Watergate: The Facts Versus Nixon Library

With a heavily edited version of a key White House tape and museum displays that avoid many aspects of the scandal, including the criminal convictions of several of his senior aides, the new Richard M. Nixon library constitutes the former President’s most recent effort in a 16-year campaign to reshape the public’s view of Watergate.

Library officials repeatedly had told reporters in recent days and weeks that the tapes presented at the museum would be left unedited. Asked Friday about that, library director Hugh Hewitt declined to comment. “That’s a museum-design question,” he said, adding that the building’s design had been supervised by Nixon’s top aide and spokesman, John Taylor.

Taylor could not be reached for comment.

The Watergate display, which Nixon avoided when he gave President Bush and former Presidents Reagan and Ford a tour of the rest of his museum Thursday, opened to the public Friday. It consists of three White House tapes, two of which will not be available to visitors until September, and a long wall of text and photographs describing the events of the Watergate scandal.

The one tape available to the public now is the so-called “smoking gun” tape of July 23, 1972, in which Nixon approved a plan to have the CIA warn the FBI to stop its investigation of Watergate. The library version of the tape presents only some portions of the conversation, stitched together with a narration that offers innocent explanations for what Nixon is heard saying. The tape concludes with Nixon reading a diary entry made two weeks later describing later events.

The text displays concede that “Nixon himself has said he made inexcusable misjudgments during Watergate” but accuse many of Nixon’s critics--ranging from the late Sen. Sam Ervin (D-N.C.), who chaired the Senate’s investigation of Watergate, to Archibald Cox, the Harvard law professor who served as special prosecutor until Nixon fired him--of “partisan” bias.

Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward and his former colleague Carl Bernstein are singled out for special criticism. One display accuses the two, who won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on Watergate, of “offering bribes, illegally gaining access to telephone numbers and talking to members of the grand jury” in their efforts.

The display puts that accusation in quotes attributed only to an unnamed “scholar.” The quotation is from a recent book on Watergate by Stanley I. Kutler of the University of Wisconsin. Kutler, in an interview Friday, said that in the book he did not make the charge himself, but merely had noted that others had said it. Woodward, in an interview Friday, denied ever having offered bribes.

Kutler said: “Nixon is blaming the media and everyone else for his troubles while Watergate was his own doing and that of his aides. The media simply reported the investigations of properly constituted legal authorities.”

As portrayed in thousands of pages of transcripts from court trials and congressional hearings, hundreds of hours of taped White House conversations and depositions from scores of witnesses, the scandal which became known as “Watergate” was, in fact, two overlapping conspiracies.

The first, begun early in the Nixon term, was a plan to use wiretaps, burglaries and surveillance by the FBI, the CIA and independent groups organized by White House aides to harass, spy on and punish the President’s enemies. Members of one of those independent groups, known informally as “the plumbers,” were arrested on June 17, 1972, as they tried to break into the offices of the Democratic national chairman Lawrence O’Brien in Washington’s Watergate office building.

Before the scandal ended, John D. Ehrlichman, Nixon’s top domestic policy adviser, G. Gordon Liddy, the general counsel to Nixon’s reelection campaign and eight others were found guilty of criminal acts connected to that conspiracy. The museum contains no mention of that first conspiracy or the convictions that flowed from it.

The second conspiracy, which began almost immediately after the Watergate arrests, was designed to cover up the first conspiracy.

Ehrlichman, H.R. Haldeman, who was Nixon’s chief of staff, Atty. Gen. John N. Mitchell and eight others were found guilty of criminal acts in connection with that conspiracy. Nixon’s own participation in the cover-up effort led the Watergate grand jury to name him a “unindicted co-conspirator” on Feb. 29, 1974, and formed the basis for most of the impeachment charges that the House Judiciary Committee approved, 27-11, on July 27, 1974.

Related charges involving illegal campaign contributions, tax law violations and political “dirty tricks” led to guilty pleas or convictions for 50 other individuals and corporations.

As portrayed by the museum’s display, the scandal that drove Nixon from office is far different, the way the former President has always seen it: “an epic and bloody political battle” in which Democrats sought to reverse the “mandate of the 1972 election” by forcing him from office.

Visitors to the museum first hear of Watergate during a 27-minute film that portrays highlights of Nixon’s career. The mention is brief. “The President knew nothing about it,” a narrator says, referring to the Watergate break-in. But, the narrator continues, in the months that followed, “some of his aides” became involved in a “cover-up.” The film then leaves the subject entirely, returning only to say, without further explanation, that “threatened with impeachment,” Nixon resigned.

The Watergate room itself presents a carefully selected set of facts about the scandal. Nixon, the opening display says, “did not pay much attention to” the break-in when he first heard of it the next day. That display does not mention the fact that Nixon and Haldeman met and discussed the break-in for 20 minutes two days later.

The tape of that July 20 discussion was mysteriously erased--the notorious 18 1/2-minute gap that became one of Watergate’s most notorious incidents. According to the museum display, which mentions the gap but does not explain which conversation it involved, “experts said the gap could easily have been caused by a mechanical malfunction, but the President’s opponents wasted no time in finding sinister and devious motives.”

In fact, a team of experts appointed by federal District Judge John J. Sirica reported on June 4 that the tape had been erased by hand and that “malfunctioning of the recorder” is “conclusively eliminated” as a possible cause of the erasures.