Journalism Was Only a Bit Player in Exposing Watergate Crimes

History in an Hour (CC BY 2.0)
President Richard M. Nixon

Posted on Jun 14, 2012

By Stanley Kutler

No leak, no “investigatory journalism” ever revealed any facet of what we know as Watergate that was not already a subject of investigation and inquiry by authorities. The marking of the 40th anniversary of the June 17, 1972, Watergate break-in nevertheless appears to focus on the role of a few journalists. Robert Redford will reprise the 1976 movie “All the President’s Men” with a documentary version. Now, of course, he can identify Mark Felt, aka “Deep Throat,” as the leaker who destroyed Richard Nixon’s presidency. Felt indeed played a part, and Nixon knew of his actions in October 1972, as revealed in Nixon’s tapes released in 1997, eight years before the elderly and ailing  Felt went public. Nixon was furious because he had considered Felt, “that Jew”  (he was not), for the post of FBI director. Nixon realized he could do nothing, for Felt “knew too much”—as, for example, the illegal break-ins committed by Nixon’s “plumbers.”  

The media’s canonization of its primacy in “breaking the case” threatens to leave us with “Hamlet” absent the Prince of Denmark. Inevitably the Watergate narrative will be reduced to its bare essentials. G. Gordon Liddy surely will not make an index, and the “President’s Men” will slip into their deserved place as largely anonymous spear carriers. But Richard M. Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, and his story will endure. Future textbooks (assuming we will have them) will render his history roughly as follows: “Richard Nixon, the first president of the United States to resign as a result of his abuses of power and criminal obstruction of justice…,”  perhaps then followed with several sentences describing other parts of his presidency. For certain, Nixon is the principal player of Watergate; journalism will at best be remembered as a bit player in bringing him down.  

Leaks are a way of life in Washington circles; their purpose and motive are self-evident and self-serving. Onetime Nixon presidential counsel Leonard Garment regularly talked with media people to reveal forthcoming potentially explosive news, hoping to defuse it. Sam Dash, the Watergate Select Committee counsel, once remarked: “Leak? I leaked all the time”—to advance his committee’s work.   READ MORE