White House and his reelection campaign had been involved.
“The White House has had no involvement whatever in this particular incident,” Nixon told the nation at a press conference on June 22.
In private Oval Office meetings, Nixon, Bob Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman discussed options for damage control. The president wanted to know who had ordered the job.
“Is it Liddy?” he asked. “He must be a little nuts.”
“He is,” Haldeman said.
“I mean, he just isn’t well screwed on, is he?”
Perhaps not, Haldeman granted, but he was working for people higher up, including John Mitchell. Complicating matters, the FBI had just discovered that the hundred-dollar bills found in the burglars’ pockets had all been withdrawn from a bank account belonging to the Committee to Reelect the President. It was only a matter of time before the FBI picked up Hunt and Liddy for questioning. And the problem was, they knew too much. Not just about Watergate, but about other jobs that could be traced back to the White House—most dangerously, the Ellsberg break-in.
With these facts in mind, Nixon and his team devised their strategy. They would get top officials at the CIA to tell the FBI that Watergate had been an intelligence operation, a matter of national security.
“They should call the FBI in,” Nixon ordered, “and say that we wish for the country, don’t go any further into this case, period!”
All approved the cover-up plan. Everything was recorded.
* * *
In the early morning light, a lone figure churned through the water of the swimming pool outside a Los Angeles apartment complex. This was Daniel Ellsberg’s daily routine now—thirty laps, starting at six o’clock.
With the trial set to begin soon, the Ellsbergs had moved into this complex near the courthouse. Patricia Ellsberg worked out her stress on the apartments’ tennis courts. During one game, after she missed a shot, a friend suggested she pretend the ball was the chief prosecutor, David Nissen.
She wound up and smashed a winner.
“That’s Nissen,” she snapped.
Patricia sold property she owned to raise funds for the Ellsberg-Russo legal team. Her father was wealthy, but his riches were definitely not available.
“Louis Marx presently refuses to see Dr. Ellsberg,” reported the New York Times.
For the lawyers, meanwhile, this was a difficult case to prepare for. Lawyers like to study precedents, similar cases that have come before. There were none. The government had never prosecuted anyone for leaking secret documents. One of the team, Leonard Boudin, explained to Ellsberg that to prove espionage, the government would have to show that Ellsberg had damaged national security—something Ellsberg obviously didn’t feel he’d done.
“That’s great,” he said. “So I’m home free!”
“I’m afraid it’s not as simple as that,” Boudin explained. “When the U.S. government goes into a courtroom and says to a jury, ‘The government of the United States versus Daniel Ellsberg,’ and presents twelve felony counts … you can’t be sure you will walk out of that courtroom a free man.”
“Well, what are my odds?”
“Fifty-fifty.”
Ellsberg did not feel reassured.
“Well, let’s face it, Dan,” said the lawyer. “Copying seven thousand pages of top secret documents and giving them to the New York Times has a bad ring to it.”