Grounds for Impeachment: Nixon, Watergate, and the White House Horrors.

• Author: Small, Melvin

"The 25th anniversary of the investigations into the Watergate affair coincides with the Probe of Pres. Clinton's alleged abuses of power."

Speaker of the house Newt Gingrich asserted that the Clinton Administration's controversial approach to campaign fundraising "in its total effort is much bigger, I think, than Watergate." Gingrich, who once was a professional historian, seemed to have forgotten the unprecedented variety of dangerous abuses of office that constituted Watergate, of which illegal and extralegal fundraising were only the tip of the iceberg. Clinton's various "offenses" pale in significance compared to the high crimes and misdemeanors committed by Pres. Richard Nixon and his staff from 1969 through 1974.

In the early morning hours of June 17, 1972, District of Columbia police officers discovered five men, wearing surgical gloves and carrying tear-gas fountain pens, walkie-talkies, and wads of new $100 bills, apparently attempting to plant electronic surveillance equipment in the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate apartment-office complex. The resultant investigation uncovered the roles of White House consultant E. Howard Hunt and a former White House aide, G. Gordon Liddy, then employed by the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP).

Despite the existence of Nixon's tapes and the diaries and memoirs of virtually everyone involved in his White House, it remains unclear why former Attorney General John Mitchell, chairman of CREEP, approved the break-in, which was part of the $250,000 counterintelligence "Gemstone" program Liddy had concocted. Liddy's burglars may have been at the Watergate to remove or replace defective electronic equipment planted in May to determine what Democratic National Party chairman Lawrence O'Brien may have had in his safe relating to Nixon's and/or his brother Donald's seamy relations with millionaire Howard Hughes, or to find a black book containing call girls' phone numbers, used by party officials for visiting Democrats, which might have included the name of White House counsel John Dean's fiancee. Conspiracy theorists even speculate that the burglars were set up as a part of a CIA plot to bring down the Nixon Administration.

Nixon did not know in advance about the break-in, and his press secretary dismissed it as a "third-rate burglary." The President, however, dissembled when he assured the nation at a press conference on June 22, 1972, that "The White House has had no involvement in this particular incident." By that time, he knew that several then and former White House employees had links to the burglars and their handlers, links he already had begun to cover up.

The Watergate cover-up was not the beginning of the scandals that led to Nixon's resignation in August, 1974. In fact, a major reason for the action was to cover up an earlier illegal break-in. In the summer of 1971, Nixon most likely knew about--or even ordered--an attempt organized by chief domestic advisor John Ehrlichman to break into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, Lewis Fielding, to steal files that would be used to "destroy" the former Defense Department aide who had leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. Because several of the CREEP operatives who had broken in at the Watergate were the same burglars who had broken into Fielding's office, Nixon had to contain the Watergate story to protect himself and his colleagues against exposure from the even more damaging Ellsberg story.

H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, outlined the first part of the cover-up on June 23, 1972: "the only way to solve this ... is for us to have [Deputy CIA Director Vernon] Walters call [Acting FBI Director L. Patrick] Gray and just say `Stay the hell out of this ... this is, ah, business we don't want you to go any further on it" because it involved national security and CIA secret operations. Unfortunately for Nixon, this part of the cover-up tell apart after a week or so when the FBI learned that the CIA had nothing to hide in Mexico, where the burglars' money had been laundered.

Hush money

An equally important element in the President's illegal Watergate activities involved his attempts to silence the burglars by paying them off or even by promising them clemency. On June 29, 1972. Nixon's lawyer and chief bagman, Herbert Kalmbach, told CREEP's finance chief that he was "on a special mission on a White House project and I need all the cash I can get." Ultimately, Nixon and his aides raised $350,000 for defense Ices and hush money. When the affair began to unravel in the spring of 1973, while discussing the amount of money required to keep the burglars from talking, Nixon explained, "We could get that ... you could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I, I know where it could be gotten."

Nixon also suborned perjury. When it appeared that his closest aides...