Master Plan - Premium

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP: People of consequence are questioned on the issues of our time by Elizabeth Drew on Thirty Minutes With…

DAVID: It was September 7, 1972, about seven months after President Richard Nixon had signed the Federal Election Campaign Act. “Thirty Minutes With…” was a weekly public affairs program that broadcast on a newfangled TV network called PBS.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP (ELIZABETH DREW): Tonight, John D. Ehrlichman… Mr. Ehrlichman as the top assistant to the president for domestic affairs, I’d like to ask you some questions, beginning with what the Nixon administration might do if it gets reelected and has four more years in office?

DAVID: The host, Elizabeth Drew, was a Washington correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly. Her bouffant hairdo and bright green blouse created a stark contrast to the man in the dark suit sitting across from her. Like all political journalists Drew had been closely following the various scandals and questionable activities cropping up around President Nixon in the months since he had signed the nation’s first major anti-corruption legislation in decades.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP (ELIZABETH DREW): You gave an interview to the Christian Science Monitor earlier this year. And you said that, in his campaign, the president is going to be able to point with pride for having quote “gotten Washington away from the Bobby Baker Syndrome.”

DAVID: Bobby Baker was Lyndon Johnson’s top senate aide who had to resign in 1963 in a bribery scandal. Drew is basically asking if Nixon kept his promise to “drain the swamp.”

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP (ELIZABETH DREW): And there have been various controversies now around this administration: The break in of the Democratic headquarters of the Watergate… Do these things keep the president from pointing with pride to this sort of thing in the campaign?

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP (JOHN EHRLICHMAN): No I don’t think so… And as far as the watergate thing is concerned? I know about as much about it as you do, probably less. Except I do know, very definitely, that people in the government, in the White House particularly, are simply not involved in that.

DAVID: Yeah, you heard that right. No involvement with Watergate, according to John Ehrlichman, the Nixon aide who America would soon learn was literally the man who oversaw Watergate.

But here we are just months before the 1972 election, and Ehrlichman is appearing on television to portray the Nixon administration as good government reformers — an argument bolstered by Nixon having recently signed the campaign finance reform bill.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP (JOHN EHRLICHMAN): And I think after the history of this first term is written and you look back, you’ll see that, compared to other administrations or by any standard you want to apply, that it has been an extraordinarily clean, corruption free administration. Because the president insists on that.

DAVID: Mm-hmmm. That’s exactly what I think of when I think of the Nixon administration. Clean, corruption free…

Ehrlichman here is trying to whitewash the White House in a performance that goes way beyond spin. This is an early version of the coverup. While Nixon may have publicly signed that campaign finance bill, behind the scenes, the administration was neck deep in corruption — and was working hard to keep it under wraps.

This series is about the master plan to legalize corruption in America — a plan that first emerged from the cauldron of Watergate. Pieces of that Watergate story will sound familiar, but in this episode, we’re going to tell you things you’ve probably never heard before. Think of this moment in 1972 as the opening salvo in a long game that stretches to the moment we’re living in right now, a game with wins and losses, where some of the players are trying to shore up protections against corruption, while others are seeking ways to remove those guardrails.

I’m David Sirota, and this is Master Plan.

It’s 1972, five months before Ehrlichman’s interview on “30 Minutes With…” and just a few days before key parts of the Federal Election Campaign Act are set to take effect, the men began arriving at Dulles International Airport on the edge of Washington D.C. It was springtime in the nation’s capital. Cherry blossoms were in bloom, the birds were chirping, politicos swapped their conservative-colored sweaters for conservative pastel button-downs, on their way to a humid summer of seersucker suits.

Those guys arriving at the airport were carrying bags — briefcases, satchels… attaché cases were popular. And their bags were filled with money — literally stuffed with cash. Lots of cash.

From the airport they’d drive directly to the same place: 1701 Pennsylvania Ave, just one block away from the White House. Where were they going? The office of the Campaign to Re-elect the President — C.R.E.E.P. Yes, Richard Nixon’s campaign was called CREEP. Pretty on brand. Inside of CREEP’s office, workers were frantic. Political campaigns are used to dealing with large amounts of money but this was very different.

LAURA: You really can’t make this up… one day a top executive from Pennzoil showed up at CREEP and handed over $150,000 in cash and $550,000 in checks and stock certificates.

DAVID: This is Master Plan producer Laura Krantz.

LAURA: There was a New Jersey financier that sent over a worn leather bag with $200,000 of neatly wrapped one-hundred-dollar bills.

Howard Hughes’s rep dropped off blank checks for the campaign to fill in themselves.

DAVID: How do I get one of those?

LAURA: I know, right? And get this — in just one two-day period? CREEP handled about 6 million dollars — about $45 million in today’s money.

DAVID: No surprise that much of that money was coming from the kinds of donors who wanted political favors from the Nixon White House - from approval of mergers, to get-out-of-jail-free cards, to the dairy price supports you heard about in Episode 1.

LAURA: Ok — But David, you just said that Nixon had already signed FECA — wasn’t it supposed to limit donations and make info about them public?

DAVID: It was — but CREEP had found a way to get around the guardrails and the mastermind of all this was G. Gordon Liddy. If you’re even remotely familiar with Watergate, you know who this guy is — the bald, crazy-eyed former FBI agent with the bristle-brush mustache. The guy who would hold his hand over a candle to show his tolerance for pain. He’s known for coming up with the Watergate burglary, but what most folks don’t know is he was also the architect of this incredibly bold plan to get around campaign finance laws. It actually was amazing, if highly sketchy.

LAURA: And, officially, Liddy was the general counsel for CREEP, the guy whose job it was to make sure the committee followed the law. But we got ahold of this memo he wrote to the White House about using a loophole to get around the new law.

DAVID: Here’s how it worked: Nixon signed FECA into law on February 7, but the campaigns still had 60 days before they had to follow the new disclosure requirements. Liddy suggested that CREEP use this gap between the end of the old disclosure laws and the beginning of the new ones as a magical window of no campaign finance disclosure requirements at all — a window that Liddy argued would made it legal for Nixon’s donors to secretly dump completely anonymous bags of cash onto the campaign.

LAURA: Liddy’s scheme ended up not being as much of a secret as Nixon’s team might have wanted. The New York Times ran a front page story about it with a line that said, quote “President Nixon’s chief campaign fundraiser has been urging contributors to make their gifts to Republicans before the law takes effect on April 7.”

The story also mentioned a letter from the Nixon campaign that told donors how to get around reporting their contributions.

DAVID: Once word got out about the Nixon campaign’s free-for-all fundraising scheme, other campaigns began following suit, both Republican and Democrat. But no one was doing it at the scale of CREEP. And the legality of it was questionable. I mean, the strategy did come from G. Gordon Liddy — not exactly the most upstanding guy.

And then of course headlines like this one started hitting the airwaves:
ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP: The Democratic National Committee is housed in the fashionable Watergate complex. The break in was apparently planned well in advance.
DAVID: What you might not have known is that some of that anonymous money going into CREEP during the magical window funded the Watergate break-in and provided hush-money for the burglars.

At the time, no one outside of Nixon’s inner circle knew what the money was being used for. This would be uncovered later, during the Watergate investigations. The burglary and the subsequent cover-up were the sexy side of that scandal — the stuff Hollywood latched onto — so that’s what we all remember today. But the secret campaign money was the real foundation of Watergate. It illustrated how deep the corruption problem still ran, even after Congress was shamed into passing FECA.

And at least one set of people were aware of that corruption problem: The campaign finance watchdogs who had led the fight to pass FECA in the first place. Those watchdogs wanted to know who had donated all that money flowing into Nixon’s campaign.

Only Nixon and his cronies actually knew the names. But a lawsuit was about to change that.

Ok, so anonymous money poured into Nixon’s campaign thanks to G. Gordon Liddy’s scheme…

And a few months later Nixon’s aide John Ehrlichman appeared on PBS in that interview you heard at the top of this episode - the one where he insisted the Nixon White House was a corruption-free zone. In preparation for that interview, Ehrlichman met with Nixon in the Oval Office and Nixon seemed particularly interested in one guy.

WHITE HOUSE RECORDING (RICHARD NIXON): What in the hell is John Gardner…filing a [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Oh for Christsakes. It’s the law. The law!

DAVID: This recording — like many of Nixon’s White House tapes — is difficult to make out. But you can hear Nixon say the name “John Gardner.”

WHITE HOUSE RECORDING (RICHARD NIXON):... John Gardner…

DAVID: Who’s John Gardner? He’d been a cabinet official under Nixon’s predecessor, Lyndon Johnson but, more recently, he’d founded a citizens’ advocacy group known as Common Cause.

ARCHIVAL AUDIO (JOHN GARDNER): We want public officials to have literally millions of American citizens looking over their shoulders at every move they make.

DAVID: That’s John Gardner describing the mission of Common Cause. Side note: Nixon reportedly asked Gardner to be his vice-presidential running mate in 1968 — Gardner declined and then became one of Nixon’s least favorite people. They probably wouldn’t have been a good match anyway — Gardner was committed to making political institutions more open and accountable, and Nixon was committed to, well, the opposite.

Common Cause wanted to know who had donated to the Nixon reelection campaign during that disclosure-free window in the spring of 1972. Since no one in the White House was divulging any information, Common Cause filed a federal lawsuit.

Gardner spoke about it at a press conference on September 6 — the day before Ehrlichman and Nixon met in the Oval Office.

ARCHIVAL AUDIO (JOHN GARDNER): In recent months, citizens have been treated to several highly questionable instances of huge sums flowing to the President’s political campaign, while government favors flowed in the opposite direction. Perhaps the instances were all coincidental. The way to dispel the aura of mystery and suspicion is to bring all the facts out into the open. That is the purpose of our suit.

DAVID: CREEP thought they’d found a loophole that allowed them to temporarily raise millions of dollars anonymously. Common Cause discovered a loophole to their loophole and found a way to use an older campaign finance law against them. This might seem like boring legalese, but national news picked up the story because it was directly connected to Watergate.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP: The court will have to say if such a suit under the old Corrupt Practices Act can be won. But the administration apparently takes it seriously enough to have asked and should be held off. If a suit like this were won, it would clear up a lot about the Watergate bugging and more than that exposed just those Nixon contributors who made their contributions before April 7th in order not to be disclosed.

DAVID: That was on September 6. The next morning, Nixon and Ehrlichman planned out their response. This “clean, corruption-free administration”? It opted to go with smear tactics.

WHITE HOUSE RECORDING (JOHN EHRLICHMAN): I think the line on that is: Common Cause has not succeeded in raising money. They needed some high visibility maneuver… And this is obviously a last gasp by John Gardner to try and keep Common Cause afloat.

WHITE HOUSE RECORDING (RICHARD NIXON): He’s sure an ass

DAVID: Yup, Nixon just called John Gardner an ass. He really hated this guy.

A few hours later in that PBS interview you heard at the top, journalist Elizabeth Drew asked John Ehrlichman about a brand new development having to do with donations to the Nixon campaign.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP (ELIZABETH DREW): Common Cause filed a suit yesterday, as you know. To force the revelation of who contributed the ten million dollars to the president before April 7th — do you think that that might bring about, before the election, bring about any kind of revelation of who the contributors were?

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP (JOHN EHRLICHMAN): Well I don’t think it should. Because I think the whole spirit of the law that the congress adopted involved a freedom from disclosure of any contributor prior to a certain date…

DAVID: Make note of that: Ehrlichman is arguing that the lawless period wasn’t a bug, it was a feature. He’s arguing that the lawmakers who passed the new campaign finance disclosure law INTENTIONALLY created a period to allow anonymous bags of cash to flow to the president’s campaign. And now these annoying campaign finance reformers want Nixon to tell America who his donors are? How dare they. Elizabeth Drew pressed Ehrlichman about this.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP (ELIZABETH DREW): The current law said, they didn’t have to report before April 7th but what the Common Cause’s suit said is that the Corrupt Practices Act was in effect until then, and that did require the publication of everybody who had contributed more than a hundred dollars. So they say that the Committee broke the law.

DAVID: In response to this perfectly reasonable assertion, Ehrlichman whips out the smear he’d rehearsed with the president that very morning.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP (JOHN EHRLICHMAN): I suspect maybe Common Cause was looking for a little rehabilitation. I understand that Mr Gardner and his organization difficulty in terms of being able to raise money and keep alive. Maybe this is their salvation, I don’t know. But they’re keeping their name in the paper anyway.

DAVID: Bra-vo. Give that man an Oscar.

He delivered that line even more smoothly than he had during his practice run with Nixon that morning. But while Nixon officials were publicly brushing off Common Cause, behind the scenes, this was clearly a problem for the White House and it was not going away.

The issue of disclosure was central to all of this. FECA required candidates to disclose any expenditures or contributions that exceeded 100 dollars. It required disclosure reporting for candidates, political parties, and political action committees. It also required candidates to file spending reports periodically to administrative offices, deep within the bowels of the Capitol.

ARCHIVAL AUDIO (FRED WERTHEIMER): And we thought no one’s gonna look at ‘em. And the public is not gonna find out this information if reporters don’t have it before them because it would take a hell of a lot of work to review these reports

DAVID: That’s Fred Wertheimer, who in 1972, was the young legislative director for Common Cause. He told us that to make sure the media and the public would get this information, he’d send volunteers up to Capitol Hill to buy photocopies of each report. Then, they’d write up that information into press releases for each state and congressional district, sharing what campaign had received how much money and from whom.

Over the course of the 1972 campaign, Common Cause uncovered widespread violations of the new law and filed complaints against 128 Democrats and 98 Republicans in various Congressional races. It came as something of a shock to candidates to learn that someone was actually watching.

But Common Cause also had its eyes at the top of the ticket, on the presidential race. Following CREEP’s lead, other presidential campaigns had also amassed piles of money, taking advantage of the window of lawlessness. Common Cause urged all presidential candidates to reveal their pre-April 7 donations.

Having brought in so much cash, in such a corrupt fashion, CREEP needed to keep their donors anonymous and they had a whole laundry list of reasons explaining why: the law didn’t require it, it would be unfair to donors (John Ehrlichman’s argument on PBS), other campaigns haven’t done it. And even when the other campaigns did gave up their donor info, CREEP still refused. Here’s Fred Wertheimer again.

ARCHIVAL AUDIO (FRED WERTHEIMER): They said nuts to you. They fought us. We sued Nixon and within a few weeks we got a letter from the IRS telling us they were investigating our tax status.

DAVID: What a coincidence!

Regardless, Common Cause pushed the lawsuit forward, even as election day drew closer.
Facing a court order, CREEP suddenly agreed to a concession: They weren’t handing over information about donors who gave during the window of non-disclosure, but they would hand over information about donors who gave in the first two months of 1972 — January and February. When news broke that even a partial list was being released, it caused quite a stir.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP: ABC’s David Shoemaker reports…

DAVID: In this TV clip, Gardner with reporters in tow, is marching into CREEP’s offices to get the first batch of information, and he’s asking to see the director of press relations, Powell Moore.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP: Mr. Moore did not come right out, but a security man did, and he tried to block photographers.

DAVID: In the black-and-white footage, we see a grainy hand appear over the lens, pushing the camera down.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP: The security man finally gave up, and so did Gardner. After waiting in vain for 25 minutes, he walked back to his office, leaving lawyers behind to pick up their list, reporters elbowing lawyers for their own copies.

DAVID: The news story picks up later that day at the Common Cause office, where we see rooms of young volunteers. They’re sporting some quintessential 70s outfits along with handlebar mustaches, big collars, and big hair. Most of them look fresh-faced— barely out of college — as they begin to sort through the preliminary donor information they’d managed to extract from CREEP. They didn’t get the holy grail — the anonymous donor list from the secret window — but they’d gotten something.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP: A quick total for Chairman Gardner, just under $5 million. Heading the list, Chicago insurance man, Clemens Stone — $1,000,000 — reinforcing rumors he’s about to be appointed ambassador to Great Britain. Next, $800,000 from Richard Scaife of the wealthy Mellon family. Arthur Watson, former ambassador to France, gave $300,000. John Mulcahy of New York hosted the president on his trip to Ireland, $255,000.

DAVID: And unearthing those numbers was just the start of a tremendous amount of work.

Nowadays, if we get the name of some person, we just type it into an internet search and up pops the information we need. But these Common Cause volunteers in 1972 are having to search for donor identities by furiously flipping through giant phone books and reference periodicals.

LAURA: They’re calling operators in other states. Using rotary phones. Do you know how long that takes?

DAVID: They’re tapping numbers into calculators the size of toasters.

LAURA: They’re cross-checking all this data with pencil and paper — my hand hurts just thinking about it.

DAVID: You can see why nobody else had bothered to do this before. And this was just the tip of the iceberg — as the media pointed out, the biggest donors had yet to be unmasked.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP: The Republicans still have not identified their contributors for the month of March — the month the Committee to Re-Elect the President pushed hardest for Big Money. The court suit on that is still to come. But there was enough information on hand for now to keep the lights at Common Cause burning through the night.

DAVID: The disclosure came only a few days before the election, and it had almost zero effect on the outcome. Nixon was re-elected, defeating George McGovern in a landslide.

CREEP, though, still refused to turn over any information about the bags of cash from March and April — during Liddy’s magic window. So Common Cause continued to press their lawsuit.

Their lawyers spent the early part of 1973 deposing Nixon’s White House and campaign officials. All of them insisted that the records from the spring of ‘72 had been destroyed — which was almost certainly true, since CREEP officials basically moonlighted as professional document shredders.

But then a campaign official let slip that one document hadn’t been shredded — a list of Nixon’s most-important contributors of all — the guys with the biggest bags-o’-money. This list was in a locked drawer in the desk of President Nixon’s personal secretary, Rosemary Woods, right next to the Oval Office.
This document could potentially unlock everything that Common Cause wanted to know. Obtaining it became an obsession. But “secret donor list” doesn’t really roll off the tongue, so they gave it a catchy nickname.

MOVIE TRAILER…(baby crying)…

DAVID: Fresh in the minds of Common Cause staff…

MOVIE TRAILER:… this is no dream, this is really happening…

DAVID:….was a wildly popular psychological horror film that had come out a few years earlier, about a young mother being secretly manipulated by an evil cult.

The mother’s name? Rosemary. Just like Nixon’s secretary. And that’s how this coveted secret list came to be known as…

MOVIE TRAILER:...Rosemary’s Baby.

DAVID: It took nine months (ahem) from when Common Cause filed its initial lawsuit, but Rosemary’s baby was finally delivered in June 1973.

After all those court filings, motions and counter-motions, network television reported that a federal judge officially ordered the White House to turn the list over.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP: The White House confirmed today that it HAS a copy of the campaign donations received before the new April 7th reporting deadline. Assistant press secretary Gerald Warren insisted that the President has never seen the list.

DAVID: And what a list it was— really more of a book. Coming in at a whopping one and a half inches thick, it showed contributions that added up to more than $19 million in undisclosed donations to Nixon’s reelection fund.

All in all, CREEP raised nearly $55 million. That’s the equivalent of… let me get my calculator… $407 million in today’s dollars! An eye-popping amount — and much of it had been kept a secret.

ARCHIVAL AUDIO (ARCHIBALD COX): “You already know that Secretary Richardson has asked me to prosecute the offenses growing out of the breaking into the Watergate and other related allegations.

DAVID: That’s Archibald Cox, in May 1973, accepting the job of Special Prosecutor with the United States Department of Justice. He’s tall, with a buzz cut and looks better in a bow tie than Tucker Carlson ever did.

Cox would oversee the federal criminal investigation into the failed Watergate burglary, which had happened just shy of a year earlier and his name is pretty familiar to anyone with even a passing knowledge of Watergate.

And Watergate was HUGE. Cox understood that one investigation would be insufficient and incredibly unwieldy — this was too big and it went far beyond the bungled burglary that we’re all so familiar with. So he divided the investigation into task forces.

LAURA: A few of them investigated Watergate itself—the break-in, the political dirty tricks, and the infamous White House plumbers’ efforts to stop leaks.

DAVID: But two other task forces focused on the part of Watergate that’s often forgotten: the corruption.

LAURA: One looked at a scandal in which one of the country’s largest telephone companies pledged 400 thousand dollars to the Republican Party in exchange for a favorable Nixon administration settlement in an antitrust lawsuit.

DAVID: And the final task force — the one that’s most important to our story—focused on campaign contributions. The mission of these prosecutors was straightforward:

MOVIE CLIP: Follow the money.

DAVID: The Campaign Contribution Task Force honed in on that Dairy Scandal that we talked about in the first episode — the $2 million that the Associated Milk Producers gave to Nixon’s campaign in 1971.

But it was that window, in the spring of 1972, before FECA came into effect where the task force focused much of its attention. Who had contributed to the mountains of cash that came rolling into Nixon’s re-election war chest? Were any of those donors promised government favors? Or threatened with government retribution if they failed to pay up? Just how legal — or illegal — was all that money?

Thanks to John Gardner and Common Cause, the question of “who” had been partially answered. Those names were now in the hands of Watergate prosecutors — including a young lawyer named Roger Witten, who spoke to us about his work during this period.

ROGER WITTEN: I didn’t know anything about any subject we were confronting when I walked in the door. For a young lawyer at the beginning of his career without any prosecutorial experience, it was exciting and it was scary. The spotlight was shining brightly on us and we wanted to do it right and fairly.

DAVID: Witten had been Archibald Cox’s student at Harvard law school and, in 1973, he joined the Watergate Special Prosecution Force. He’d be working to find any evidence of illegal campaign finance activity.

WITTEN: It was clear fairly early on that the hush money paid to the Watergate burglars came directly or indirectly from illegal campaign contributions.

DAVID: But the Campaign Contributions task force wanted to know more about the contributions themselves. As we’ve heard throughout this episode, the Nixon campaign had made a big push to get as much money as possible before FECA went into effect. The reason for that push was because FECA’s disclosure requirements went way beyond those of the older law—the Federal Corrupt Practices Act.

WITTEN: And we wondered why were they so interested in making secret contributions? What were they trying to hide? And that’s the question we tried to answer. And in a number of cases, we were able to show that they were seeking influence by making large contributions secretly to the president’s re-election campaign.

DAVID: The information on who had donated to Nixon’s campaign came from a variety of sources—members of CREEP, the president’s personal lawyer, reporting from the press corps (hat tip to Woodward and Bernstein) and, of course, the Rosemary’s Baby list obtained by Common Cause.

WITTEN: Somehow this great mass of information got sorted into charges or not charges against companies and people.

DAVID: And who were those companies and people?

WITTEN: Well, I made a little list. There was the milk investigation… I thought milk was healthy and clean, but it wasn’t. There were a number of well-known large companies, Gulf Oil, Ashland Oil, Northrop, Phillips Petroleum, Goodyear, Occidental.

DAVID: Since FECA hadn’t yet gone into effect when this money made its way into Nixon’s coffers, the Watergate corruption task force had to rely on older criminal statutes in order to press charges. Up until this point, those laws went almost unenforced. But amid the Watergate scandal, prosecutors were now going to aggressively enforce their prohibition against corporate money flowing directly into campaigns.

As the prosecution began charging companies and officials, Witten says they offered leniency to corporations that came in voluntarily to self-disclose and cooperate with the investigation.

WITTEN: We were quite open to plea bargains because frankly we didn’t have the resources to try 20 cases. We thought also that we could accomplish a lot by holding these companies and these senior executives up to public scrutiny.

DAVID: We live in an era where corporate executives almost never get prosecuted for anything — where bankers can rip off millions of homeowners and oil CEOs can light the climate on fire with no consequences. But notice how Witten said that back in 1973, government prosecutors looking at corruption were going after BOTH huge blue-chip companies AND their individual corporate executives. This is a big deal, and almost unimaginable today. Watergate prosecutors were trying to send a very specific message.

WITTEN: We were not going to just let the corporation dig into its pocket and pay. Guilty pleas and the plea bargains were deterrent to others not to engage in this misconduct. Because even though you’re pleading guilty to a misdemeanor, it’s not a high priority of a CEO of a name brand company to go to court and confess guilt in connection with a crime.

DAVID: On October 17, 1973, Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox issued a statement, indicating that both the corporations and their primarily responsible corporate officers would be charged. That same day, news outlets eagerly reported on the fallout…

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP: Three big U.S. corporations pleaded guilty today to making more than $125,000 in illegal contributions to President Nixon’s 1972 campaign.

The firms are Goodyear Tire and Rubber, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, and American Airlines.

In court, Attorney Herbert Miller said the airline pleaded guilty. Reportedly, its $55,000 donation was laundered through accounts in Lebanon.

DAVID: By the way, I remember being a teenager and first learning about Watergate from a TV miniseries in the 1990s that included this commercial.

ARCHIVAL TELEVISION CLIP: This presentation of Watergate sponsored in part by American Airlines.

DAVID: I guess I didn’t realize how on the nose that was.

In essence, Watergate was the first campaign finance scandal of the modern era and it exposed incredible corporate corruption. Ultimately, the Campaign Contribution task force obtained convictions of 19 companies and 21 executives for making illegal corporate contributions to President Nixon’s campaign, which then used some of that money to fund activities like the Watergate break-in. Remember John Ehrlichman’s claim?

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP (JOHN EHRLICHMAN) By any standard you want to apply, that it has been an extraordinarily clean, corruption free administration.

DAVID: Yeah, not so much.

And then, Nixon decided to make things worse for himself. Just three days after Cox’s press conference and the guilty pleas of those big companies, Nixon ordered Archibald Cox to be fired. The two top men at the Justice Department refused to do it, so it fell to the third in line — Robert Bork, a name we’ll hear again and again in this series.

ARCHIVAL TELEVISION CLIP: “Børk! Børk! Børk!”

DAVID: The firing of Cox was part of what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. The public was outraged. In an effort to contain the fallout, Nixon gave a televised press conference.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP (RICHARD NIXON): I made my mistakes, but in all of my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service — I earned every cent.

Side note — he gave this speech at Disney World, which is worth mentioning because we’ll be back to the Magic Kingdom in the not too distant future. Bookmark Disney World — a lot of weird shit happens there.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP (RICHARD NIXON): I have never obstructed justice. I welcome this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got.

DAVID: Obviously, the best way to assure people you’re not a criminal is to desperately insist that you’re not a criminal.

LAURA: Obviously. But by the time Nixon delivered that now-famous line, the damage was done. Millions of Americans had been watching the nationally televised Senate Watergate hearings unfold under the leadership of Senator Sam Ervin, who honed in on the link between corruption, campaign finance and the burglary.

CONGRESSIONAL HEARING TAPES: Didn’t you suspect that when you raised this money and distributed it in this surreptitious manner to the lawyers and families of the parties that had been indicted in the Watergate that you were aiding the Nixon campaign for re‐election?

DAVID: Americans glued to their televisions heard the dramatic stories about bags of cash, political intrigue, and straight-up corruption. Even before the Saturday Night Massacre, a Gallup poll confirmed that Americans considered government graft one of the most important problems facing the nation.

Campaign finance and political corruption would be key issues in the upcoming 1974 midterm elections and, thanks to Nixon, the Democrats—along with a coalition of reformers and organizations like Common Cause — saw both a political opportunity and a chance to fix the system.They began pushing a package of amendments that would strengthen the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act.

ARCHIVAL TELEVISION CLIP (JOE BIDEN): I think this is the single most important issue that can be resolved by this Congress

Hey Laura, Does that voice sound vaguely familiar?

LAURA: Uh, no. Who is that?

DAVID: That’s Joe Biden in a televised debate, back when he was a fresh-faced, 31-year-old Senator. He was one of the lawmakers involved in passing amendments to strengthen FECA.

It would have been delicious to see supervillain Richard Nixon shamed into signing new, even tougher anti-corruption bills into law, but he’d already thrown in the towel by the time they passed.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP (RICHARD NIXON): I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as president at that hour in this office.

DAVID: That left Gerald Ford holding the pen. He’d been a longtime Republican leader in the U.S. House, and Ford probably didn’t like the new tougher campaign finance legislation any more than Nixon would have— we’ll hear more about ol’ Gerry in a future episode— but the political climate meant Ford had no choice but to grit his teeth and sign the bill during a televised ceremony.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP: A major legislative outgrowth of the Watergate scandal was the campaign financing reform bill, and President Ford signed that into law in a ceremony today

DAVID: The president invited Congress in to watch and about 100 members showed up for the East Room ceremony. Among other things, the bill limits the amount individuals can contribute to candidates, puts a $20 million spending limit on presidential races and provides some public financing of the presidential campaigns through voluntary $1 deductions, which voters can take on income tax.

When signing the bill, President Ford explicitly acknowledged how angry the public was at the corruption that had taken over Washington.

ARCHIVAL AUDIO (GERALD FORD): I can assure you from what I have heard, from the American people in writing and other communications, they want this legislation. So, it will soon be law… We do recognize that this legislation seeks to eliminate to a maximum degree some of the influences that have created some of the problems in recent years. If that is the end result, certainly it is worth all the labor and all the compromises that were necessary in the process.

DAVID: Wow, what a wild trip it’s been!

Without the original FECA and that magical window of lawlessness, those bags of secret money may never have been dumped into Nixon’s campaign.

Without that money and all the corruption and scandal that came out of Watergate, these reforms may never have happened. If, as the old saying goes, every crisis is an opportunity, then the work of reformers and organizations like Common Cause made sure that when something as bad as Watergate happened, it could become moment for progress. Fred Wertheimer again:

ARCHIVAL AUDIO (FRED WERTHEIMER): Watergate was the trigger because the public would not have engaged, people would’ve not have been outraged. The stories would not have been there. Look, I’ve worked on this since 1971. We passed the Watergate reforms in 74 because we had enormous public support and demand.

DAVID: And so here we are once more, dear listener — the forces of corruption have been repelled. The man who had come to personify corruption had been ejected from the White House in what seemed like a national referendum for a cleaner government, free of big money influence.

But, of course, we have several episodes to go and we now live in a kleptocracy that makes Watergate seem quaint — which means this is not where the story ends.

This is where the story really begins. Because even though he was forced into an early California retirement, Richard Nixon had left the American people a present – a time bomb back in Washington, one that was ticking away.

ARCHIVAL AUDIO:
Mr Powell if you’ll raise your right hand and repeat after me. I Lewis F. Powell Jr…
I Lewis F Powell Jr…
…do solemnly swear…
…do solemnly swear…
…that I will administer justice…
…that I will administer justice…
…as Associate Justice…
…as Associate Justice…
...of the Supreme Court of the United States…
...of the Supreme Court of the United States…
…according to the best of my abilities and understanding…