The Watergate hearings enthralled the American public.
I remember watching the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, the official name of the hearings, on television. I remember being mesmerized by the idea that I was watching history being committed. I was fascinated by the characters like Maurice Stans, Fred LaRue and Jeb Stuart Magruder. For a time, it seemed like Sam Ervin's eyebrows were being considered for their own spin-off series. I watched Fred Thompson become a star when he asked Alexander Butterfield if he was "aware of the existence of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president?"
A total of 51 days--319 hours--of live testimony was broadcast. At least 85 percent of U.S. households watched at least part of the hearings. At first, all three commercial TV networks covered the hearing live; after a while they took turns. My memory is that I watched them religiously.
But did I? It was a long time ago, and the nature of memory is such that I began to question whether I'd really watched all that much. I was in high school then, and though summer vacation started a couple of weeks after the hearings began, I had things to do. I had a job; I played organized baseball and golf--not watching TV.
I caught a little bit of the hearings here and there, read a lot of books about Watergate, and saw All The President's Men, which made me feel like I'd watched far more of the hearings than I actually had. At lunch last week I confessed to a friend--who had been in England during the hearings and hadn't seem them at all--that I suspected myself of being a Watergate hearings poseur. I simply couldn't have watched the hearings the way I remembered.
But the hearings weren't just broadcast during the day. They were re-broadcast every evening on public television. (Thanks, Google.) I called my mom to confirm and can say with some measure of certainty that I did watch a good portion of the Watergate hearings as they were going on, just not live.
I watched the public television broadcast, anchored by Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, which began at 7 p.m. central time, in my bedroom on a 13-inch black and white GE TV. This makes sense; though the hearings were broadcast in color, I remember them in black and white.
Not everyone paid attention to the hearings, but enough of us did for them to qualify as a genuine socio-cultural phenomenon. We talked about them at school. Some Americans followed them in the same not-quite-healthy way some of us nowadays obsess over fake reality TV shows. This was real reality TV. And in 1973 we probably had more leisure time than we do today; we certainly didn't have nearly as many things to distract us.
If you watch those hearings today--you can stream all of PBS's 1973 coverage at the American Archive for Public Broadcasting's website, americanarchive.org--you will be struck by how low-key and measured the questions and responses are. There is no sense that anyone is playing for the camera or trying to send coded signals or blindly adhering to talking points. It all feels grave and serious and sad; there is no viciousness, no grandstanding.
Despite the inherently political nature of the inquiry, it is not a circus.
At the time it felt necessary and regrettable, but in retrospect, those people seem honorable and serious.
There is a moment early on where Howard Baker--a Republican (!) senator from Tennessee-- asks 35-year-old Herbert L. "Bart" Porter, the scheduling director for the Committee for the Re-election of the President, why he followed his boss Jeb Magruder's instructions and characterized a committee payment to G. Gordon Liddy as being for "intelligence gathering" rather than "dirty tricks."
"Well, Senator Baker, my loyalty to this man, Richard Nixon, goes back longer than any person that you will see sitting at this table throughout any of these hearings," Porter says. "I first met the president--"
Baker cuts him off, before Porter has the chance to say "when I was 8 years old."
"I really very much doubt that, Mr. Porter. I have known Richard Nixon probably longer than you have been alive, and I really expect that the greatest disservice that a man could do to a president of the United States would be to abdicate his conscience."
What we see here is Baker doing his job. In this moment he's not a politician who owes fealty to the leader of his party. In this moment he's an adult.
Yet Porter isn't a weasel; later that year he'd give an interview to The New York Times in which he'd argue that the real crime of Watergate wasn't the break-in and bugging--which was wrong--or even the cover-up, which "was almost a natural outgrowth of the situation," but "the misuse of ... younger people, not only through Watergate and the cover‐up, but through the whole White House system. They were not criminals by birth or design. Left to their own devices, they wouldn't engage in this sort of thing. Someone had to be telling them to do it, to do their dirty work, and damn it, that's a crime!"
Porter later pleaded guilty to perjury charges and ended up serving 30 days in a federal minimum security prison in Lompoc, Calif. He was one of more than 40 government officials eventually indicted or jailed. He couldn't find work after Watergate and went into the construction business with his father-in-law in Orange County, Calif. (He presumably ended up all right.)
I wouldn't characterize Porter as a hero, but his candor, both in the hearings and afterwards, was commendable. He owned his mistakes, and although he was, by his lights at least, badly used by his superiors (Jeb Magruder's lawyer called him an "ant," John Ehrlichman called him a "little fish"), he went to prison largely because he didn't have any information he could trade prosecutors for his freedom. ("I have thanked God many times that I knew nothing," he wrote in Harper's in October 1974. "I would hate to gain my freedom by fingering someone else.")
I don't know that anyone would watch the Watergate hearings today; we like our reality shows fake and loud.
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Commentary on 11/17/2019