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What the Fuck Do We Know Anyway: Nobody Knows Why They Broke Into the Watergate
TLDR: I recently became aware that there is no conclusive consensus answer to the question "Why was the Watergate Break In Ordered?" This despite practically infinite investigative, historical, testimonial resources and interest in the event. This shakes me. Do we actually know anything at all?
I recently finished Watergate: A New History by Garrett M. Graff on audiobook. I highly recommend the book, it is deeply researched and well constructed, combining a strong narrativizing tendency with an ability to show different and conflicting stories and testimony. It creates engaging characters without turning them into caricatures, delivers controversial facts without bias. The audio performance was engaging and well done, even doing a good job with footnotes, it was a good accompaniment to long walks and summer chores.
But the one thought that comes out of it that sticks in my mind, I can't let it go: Graff doesn't have a good reason why the Watergate break in happened. There is no conclusive answer to this question, Graff himself says no one quite knows. In 832 exhaustively researched and extensively sourced pages, Graff ends in a shrug concluding with quotes from John Haldeman himself who said "No one here today, nor anybody else I can identify, knows who ordered the break-in at the Watergate, or why it was ordered." and Ehrlichman: "The break-in made no sense to me, it never has."
First, Last, and Always a Farce
Some background, to refresh everyone: Nixon was running for Re-Election against Democrat McGovern for President. A major part of his re-election effort: The Committee to Re-Elect the President, or CRP or CREEP for short. CREEP had a "dirty tricks" or "ratfucking" unit that would play games like donating to an opponent's campaign from a fake communist student group, so the Nixon campaign could point out the donation to the press. Two operatives employed by CREEP, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, were ex-FBI and CIA operatives respectively, and fanatically loyal to Nixon. They both proposed a vastly expanded ratfucking campaign, that would include everything from kidnapping or mugging DNC operatives in the street, to extensive wiretapping, to electronic surveillance at all McGovern events from a follow car, to murdering or drugging political enemies. ((FHM note: never trust anyone who uses a first initialism and his middle name, too melodramatic for my taste)) Both fancied themselves romantic figures, Hunt wrote spy novels in his free time. They had a tendency towards dramatic gestures and announcements. Liddy was known to demonstrate his loyalty to the president at dinners by holding his palm over a lit candle while those at the table watched and smelled it burn. Hunt would, in the midst of the later scandal, loudly announce to his superiors that if they wanted to get rid of him all they had to do was tell him which corner to stand on to get shot and he would be there when ordered. This kind of behavior, and trying to name CREEP the even creepier ODESSA after the mythical organization of ex-Nazis popular in fiction, really just weirded out most of the political staff in the White House, they were viewed less as scary secret-agent men and more as LARPer weirdoes.
Their original "gemstone" proposal to launch covert war on the Dems was turned down, partly for budgetary reasons partly because everyone else thought it was fucking insane, in favor of a smaller plan to maybe wiretap DNC headquarters in DC or something like that. Graff traces a lot of the problems to a tendency in the Nixon Whitehouse to never say "no" but instead bargain people down to a smaller version of whatever they wanted to do.
The Break Ins
Graff traces the start of the path a little earlier, to the break-in at the office of Pentagon Papers' leaker Daniel Ellsburg's psychiatrist, where CREEP hoped to find damaging material on Ellsburg which could be used to destroy his credibility. That affair was equally shambolic. In May, they moved on to the DNC. From Wikipedia:
This is more or less a neutral summary of the consensus core events of Watergate. They definitely broke in to tap the phones in May, the bugs didn't work, they broke back in later and were caught. But there's a lot of variation in accounts of why they broke back in.
Diverging Possibilities
-- The general theory is that Nixon wanted to know what the DNC was going to do, what they had on him in their oppo files, and anything he could get on them to use against them. It is unclear how useful anything that was or could have been found out in the break-in was or would have been. This is almost certainly not entirely true or explanatory. And anyway, wiretapping is always portrayed as a simple in and out, but no one talks about the long-term effort required to sift through phone calls all day to find the useful content. That seems unrealistic in my mind? It would have to be something really important, something targeted that they could quickly skip through calls that weren't relevant, or it would be virtually impossible to just sit through every call hoping you found something controversial.
-- Graff seems to see a likely throughline from the Ellsburg break-in to the Watergate, maybe seeing a paranoia that the DNC might have known about the other break-in and launching another break in to find out. Intelligence operations are self-perpetuating: one leads to cover ups leads to cover ups of cover ups leads to discovery.
-- One account traces the story to a high-end prostitution ring active in DC political circles at the time. John Dean, Porsche-driving playboy young Whitehouse counsel later made famous by Watergate, was dating a girl who may have been mixed up in the ring. The purpose of the bugs and the break-ins was, by this account, to gather counterintelligence in case that story should break. Find out what the Democrats had on Dean, and find ties between some Dems and the prostitution ring, so that if they try to break the story they can be kept quiet. Some even claim that Dean ordered the break-in himself, that this was more personal misuse of campaign assets than political effort. This explains some of the weirdness around which phone lines were actually tapped. But I find it ultimately unsatisfying and anachronistic: Dean wasn't that important at the time, he only became important later. Promoting him to central figure feels more like conservation of characters in a novel than it does like a real version of events.
-- The Cubans, four of the burglars, were all told they were looking for ties between the DNC and Castro's Cuba. This is more or less facially ridiculous, there is almost no chance that Cuba was funding McGovern to any degree. But, did they believe it? Maybe. Or maybe they found it beneficial to pretend that they did, to act like they were passionate anti-communists but unsophisticated, immigrants being manipulated by the evil YTs in charge, and the media and justice system were willing to excuse them as rubes in favor of targeting others. But hey, maybe there was something there, or maybe Hunt and Gordon thought there might be, stranger things and all.
-- The only actual wiretap ever found at DNC headquarters, on DNC head O'Brien's phone, was later found by the FBI when the Watergate scandal had already broke, and was so antiquated and weird that many believe it was actually planted by the DNC to be found by the FBI team, to provide proof that Nixon had tapped their phones. It was simply too old and too obvious to have been done by the actual Plumbers team.
-- Several of the burglary team note that McCord disappeared repeatedly, without explanation during the event. Many theorize that while the Cubans had one mission, McCord may have had another, secret mission that has never been revealed. Secrets within secrets, plots within plots, maybe most of the participants lacked the whole story. In general, Hunt, Liddy, McCord are theorized to have stayed on CIA payroll throughout the scandal, and their actions are regarded suspiciously, maybe the Agency was in charge all along.
-- Many have raised suspicions about why the "Bum Squad" just happened to be on hand, close by, on a day they shouldn't even have been on duty. The Bum Squad worked Vice, which would include prostitution, tying back to the high end prostitutes theorized to be at the center of the counterintelligence scandal. Could it be that the DC Police tipped off in advance? Why was the lookout "distracted" during a pretty short window when he actually had to work?
-- Why was Nixon doing shit like this when he was almost guaranteed to win? This ties into conspiracy theories that the whole of Watergate was a set-up to get rid of Nixon, that the CIA and Deep State wanted Nixon out and set up the whole burglary plan to trap him. This is somewhat belied by Nixon's own decision making, he probably could have survived the break-in had he come clean about it early, it was only the long cover up that sank him.
There really is no satisfactory answer. The confessions and memoirs of participants are contradictory, and most of them are now dead. We really will never know. And that is horrifying to me at an existential level. I'd consumed enough Watergate mentions in history books and History Channel Documentaries back in the day to understand the outline of the story, but I'd always thought that it was a lot more clear than it was. That Nixon had ordered the break in, that the wiretaps had worked, that Nixon was bad because he had done something. I never realized how shambolic the whole operation was. Perhaps the most horrifying explanation: the whole thing was a kind of weird botched abortion of the Gemstone plan originally proposed by Liddy, a negotiated-down version that really achieved nothing. That the whole operation just sort of happened because no one at the top quite said no we can't do that, and the people at the bottom wanted to do something adventurous to justify their role at the campaign, and that it probably achieved nothing and never could have achieved anything. That a presidency was brought down by a pointless exercise in machismo by operative who had only met him briefly if at all. Or maybe one of the deeper conspiracies explains the whole story?
I don't know! And the fact that I don't know, that we don't know, that one of the most thoroughly turned over and published and investigated stories in human history, a story which took place in the 20th century when we had all the technology to record information, a story which has spawned hundreds of books and memoirs and movies and reams of newspaper articles and hours of interviews, a story that launched numerous careers, that all that can't answer a basic question of fact about the crime at the heart of it? That's driving me crazy. What the fuck do we know anyway?
Other Thoughts on the Book
-- The one criticism of the book I would offer is its revisionist tendency towards Woodward and Bernstein. WoodStein is the only figure in the book consistently singled out for negative implications to every action. This is one of the weaknesses of books that seek to take part in a "discourse" on a historical topic, I would imagine that all the negative attention lavished on WoodStein's inaccuracies, fibs, self aggrandizement and exaggeration of his own role would scandalize my mother, who grew up during Watergate and read All The President's Men around that time and saw the Redford movie in theaters, she would have felt like this was puncturing an important myth. I read a few of Woodward's books in my life, though never All The President's Men and recognize his status as an investigative reporter from Watergate, so I kind of get what Graff is doing here, he's engaging with the myths of other Watergate books and media, bringing them down to size. I wonder if Zoomers, for whom Watergate will feel like Teapot Dome or Tammany Hall does to me, will be confused by it. I've definitely had the experience before of reading an ostensibly neutral work of history that became self consciously revisionist and caught up in the discourse, and found it confusing when I wasn't aware of the broader conversation it was engaging in. Authors should be cautious of this tendency.
-- The book is loooooooong. The scandal was loooooooooong. The first events reach public light immediately in mid '72, Nixon wouldn't resign until two years later. Throughout, a trickle, a drumbeat, of revelations reached the press. We can't expect scandals to work fast. There's a tendency to start dismissing a scandal because it's been going on too long and nothing has happened. It's easy to imagine a '70s mottizen posting: "God, can all the turbolibs just get over it already? If they had anything on Nixon with Watergate they would have done something with it years ago!" People back then did say that.
-- On a personal note, a local abandoned factory was recently demolished. I've been driving by it my whole life. The historical society detailed in the local news, how the factory came to fail: Watergate. The owners were among the business leaders tapped, pressured, cajoled by Nixon and his team into donating cash illegally to CREEP, which then used the funds for ratfucking operations. Their cash was actually traced to hush money payments made to the burglars after their arrest! As a result, consumers shunned the company, and it folded soon after, with the building just kind of hanging around for decades. The consequences of Watergate weren't limited to Washington, sweeping up everyone from dairy farmers to George Steinbrenner, who thought he could buy wins in Washington and not just in baseball.
-- On the Deep State: near the end, Nixon was doing as little as four minutes a day of actual work according to his daily schedule, and mainly drank and moped. Kissinger issued, on his own authority, an order to all US military forces that no order from Nixon was to be followed unless countersigned by Kissinger. As Nixon's power evaporated, his cabinet stepped into the void, and Kissinger's long tenure and intelligence lead to him accruing vast amounts of power outside of his immediate purview. Al Haig is sometimes called the "37.5th" president due to his work at this time. For the most part, 1974 was a guide to how the US Government functions without a functional president.
-- Favorite part of the book, A Nixon aide told the following joke during the Watergate scandal:
"How would a Polish President have handled Watergate?"
"I don't know, how?"
"Pretty much like this."
I have always been of the opinion that Watergate was just standard dirty tricks of the era that the press got in the mood to actually cover because they hated Nixon and the main reporters given the story were cub reporters who didn't know that FDR had done 10x of Watergate regularly. Nixon is merely a victim of Mark Felt and a press that hated him because he did normal things that happened to be technically illegal. But his opponent Kennedy several years before probably did 10x as much wiretapping and breaking and entering to no coverage.
Was it a setup? I dont think so. It was just a frame up. Something that every other presidential candidate had been doing for decades was done by Nixon, and his team was caught because law enforcement wanted to catch them and then the press wanted to press the issue so it became a big deal instead of becoming the primordial version of the Joe Biden classified documents case.
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There were two other figures of great significance here who used the same name pattern--J. Edgar Hoover and W. Mark Felt (and to a lesser degree, L. Patrick Gray).
Hoover was famously the Director of the FBI for decades, spanning multiple presidential administrations. It's pretty common knowledge that he did an epic amount of empire-building over his career, and that the major players in Washington feared to cross him. He died in office during Nixon's tenure as President.
At the time of Hoover's death, Felt was the Deputy Associate Director of the FBI, assisting the elderly and infirm long-time Deputy Director Clyde Tolson. Nixon appointed L. Patrick Gray as Acting Director, later appointing him as full Director, and finally naming William Ruckelshaus Acting Director following Gray's resignation, despite Gray's recommendation of Felt for the role. Felt resigned from the FBI after a month or two of conflict with Ruckelshaus.
Felt was bitterly resentful at being repeatedly passed over for the Directorship, but in my view, a point often missed is that the role he really wanted was 'heir to Hoover's legacy,' a vastly more influential position than simply 'Director.' Both Gray and Ruckelshaus were appointed as Director from outside the FBI--intentionally, as Nixon wanted to break Hoover's legacy, not permit the rise of a second Hoover.
Nixon was suspicious of Felt, and was informed of the rumors that Felt had been leaking to the press, though Felt adamantly denied any such thing. It wasn't until 2005 that Felt finally 'confessed' that the rumors were true, and that he had been...Deep Throat.
Giving rise to the common expression, "to take the L".
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Thoughts on J. Robert Oppenheimer?
Best beatdown of Thanos since Squirrel Girl.
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H. Ross Perot should have really found a way to get involved.
It really does seem to have been a thing during that period. I'm inclined to agree with @FiveHourMarathon in disliking the choice on aesthetic grounds.
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There's a very famous interview with Prof Feynman about magnets that has a really good point about why questions. Why questions require that your question live in a framework where there can be assumed facts. If not it's just why all the way down.
To tie it to your quandry, you have to can't get anywhere until you accept that some portion of the people you ask their motivation then reveal their actual motivation, when there's no good reason for them to do so, you can't really answer why something happened. The best you can do is make guesses from the little you can observe. At least until we get really quite a lot better at fMRI or mind reading.
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Conspiracy theory is thinking it's normal and not ultra mega suspicious the biggest story of decades is given to a junior 'journalist' whose previous work was handling most secret communications for the boss of the entire US navy!
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I assume this is a typo on your part but there's an inconsistency between your Wikipedia quote and what I assume is a book cite.
...
As to motivation I don't see why "they thought it would yield intelligence useful to the campaign" is insufficient. Maybe they, themselves, didn't have a particular piece of intelligence they thought it would yield. The way you describe Liddy and Hunt make it sound like they were "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" types.
I probably got it wrong. I love a good nonfiction audiobook, but it's a lot harder to look things up to refresh memory. That scene was like eight workouts and four dog walks and doing all my laundry ago!
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One bit that jumped out:
Not just historical!
For a modern case study, look at the Alex Marinos ivermectin “conversation.” Setting aside his factual basis, he kept leading off with weird shots at Scott or whoever else had cachet among his audience. Opponents can’t just be wrong, they have to be suspect and dishonest, because he’s selling his audience on a specific image. Whatever level on which the establishment is operating—you’re one higher, right? You’re not falling for the same tricks.
I’ve argued before that this is the driving factor behind most of the unhinged academic papers that get thrown around. They’ve got to commoditize surprisal. In an attention-based economy, there’s every incentive to be just a little more inflammatory than your peers.
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Have you read Geoff Shepard's book (The Nixon Conspiracy) or listened to any podcasts with him? Shepard was a young aide in the Nixon White House and as part of his junior lawyer duties was one of the first people to originally listen to the tapes to review them for problematic material. Recently, as an older man, he got access to a lot of the prosecution documents and then wrote a revisionist history. I haven't read the book in full, but Iistened to a podcast with him and it was very interesting.
Basically, he argues Nixon was completely unaware of the break-in, he was not trying to cover it up, but that he fired special prosecutor Cox because Cox had totally gone rogue, including giving the person much more responsible (Dean) a slap-on-the-wrist plea bargain. The specific trigger point for the firing was Cox reneging on a deal about the tapes, which Nixon thought would show people that Cox was being plainly unreasonable.
Shepard also argues that:
The 18 minute gap was actually likely due to a mistake by the transcriber and it is extremely unlikely that it covered up any key conversations. He additionally notes that it was Nixon's lawyers inside the Nixon White House that discovered the gap and told the judge, but it was then portrayed to the public like the special prosecutors had on their own discovered this nefarious destruction of evidence.
Another famous incriminating line from Nixon supposedly showing Nixon calling for a cover-up was actually a mis-transcription and mis-interpretation of a very low quality tape.
The famous "smoking gun" tape in which Nixon is giving the OK to tell the CIA to stop the FBI from interviewing a certain witness, turned out to have nothing to do with Watergate, but was due to wanting to cover-up a legal campaign donation that was coming from a well-known Democrat (who did not want it known that he supported Nixon).
So all-in-all, Nixon did not try to cover-up Watergate, he could not come clean about it because he actually did not know about it. What got him in trouble was thinking the special prosecutors team was actually trying to find the truth about what happened, when in fact they were on a fishing expedition to take down Nixon. At that point he was screwed, if he tries to block them, it looks incriminating. If he allows them to do anything they want, well, besides the embarrassment of having all the internals of the presidency leaked to the press, no presidency can survive a team of prosecutors going Beria ("find me the man I'll find the crime") on his entire staff.
I haven't heard of him personally, do you have any recommendations for a podcast appearance of his? I'd be interested in learning more!
I do think Graff addresses a lot of these arguments. It is extremely unlikely that Nixon knew about the break-in plan or approved it in advance, though not impossible given that we don't actually no who gave the final go-ahead.
The "missing tape" gets a lot of attention in the book, and I'm not really convinced either way. Given the stuff that did come out on the other tapes, it seems odd to think that there was one 18 minute conversation worth erasing.
What's your position on the various other Nixonian controversies? One of the problems that Nixon had, in my mind, was the variety of other scandals hiding just under the surface of Watergate and the plumbers. The Milk Price Fixing, the Chennault affair, the Ellsburg break-in. The bombing of Cambodia was considered as a separate grounds for impeachment, but pulled to try to unite Republicans around Watergate.
So for example, he was hesitant to come clean and cut Hunt et al loose because he didn't want Hunt blabbing about the Ellsburg imbroglio, etc.
Reminiscent of today: Nixon might not have done what he was accused of, but he did a whole hell of a lot else.
Then again, he was a uniquely effective president in the 20th century. Arguably the most important president after FDR, despite having only one term and change before being disabled by Watergate.
The thing that bugs me about Nixon is one of the things he often gets a ton of credit for, a rapprochement with China, we can see with retrospect totally screwed us over. Why didn't we actually resolve the Taiwan issue? Because Nixon wasn't actually negotiating from a position of strength. He wanted the electoral glory of a deal.
And now, like 50 years later, we are really, really regretting not figuring out the Taiwan issue back when we actually had leverage (a seat at the UN security council is a big deal)
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I think the podcast was this one:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/06/podcast-everything-you-know-about-watergate-is-wrong-part-1.php
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/07/podcast-everything-you-know-about-watergate-is-wrong-part-2.php
Shepard covers this in chapter 11 of his book, available on libgen, if you are interested.
From reading Caro's LBJ series, Flynn's book on FDR, skimming Lasky's "It didn't start at Watergate", reading an establishment history of the FBI, etc, it seems like there was a much higher-level of criminality and dirty tricks in politics from FDR onward than what the American people were aware of. The FBI performing break-ins, for instance, was something they had been doing for a long-time. I remember talking to a Trump-hater about how he stank of corruption due to all his dealings with foreigners -- she had simply no idea of that this kind of stuff is par for the course for any modern elite, see the Clinton Foundation, or Bush dealings with the Saudi's, etc. I suspect that Nixon, like Trump, was actually more law-abiding than average because he knew he was in less of a position to work the system in his favor. That is why Nixon did not just simply destroy the tapes early on (and he did not destroy them because he thought he was innocent and thought there was nothing incriminating on them).
This is an interesting case because under classical international law a 'neutral' country forfeits its rights of sovereignty if it cannot prevent one of the fighting powers from using it as a base of operations. USA was fully justified in entering Cambodia to get the Vietcong. However, it certainly makes me queasy to use bombing to get the Vietcong, a method of warfare with a very high rate of collateral damage, especially when that collateral damage is on peasants in a country that wanted to stay out of the war. I'm not sure what I would have done if I was President in that situation. Maybe just build a big concrete wall from the sea all the way to the Mekong at the 17th parallel?
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What's the background on the special prosecutors team, why were they so hostile to Nixon?
Nixon is the classic unliked by insiders president. He won 49 states while losing 90%+ of the press.
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Archibald Cox was the special prosecutor, and a long-time Kennedy man with a lengthy history as an advocate of progressive thought, who'd then gone into private practice to further what he saw as Kennedy's civil rights and union legacy.
His appointment was weird, given that: the combination of extremely wide power and Being On The Other Team is not normally what you'd expect, given that he was appointed by Nixon's attorney general. The official story is that Elliot Richardson had gone through a list and Cox was the first who could even be persuaded to consider the appointment, at the same time that the (then-Democratic) Senate was threatening to assign a clearly-partisan investigator, but Richardson's role to go after Spiro Agnew gives a lot of space for conspiracy theories.
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Nixon's Attorney General appointed a Kennedy man, Archibald Cox, as special prosecutor.
From Wikipedia:
Notice that last bit of editorializing by Wikipedia ... perhaps Nixon was actually genuinely earnest when he said '"get to the bottom of it" "no matter who[m] it hurts."' because Nixon knew that Nixon was innocent and actually wanted the real criminals rooted out and for Nixon to be cleared.
Beyond that...the entire "east coast liberal establishment" hated Nixon, and so by default if you staff a team of aggressive lawyers in Washington you are going to staff it with east coast Ivy League liberals who hate Nixon and would love nothing more than to make a name for themselves by bringing down a president. So he was likely to get an office staffed with anti-Nixon partisans unless one specifically sought ought either conservative extremely principled neutral lawyers.
If we believe Shepard's story and sympathetic to Nixon, we would say that his Attorney General Richardson dramatically underestimated just how ruthless and Machieavelians the liberal-Democratic establishment would be. Richards expected a thorough investigation, but expected that they would still be playing it fair.
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So…is that credible?
Because it sounds a lot less likely than Nixon actually trying to cover it up.
I've never done a deep-dive on Watergate, I've never read competing accounts and compared who's footnotes are getting everything right versus who is being dishonest. I did do a deep-dive on Trump's Russia-gate scandal, and basically my conclusion was that Trump was innocent of any sort of "collusion" or obstruction of justice, albeit he did lie to the public on certain things and that the special prosecutor team was on a malicious fishing expedition. So I am predisposed to believe Shepard's account, that the same thing was done to Nixon.
From the limited amount of I've checked up on Shepard's account:
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I assume it works the same as in companies; an executive orders something with no understanding of how difficult or inefficient it is. Either everyone is afraid of giving pushback or he just won't listen to any pushback, confident in his own ignorance, and so it gets done.
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From what I know of Nixon (which is admittedly not enough to have a firmly held position), this all seems entirely consistent with the core of his personality as a deeply insecure man that was sure everyone was out to get him. As others have noted, the reality is that a lot of people were out to get him! Nonetheless, his insecurity is something that his enemies could consciously use against him, and it doesn't seem out of character for him to have been willing to go along with some extremely sketchy characters and then justify a coverup. While adding in some anti-Nixon conspiracy doesn't simplify the story, it does tie it together more coherently without adding any elements that seem implausible for the people involved.
There's so much about the whole thing that seems so very relevant to modern scandals, with the most striking part being that very few people seem to be able to articulate what exactly the events that occurred were with any degree of accuracy. This is true of both supporters and enemies of both Trump and Clinton. What exactly did Trump just get convicted of? What did Hillary Clinton do with an email server? What was Nixons' role in Watergate? I would bet quite a bit that fewer than 10% of people that have strong opinions on the matter could pass a pretty simple test about the facts.
@Skibboleth
This is where, in the standard thumbnail psychological sketch of Nixon, we talk about the Franklins and the Kennedys and how he just never felt loved. One theory is that the break-in was trying to dig up dirt on Ted Kennedy re:Chappaquidick, as part of Nixon's long running grudge against the Kennedy clan he always felt got away with everything. There was definitely a degree to the whole ratfucking enterprise by which Nixon self-justified by pointing to his enemies' actions and to his even larger suspicions of their actions, he felt this was revenge or par for the course variously.
Shades of the psychology of Fascism, how the worst atrocities often come from a sense of having been oppressed oneself.
The majority of people who wanted Clinton in jail saw the Emails as a fair pretext to put the woman who had been accused of everything from killing aides to raping (female and male) Air Force One stewards over the years behind bars. Trump's actual prosecutions are so pretextual as to strain credulity. Nixon is in that same tradition in many ways: if he hadn't done so much else, he might have gotten away with Watergate.
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I'm not a Nixologist, but my impression of him from various historical accounts (not just about Watergate) was that the idea of just going "This was a rogue op I had nothing to do with, the people involved have been fired and will be prosecuted" was pretty much unthinkable to him.
Did nobody think having these clearly bonkers people on staff was a bad idea?
Ratfucking teams end up filled by people who can't manage a normal career. The risk / benefit ratio is terrible for a more stable person. You get people who need excitement.
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