Grandson of Watergate prosecutor reflects on Washington

Fifty years ago, a night watchman noticed a piece of tape on the latch of a door in the parking garage of the Watergate office complex in Washington D.C.

The break-in at the Democratic National Committee Headquarters and connection to President Richard Nixon was exposed during Senate hearings and would lead to the president resigning.  

The anniversary comes as hearings are once again being held to investigate the role of a US president, this time in the 6 January attack on the US Capitol.

New York Times reporter Robert Draper, who is the grandson of Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, is writing a book about the Capitol insurrection and also reflects on Washington then and now in a piece for the New York Times.

When the break-in happened, it seemed like a non-story with President Nixon describing it as third-rate burglary, until a couple of metro reporters began to uncover the truth.

“[It] was part of a larger scheme to gain the presidential campaign in favour of the incumbent Nixon and the burglary was just the tip of the iceberg.”

Nixon took aim at the special prosecutor initially in charge of the case and fired him, Draper says.

“It was on the heels of that that my grandfather Leon Jaworski was brought in and assured of requisite independence and ultimately did manage to successfully sue for the release of the White House tapes, which ultimately led to Nixon's resignation on August the 9th, 1973.”

Draper tells Jesse Mulligan he clearly remembers the day his mother sat him down and told him his grandfather had agreed to take on one of the most difficult jobs in America.

“I didn't have the slightest interest in political journalism until then, and I became something of a politics groupie as a result of that.”

Jaworski died 40 years ago, but other alumni of the Watergate hearings gathered on 17 June for the 50^th anniversary.

Taking place amid the current 6 January committee hearings, the anniversary was a solemn occasion, Draper says.

“For a lot of us who grew up during Watergate, it was really unfathomable to imagine that we would see a presidential scandal of the scale of Watergate, of a president participating in a gathering and disbursement of hush money payments, and ordering people to plead the 5th Amendment that is to not really testify truthfully.

“That has really kind of turned out to be child's play against what appears to be seditious conduct by a sitting president who lost fair and square, refused to accept the election results, lied and claimed that massive fraud had stripped him of his victory and then ultimately, after a number of attempts failed to try to reverse the election results, essentially, as the evidence now appears, incited a mob to descend on the Capitol on January the 6th, while the official tallying of electoral votes was taking place.”

One marked difference between the two cases has been the rampant conspiracy theories and a debate around the truth, Draper says.

“Yes, there were Republicans shortly after the break-in who thought that Nixon didn't have anything to do with it, that the charges were made by the media, were trumped up, and my grandfather Leon Jaworski was one of those, but once the facts began to be produced, people dropped those sentiments.

“It's a real testament to our times … that there actually is a sliver of the electorate who now believes, as no one believed back then, that Watergate was a hoax, that it's all fake news.

“That concept just simply did not exist back then or at least if it did, it was so much of the margins that it was on the order of the US government faking the moon landing in 1969.”

Draper also spoke to his grandfather’s deputy at the time, Richard Ben-Veniste, who told him that Nixon at least possessed a modicum of shame, unlike Donald Trump.

“That his ability to be so perfused with lying and so florid with them and to talk about enemies in this sort of manner of a populist, demagogue, encourage vast swathes of the American public to view the media and academics and others as the enemy of the American people is something that is really a prominent feature of Trump's lexicon and is born out of his utter shamelessness.”

The writer was in the Capitol on 6 January, to interview some Republicans for his upcoming book Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party lost its mind, but he managed to escape just before the riot breached the building.

“I've been to a lot of troubled countries, Yemen, Somalia, the Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan, I never expected to see that kind of scenario take place in the United States Capitol. It was a really, really jarring scene.”

While the Watergate hearings riveted Americans and moved the needle of public opinion, Draper doesn’t believe that is happening now with the Capitol riot hearings.

“Republicans in particular overwhelmingly believe that this is a witch hunt, perpetrated against former President Trump and believe, despite the fact that there are two Republicans … sitting on the committee, that this is an entirely partisan takedown of former President Trump in particular and the Republican Party more generally.

“[Ben-Venisti] also conveyed [to the committee] as well that, despite the fact that [nonpartisanship] is even more lacking now than it was in 1973, … that the effort to at least convince some Republicans, to try to sway them is important, even if it doesn't bear fruit, but at least shows Americans that this is a non-partisan inquiry.”

But the committee is running up against real headwinds, he says, as some of Trump’s allies are not willingly coming forth and some defying subpoenas.

“There has been no central clearinghouse of information the way say [former White House Counsel] John Dean was, it's just been bits and pieces here and there.”

Draper wonders whether democracy can survive when truth is up for debate.

“When half of America believes that up is down and black is white, and that the 2020 election was stolen, and that Joe Biden isn't a illegitimately elected President, then you do wonder what that does to our democratic institutions when people possess their own sense of reality.

“The Republican Party has a real shortage, a conspicuous shortage of statesmanlike figures who are willing to risk their own political standing, to stand up for what's right, and to go with the truth … because they know that their base consists among others of rabid Trump partisans, and they do not want to run up against those individuals.

“So yeah, courage is in short supply in American government particularly amongst one party and that does really, really jeopardise the health of our democratic institutions here.”