Graff, Garrett M. Watergate: A New History. Simon & Schuster, 2021.
O’Donnell, Lawrence. Playing with Fire: the 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics. Penguin, 2017.
Robb, David L. The Gumshoe and the Shrink: Guenther Reinhardt, Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, and the Secret History of the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon Election. [includes: appendix, Reinhardt’s confidential report on Dr. Hutschnecker]. Santa Monica Press, 2012.
Confession: somewhat reluctantly I admit to be of sufficient certain years to remember the goings on during the Watergate Affair. With more than casual interest I followed the always fluid developments. Glued to my television, I reveled in a bespectacled John Dean as he spoke of a cancer on the office of the president; read somewhere that Martha Mitchell opined that rumors to the effect that she’d been confined to a mental hospital were “… as crazy as can be”; and remember a news item that let us know Gordon Liddy saluted someone (McCord?) when he walked into the courtroom. I’m even old enough to remember the rancorous – even by today’s standards – 1968 presidential campaign, and even recall, though just barely, and hazily, the 1960 campaign, my introduction to electoral politics.
Thus my personal association with the trifecta of books cited above and the eras they so vividly capture. I actually did some time (the phrase is not coincidental) volunteering for one of the sides in the 1968 presidential contest (I’ll not divulge which side), but haven’t been much of an activist since. In any event, as of the writing of this post, the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in is upon us, give or take a few weeks, and a think piece on the break-in and -like events of the era, focusing on three books that caught my attention, seems apropos. Of the three books listed above two are (semi)-scholarly and one is popular. All the books have a progressive slant, Graff only mildly so, O’Donnell and Robb not so mildly. What is surprising is that, while the slightest, the Robb volume is in its way the most remarkable, and surely the most entertaining. But I get ahead of myself.
O’Donnell’s compulsively readable account of the dramatic events of the late Sixties (an era uncannily similar to our own), focuses on the ’68 election and compares favorably with Theodore White’s magisterial The Making of the President 1960. The book in particular gives strong coverage to the nuts and bolts of the presidential campaign (almost too strong in some cases, the detailed accounting of the primary season and the nomination process being one example). Other tumultuous events of that year are chronicled extensively, but the overarching idée fixe throughout is the Vietnam War, which drives so much of the narrative both as foreground and background. If there’s a hero in O’Donnell’s thesis, it’s Senator Eugene McCarthy (Bobby Kennedy ranks a close second). McCarthy cheekily challenged President Johnson for the Democratic nomination and ran against him in the New Hampshire primary as the anti-war candidate, and almost won. There are plenty of villains in Playing with Fire, but it’s no surprise that Richard Nixon emerges as the principal bad guy though LBJ is always lurking in the shadows.
Correctly or no, O’Donnell credits McCarthy more than anyone else with shortening the war and saving lives. But he gives us the real kicker in the last chapter, aptly titled ‘The Perfect Crime,’ in which he details what came to be known as the Chennault Affair, the short version of which is: four days before the election President Lyndon Johnson announced a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam as a strategy to end the Vietnam War. But there was a problem: operatives in the Nixon campaign were secretly communicating with the South Vietnamese government in an attempt to scuttle the peace talks taking place in Paris. They told the South Vietnamese to just hold out a little longer and Nixon would give them a better deal if he became president. The principal go-between for the Nixon campaign and the South Vietnamese delegation was Anna Chennault, a Chinese-born Republican fundraiser, widow of U.S. WW2 Major General Claire Chennault, and general woman-about-town in Washington. A nice bit of ironic trivia is that she lived at the Watergate, in the penthouse no less.
When he learned of the underhanded communications, President Johnson described the skullduggery as "treason." But he never went public with his knowledge, for fear of damaging the office of the president and needing to disclose that that he used government agencies, arguably illegally, to spy on Chennault and the South Vietnamese. Moreover, Johnson admitted that he lacked “absolute proof that Nixon was involved” (revelations in recent years present a clearer picture, i.e. that Nixon was very much involved).
Nixon won the election against Hubert Humphrey, barely, and his ‘better deal’ for the South Vietnamese ultimately extended the war another six years, cost an additional 21,000 American lives and untold tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, or more, Asian lives, and when the war finally ended in 1975, a year after Nixon’s resignation, the terms were essentially the same as those negotiated by Johnson in 1968 but never realized due to Nixon’s interference in the peace talks.
But perhaps the most long-lasting result of the 1968 campaign was the ascendancy of one Roger Ailes, Nixon political consultant and architect of the modern, mass media driven political campaigns and eventual chairman of Fox News. There’s also the, eerily prescient, politics of fear and divisiveness that drove, well, both campaigns really, but the Republican campaign used it especially effectively (remember Nixon’s law-and-order mantra and the Southern strategy?) with attendant electoral dividends.
There’s not a lot that’s new in Playing with Fire, but it’s presented in such a literate, cogent fashion that history buffs and politics junkies will take notice and find much of it little short of catnip. Still, how one reacts to O’Donnell’s take will in large part depend upon political sympathies. Like other things, good history, and good politics, is in the eye of the beholder.
"When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal"
We fast forward a few years, though not that many really, to 1971, where Garrett Graff’s Watergate: A New History begins. The mindset that led to the Watergate break-in and similar actions are covered in highly detailed, well-organized fashion in Graff’s densely packed account. Indeed, with Watergate: A New History, Graff has produced the most complete and thorough one-volume history of the Watergate Affair to date, and it should stand as definitive for some time, at least until new information, lots of new information, and new perspectives, are uncovered.
Depending on how one defines the origins of Watergate, the beginnings may go as far back as 1968, the year of the above-discussed Chennault Affair. But the true underpinnings of Watergate as a political operation didn’t take place until the summer of 1971, when Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers to various newspapers. Nixon initially was nonplussed about the Papers but, egged on by his advisers, eventually went ballistic. ‘The Pentagon Papers’ was a top secret Department of Defense study of American involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967, focusing on the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. The papers included the various lies and deceptions committed by the government. But here is the great irony: the word Nixon barely appears anywhere in the 7,000 pages and 47 volumes. As much as anything else the reason Nixon reacted so violently to their public dissemination was the top secret classification. In a word, Nixon was afraid. The main reason for the fear was the possibility that Ellsberg or someone else might leak additional documents that would reveal Nixon’s then undisclosed, potentially criminal, actions, such as the secret bombing of Cambodia. But even worse, somewhere in the Vietnam deluge might be evidence of the above-discussed Chennault affair and Nixon’s treachery. Thus Nixon became obsessed with leaks and created the infamous White House Plumber’s Unit, whose various extra-curricular activities included the break-in of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, the planned break-in – on Nixon’s orders – of the Brookings Institution (never carried out), illegal surveillance and wiretaps, and eventually the Watergate break-in and cover-up. Thus what we today know as ‘Watergate’ was only part of a larger umbrella of clandestine activities orchestrated by the White House at Nixon’s behest or done on his behalf. In his new study Graff lays out this thesis in excruciating (in a good sort of way) detail, employing updated sources but relying mostly on contemporary accounts. The inescapable conclusion is that the Watergate break-in and cover-up was really just the tip of the iceberg, and not necessarily Nixon’s worst crime [1].
As Graff points out, had there been no Watergate, Nixon may well have been considered a towering and positive figure in twentieth century American history, right up there with FDR as one of the great presidents [2]. Nixon signed the Clean Air Act and created the Environmental Protection Agency, signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act, transformed the Post Office into a quasi-private government entity, hiked Social Security payments, extended unemployment benefits, declared war on cancer, signed Title IX to give women opportunities in academia and on athletic playing fields, was an early supporter of civil rights (he advised then-President Dwight Eisenhower to sign the 1957 Civil Right Bill.), signed arms control treaties with the Soviet Union, re-opened diplomatic relations with China, and was the first American president to visit a communist bloc country, this despite his being a lifelong rampant anti-communist. Speaking of anti-communism, it must be mentioned that his handling of the Vietnam War is another, more complicated matter, perhaps less deserving of praise [3].
There are additional, personal qualities one can cite. Nixon was always loyal to his family; he was an outstanding law student (he was offered a full scholarship to Harvard, but declined); he was something of an intellectual and an avid student of history; he was loyal to a fault to his workers and advisers (and later abandoned them); Nixon established a scholarship at the Duke University law school; he served honorably in the U.S. Navy in WW2; he was a classical music buff and a fair amateur pianist, and had even once considered a career as a musician.
However, and it’s a big however … all the positive accomplishments were largely negated by a one-word scandal that led to congressional impeachment hearings and his eventual resignation from office. For better or worse, ‘Watergate’ and all its lurid associations would be forever symbiotically connected to Richard Nixon, overshadowing all other facets of his political life.
Graff’s writing style is fairly dry but he gets high marks for organization, especially so considering the Watergate Affair’s many intersections and cross currents. The detailed index and extensive notes section are first-rate but there’s no general bibliography. A welcome plus are the footnotes Graff inserts within the text that clarify and elaborate upon the basic narrative. Graff also fleshes out a few more details of the unsavory Chennault Affair but more or less treads the same ground as does O’Donnell [4].
Graff admits that even today a half century later, despite the myriad of information available, there’s still no definitive answers to the basic questions: who ordered the Watergate break-in; what was its purpose; did some of the participants have their own private agendas; how did it fit in with the other dirty tricks of the White House Plumbers; how much did the participants know, both before and during the break-in [5].
Amid the sordid, untidy nature of the whole affair, there are compensations: one of the great joys, if that is the word, of Graff’s telling are the insights he provides into the various characters involved in the Watergate business, their glories, foibles and absurdities. There’s the near pathological, single-minded intensity of Gordon Liddy and his highly imaginative – and expensive – ideas for sabotaging the operations of political enemies; the outrageously politically incorrect pronouncements of Martha Mitchell (among other things Martha alleged she was held hostage and drugged when she tried to talk to the press); a near senile J. Edgar Hoover and the Nixon administration’s attempts to lessen his influence as FBI director; CIA operative E. Howard Hunt, author of spy novels and later his own autobiography, appropriately titled American Spy. Then there’s the baroque convolutions in the arranging of the ‘hush money’ campaign funds used to pay off the Watergate burglars for their silence.
Of course the inescapable main character is Richard Nixon, and what emerges is a somewhat complex but mostly unflattering portrayal. The White House tapes alone reveal him to be one vile, sneaky, thin-skinned, vindictive, anti-Semitic, homophobic, misogynistic, racist, paranoid, foul-mouthed piece of work. But what we get, from all three books really, is a more complexly nuanced, if not exactly sympathetic, view of the man. In a word, Richard Nixon was a complicated guy. Moreover, in his own idiosyncratic way, he actually loved his country [6], but the great tragedy is that he loved power more, and as these three books remind us, he would do (almost) anything to attain power and hold onto it. And because of his conspiracist vision of the world, saw enemies everywhere – the press, judiciary, anti-war protestors, Daniel Ellsberg, leftists, hippies, intellectuals, and of course Democrats – intent on taking that power away from him [7].
We go back to 1960 with David Robb’s The Gumshoe and the Shrink, which basically tells the story of eccentric private investigator Guenther Reinhardt and his connection to the 1960 presidential campaign. Reinhardt was hired by Frank Sinatra (acting as intermediary for Joseph Kennedy, JFK’s father) to dig up dirt on Kennedy’s opponent Richard Nixon, especially if he could find evidence that Nixon was seeing a psychiatrist. Indeed he was [8]. Nixon started seeing Arnold Hutschnecker in the early 1950s and continued to do so intermittently throughout the decade. Hutschnecker’s checkered career included the revocation of his license to practice medicine for a year, but he rebounded by writing a best seller titled The Will to Live, one of the first self-help books to reach a mass audience. Austrian born, Hutschnecker received his medical degree in Berlin and practiced medicine in Germany until 1936, when he fled the country to escape the National Socialist regime. He set up his medical practice in New York as an internist but his specialty narrowed and he focused more and more on psychosomatic illness and depression. His high powered patients included Rita Hayworth, Elizabeth Taylor and the author Erich Marie Remarque.
With The Gumshoe and the Shrink, we’re propelled into a different, what shall we say, literary, universe. I hesitate to say a different moral or ethical, even political, universe, since most of the dirty tricks and duplicitousness we find in the 1968 election and Watergate, covered so well by Graff and O’Donnell, were around in abundance in 1960, the difference being that they were less visible, or, perhaps more to the point, less covered, actually less discovered, by the press. In any event, the difference is really one of style: despite their smoothly digestible prose and friendly organization, Graff and O’Donnell still have a scholarly patina. Not so Robb’s breezy page turner. Gumshoe not only flows like a novel, a good one, but the content seems more fiction than fact. Indeed, much of it reads like a whodunit, and some of the stuff in it seems so fantastical that it must be fiction. But the claims are documented with sources and when one checks them out they come in positive.
Gumshoe is also enjoyable for the depiction of the various and sundry, sometimes oddball characters who flit in and out of the story: Westbrook Pegler, depraved reactionary columnist and radio personality, who penned near-psychotic missives against Roosevelt, Truman, unionists, and imaginary communists [9]; Senator Joseph McCarthy, who makes an appearance in an especially appalling scene of drunken violence; Drew Pearson, muckraking journalist, Pegler nemesis, and the first to report the Nixon-Hutschnecker connection; India Edwards, ground-breaking political operative and the sacrificial pawn in the JFK Addison’s Disease imbroglio.
Given that there’s something juicy on just about every page of Gumshoe – incidents recalled, documents quoted, quasi-bombshells revealed – somehow this modest entry into an admittedly crowded field has managed to stay under-the-radar. Indeed, I’d never heard of the book till I stumbled upon it a few years ago at the local public library. Moreover, one can only wonder why a cinematic treatment hasn’t been done. I can’t help visualizing in my mind’s eye our two main protagonists in the story, and no, they aren’t Kennedy and Nixon but rather Guenther Reinhardt and Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker. For me the inevitable choice to play the dodgy, amoral Reinhardt would be Walter Slezak, an Austrian émigré and prolific 1940s actor who specialized in slippery characters, albeit with a philosophic, intellectual bent. Appropriately enough, he played a private detective in two of his best films, Cornered and Born to Kill. The role of Hutschnecker is a little more problematic, but an initial choice might be John Hoyt, character actor with an exotic edge who appeared in countless 1950s and 1960s television programs and films. Horror and sci fi buffs probably best remember him as the mad scientist in the cult classic Attack of the Puppet People. In any case, what the heck, while we’re talking movies, for the other two, more historically significant principals of Gumshoe, to play JFK I’ve got to go with Bruce Greenwood of 13 Days, and for Nixon, a tougher call, since lots of actors have played him, and done so very well. But my choice is Dan Hedaya, who with the obvious physical resemblance, also comes with the distinction of previously essaying Nixon, brilliantly, in the Watergate spoof Dick.
While Robb’s book is vaguely pro-JFK with its mostly positive portrait, Joe Kennedy cuts a pretty poor figure. Power hungry, absolutely ruthless, and more than willing to use his huge financial resources to further the political ambitions of his sons, his ambitions really, Joseph P. Kennedy actually had a lot in common with Richard Nixon. And JFK doesn’t emerge totally unscathed: during the runup to the 1960 Democratic convention, doubtless with his knowledge and approval, subordinates and surrogates repeatedly and categorically denied that he had Addison’s disease. This was a blatant falsehood, since he’d been diagnosed with the condition as far back as 1947. But Lyndon Johnson emerges as an even more unsavory character. A consummate old school politician and exponent of the win-at-all-costs philosophy, Johnson was a master of dirty tricks at least at the level of Nixon himself.
Gumshoe is admittedly not a perfect work: the chronology jumps back and forth and thus detracts from the real narrative – the 1960 election, and especially Reinhardt’s various machinations – which is the crux of the story. Still, the book is a thoroughly enjoyable, fast-paced read, and should appeal to a wide audience, from history buffs to pop culture enthusiasts to fans of cloak and dagger intrigue on the margins.
It seems nary a year goes by and a new Nixon biography or Watergate analysis, memoir, or tell-all exposé isn’t released. Each one peels back a few more layers of the Nixon psyche and reveals just a little bit more – the conniving schemer, frustrated social climber, criminal dissembler, misunderstood genius, tragic hero. Yet if the politician is an open book, solved long ago, the man remains an enigma, as mysterious and inscrutable as ever. We may not have Nixon to kick around anymore, but we still have the specter of ‘Watergate’ and all its after-effects, manifested mostly in the profound distrust of government and disdain for politicians generally. We may be finished with Nixon, or hope we are, but as the three books cited above remind us, he isn’t quite finished with us.
[1] To be totally equitable it wasn’t only Nixon who was held accountable for all things Watergate. Scores of cronies, subordinates, and other operatives, as well as dozens of big corporations, were charged with crimes. Several served substantial prison sentences, and their Watergate afterlives are a curious combination of obscurity and semi-celebrity: right-wing radio hosts, actors, political and business consultants, best-selling authors (predictably, several memoirs emerged), political columnists.
[2] Similarly, it must also be mentioned that, had there been no Vietnam War, today Lyndon Johnson would be considered one of our greatest presidents.
[3] I leave to others, i.e. professional historians and legal scholars, to determine whether Nixon’s directives in the Vietnam War qualify as war crimes. At the very least the horrific Christmas bombings in 1972 and the above-referenced secret bombings of Cambodia are sufficient to give one pause.
[4] Rumblings of the scuttling of the Paris talks had trickled out in the press as early as 1969, but nothing stuck, and by the early 1970s the story had all but disappeared from the political radar. Ironically enough, the next substantial mention in the public record of the backchannel negotiations may well have come from a most unlikely source: Anna Chennault. In her 1980 memoir The Education of Anna she describes communications she had with Nixon, John Mitchell and the South Vietnamese government. This appeared at least two decades before more details, the proof, if you will, emerged, and the Affair began to seep into public awareness, culminating in books like Ken Hughes’s Chasing Shadows and Don Fulsom’s Treason: Nixon and the 1968 Election. For an exceptionally detailed analysis of the Chennault Affair see: John A. Farrell, Richard Nixon: The Life (Doubleday, 2017), pp.342-44; 637n-640n.
[5] Almost to the point of tedium, Graff methodically takes us through the most commonly put forth theories on the actual motivation for the break-in. The scenarios range from the mundane to the downright absurdist. The official theory, probably the correct one: incompetent burglars broke into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate to bug the office or phone of party chairman Larry O’Brien, the ultimate goal to find incriminating or embarrassing information. A second, related, almost sub-theory, one that naturally alarmed the ever-paranoid Nixon, is that the burglars were looking for any incriminating information the Democrats might have on Nixon and the Republicans. And the theories get more creative: the burglars were looking for information about an alleged call-girl ring organized by the Democratic headquarters to arrange hookups with visiting supporters and VIPs. A different scenario, quintessentially Nixonian in its unsavoriness, is that of illegal foreign contributions to the Nixon campaign from the brutal Greek military junta in power at the time. These were said to total half a million dollars, and the Nixon campaign was concerned that the Democrats might have knowledge of such contributions. Then there’s the CIA connection: did James McCord and Gordon Liddy, former Agency employees, have their own, CIA-friendly agendas in the burglary? A final sub-theory is that the Democrats somehow had advance knowledge of the break-in and set a trap for the burglars. It’s also feasible that various overlapping elements of some or all the theories are correct. As the fellow said, we’ll probably never know the whole story.
Curiously, concern that the Democratic office might have the goods on the Chennault Affair seems not to have been an issue, at least as far as the conspirators were concerned. It’s very possible that Nixon considered the information so sensitive that he didn’t even entrust it to his redoubtable Plumbers.
[6] And truth be told, he did some good things. His most enduring, forward-looking accomplishments were in domestic policy, another Nixon irony, since he considered himself a foreign affairs specialist – a president is always judged by what he did in foreign policy, he often said. Nixon is also quoted as saying history would be kind to him, but historians would not, because most historians are leftists. A strange logic, perhaps, but there it is.
[7] Nixon’s paranoia was at least partially justified in that there were plenty of people intent on doing just that: taking power away from him.
[8] The ever Machiavellian Nixon may have been seeing Dr. Hutschnecker to learn psychological tricks to use against political opponents. This may have been the true motivation for Nixon’s visits. Then again, the insight into political psychology may have been an unintended benefit. We’ll never know for sure: in the eight books he authored, Nixon never once mentions Dr. Hutschnecker.
[9] Guenther Reinhardt wasn’t above doing a little communist hunting himself. In 1952 he authored a book titled Crimes Without Punishment, which Robb describes as ‘a masterpiece of guilt-by-association.’ In the book’s 322 pages Reinhardt alleges that Soviet agents or sympathizers have infiltrated all elements of American life. Hundreds of individuals were named. Most of the charges lacked any documentation or proof.
Further reading
Farrell, John A., Richard Nixon: the Life, Doubleday, 2017.
Greenberg, David, Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image, Norton, 2003.
Hughes, Ken. Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate, Univ. of Virginia Press, 2014.
Lane, Penny, director. Our Nixon [videorecording (DVD)]; producers, Brian Frye, Penny Lane; Cinedigm, 2014.
McGinniss, Joe, The Selling of the President 1968, Trident Press, 1969.
Summers, Anthony, Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon, Viking, 2000.
Wine-Banks, Jill, The Watergate Girl: My Fight for Truth and Justice Against a Criminal President, Henry Holt & Co., 2020.
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