The Investigation of the Watergate Scandal
Interviewer: Erin Tsui Interviewee: Terry Lenzner Instructor: Mr. Haight Date of Submission: February 10, 2006 Tsui 2
Table of Contents
Interviewer/ Interviewee Release forms……………………………………………Page 3
Statement of Purpose……………………………………………………………….Page 4
Biography…………………………………………………………………………..Page 5
Historical Contextualization: Watergate, the Event that Changed a Nation..….…..Page 7
Interview Transcription………………………………………………………...…..Page 23
Interview Analysis…………………………………………………………………Page 64
Appendix 1: The Watergate Hotel……………...………………………………….Page 70
Appendix 2: The Senate Watergate Committee...………………………………….Page 71
Appendix 3: The Pentagon Papers……………...………………………………….Page 72
Appendix 4: Woodward and Bernstein…………………………………………….Page 73
Audio/ Video Time Indexing Log………………………………………………….Page 74
Works Consulted…………………………………………………………………...Page 76 Tsui 3 Tsui 4
Statement of Purpose
The purpose of this oral history project is to provide a better understanding of the
Watergate scandal through an interview with Terry Lenzner. Mr. Lenzner helped conduct the government investigation that led to the resignation of Richard Nixon. He offers a first hand account and unique insights into one of the most important events in
U.S. history. Watergate changed the way people view government. His story and opinions provide an insider’s view into the investigation of the Nixon administration and the impact of Watergate. Tsui 5
Biography
Terry Falk Lenzner was born in 1940 in New York City where he lived with his parents and two brothers. His father was a doctor and his mother stayed at home to raise the children. Mr. Lenzner attended high school at Phillips Exeter Academy and went to
Harvard University, where he earned a B.A. After college, Mr. Lenzner studied at
Harvard Law School, where he graduated in 1964 with a law degree. He moved to
Washington, DC and married his wife, Margaret, in 1968. The Lenzners still live in
Washington and have three children, Emily, John (Jono) and William (Willie).
After graduating from law school in 1964, Mr. Lenzner went to work as an attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department in Washington, DC. It was here that he found his calling as an investigator. He was sent to Philadelphia, Miss., where he helped convict seven -suspects in the murder of three civil rights workers. This incident was later made into movie called Mississippi Burning. In 1969, Mr. Lenzner left the Justice Department and worked as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern
District of New York. From there, he was introduced to Donald Rumsfield, who, at the time, was Head of the Office of Economic Opportunity and an Assistant to President
Richard Nixon. Mr. Lenzner went to work for Mr. Rumsfield as the Head of the Legal
Services Program, where he managed 2,500 lawyers working for the poor around the country. He left this job and started to practice law. In 1972, Mr. Lenzner was Tsui 6 representing Daniel Berrigan, an anti-war activist, when the Watergate break-in occurred.
In April 1973, he was hired as Assistant Chief Counsel to the Senate Watergate
Committee where conducted the investigation that led to the resignation of President
Nixon.
After leaving the Committee, Mr. Lenzner was a partner in several Washington,
DC-based law firms. In a significant case, he proved there were cost overruns in the construction of the Alaska oil pipe line and won a huge settlement for the Aleyksa Indian tribe who owned land on which the pipe line was built. It was during this case that Mr.
Lenzner realized he liked investigating more than practicing law. So in 1987, he founded the Investigative Group Inc (IGI), an international investigative firm. At IGI he has conducted many high profile cases such as his investigation of the United Way of
America’s president and his associates for misappropriation of funds, helping to stop illegal activity and save the charity’s reputation. President Clinton’s personal lawyers hired Mr. Lenzner to investigate Kenneth Starr and his staff during the Whitewater investigation and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Mr. Lenzner is still the Chairman of
IGI, where he now focuses on corporate fraud cases. Tsui 7
Historical Contextualization Watergate, the Event that Changed a Nation
On November 17, 1973, while under investigation by Congress for directing a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage, President Richard Nixon uttered his most famous quote, “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook.
Well, I am not a crook” (Kilpatrick). On August 9, 1974, less than one year later, Nixon became the first United States President to resign. He was forced from office due to the criminal actions he ordered while president, which came to be known as Watergate. The first sign of the scandal occurred on June 17, 1972, when police arrested five burglars inside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. Although no one realized it at the time, the burglars were only a small part of a complex scheme implemented by the Nixon administration to damage the Democrats. Washington Post reporters Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein were the first ones to investigate the break-in, and they unraveled a web of political spying and sabotage (See Appendix 4). In 1973, the United
States Government started to investigate Watergate, which ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation and made it the most significant presidential scandal of modern times. The magnitude of Watergate makes it important to understand the perspective of the government’s investigation of the Nixon administration.
Early in the morning on June 17, 1972, police discovered five intruders inside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, which was in a complex of buildings named the Watergate. The burglars were there, to adjust bugging equipment they had installed during a May break-in and to photograph the Democrats' documents.
Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were the first ones to investigate the break-in. Woodward relied on a secret source he called "Deep Throat," Tsui 8 who was revealed in 2005 to be FBI official Mark Felt. The reporters unraveled a web of political spying and sabotage. In 1973, the United States Government started to investigate Watergate which ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation and made it the most significant presidential scandal. The impact of this event makes it important to understand the perspective of the government’s investigation of the Nixon administration.
Prior to Watergate, there were many scandals involving Presidents of the United
States and other government officials. One of the first was a sex scandal between
President Thomas Jefferson and one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. From 1784, Hemings worked as a maid and companion of Jefferson’s youngest daughter. In 1787, Jefferson, serving the new United States government as a diplomat in Paris, sent for his youngest daughter to join him, and Hemings went along (Strauss 6). It appears that Jefferson and
Hemings began an intimate relationship in Paris, with Hemings becoming pregnant before returning to the United States. Jefferson promised to free any of her (their) children when they reached the age of 21. DNA tests in 1998, and a careful rendering of the birth dates and Jefferson's well-documented travels, puts Jefferson with Hemings during a "conception window" for each of the seven children born to Sally (Strauss 7).
The very light skin and the resemblance of several of Sally's children to Thomas
Jefferson were convincing evidence. In 1802, James Thomson Callendar sought a job working for Jefferson. After Jefferson refused him a job, Callendar began to publicly allege in the Richmond Recorder, that Jefferson kept one of his slaves as his "concubine" and fathered children with her (Strauss 7-8). This has remained a controversy about
Jefferson even to this day. Tsui 9
While Jefferson was linked to a sex scandal, Uylsess S. Grant’s presidency was marked by numerous financial scandals. Black Friday, September 24, 1869, was a financial panic in the United States caused by two speculators' efforts to corner the gold market. This scandal was one of several which rocked the presidency of Ulysses S.
Grant. Jim Fisk and Jay Gould were millionaires and business partners. They plotted to corner the gold market; and on September 24, 1869, they bid up the price of gold to very high levels hoping to sell their supply at the artificially inflated rates (Grossman 159).
This scheme depended on the government remaining off of the gold market, which the manipulators arranged through political influence; Fisk and Gould persuaded President
Grant to prevent the federal Treasury from selling gold into the market which would have dropped prices (Grossman 162). Grant was not a criminal, just unintelligent and indiscreet. Eventually, the Treasury release gold into the market ending the crisis.
Another scandal under Grant involved Boss Tweed, a politician ruling New York
City, who controlled the infamous Tweed Ring. Tweed controlled all Democratic New
York state and city nominations from 1860-1870; and he used illegal means to force election of his choice for New York governor, New York City mayor, and speaker of the assembly. Tweed used bribery, graft, and fraudulent elections to illegally make about
$200 million for himself and his friends. Thomas Nast was a political cartoonist for the
New York Times who exposed Tweed’s crimes even though he was offered a $5 million bribe not to (Strauss 81). Public indignation against Tweed’s graft grew and he eventually was convicted and sentenced to prison. He was also sued by the city of New
York in a civil suit. He escaped from jail and fled to Spain, but was identified and returned to a New York jail, where he died (Grossman 169). Tsui 10
Yet more political corruption under Grant is illustrated through the Crédit
Mobilier scandal of 1872. The government contracted with the Union Pacific Railway to build the railway system in the United States (Strauss 95). Officials of Union Pacific created the Crédit Mobilier construction company. Union Pacific then hired Credit
Mobilier to help build the railroad line, thereby making a large sum of illegal money. To ensure that Congress did not stop them, the company gave out shares of its stock to important congressman. This ended when a newspaper exposé and congressional investigation led to a formal censure of two congressmen (Grossman 174). It was also discovered that the vice-president had accepted payments from Crédit Mobilier.
The Whiskey Ring was another scandal that occurred during Grant’s presidency.
Businessmen known as the Whiskey Ring made an agreement with the Secretary of the
Treasury, Orville E. Babcock, who agreed not to collect the excise tax on liquor sold by members of the Ring (Grossman 180). The companies saved more than $200 million and in return, and government tax officials including Babcock, were paid for this. When
Babcock was put on trial, Grant wrote a statement defending him to the jury, which helped pardon the thief. It was thought some of the money raised by the Whiskey Ring was part of a plot to finance the Republican Party.
Another president who endured numerous scandals was President Harding. Even though Harding had numerous affairs, the Teapot Dome oil reserve scandal was the most infamous of his administration. In 1921, by executive order of the President, control of naval oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and at Elk Hills, California, was transferred from the Department of the Navy to the Department of the Interior. The oil reserves had been set aside for the navy by President Wilson. In 1922, Albert B. Fall, Tsui 11
U.S. Secretary of the Interior, leased the Teapot Dome fields to Harry F. Sinclair, an oil operator, and the field at Elk Hills to Edward L. Doheny. Between 1922 and 1923, these transactions became the subject of a Senate investigation conducted by Senator Thomas
J. Walsh. It was discovered that in 1921, Doheny had lent Secretary Fall $100,000, interest-free; and Sinclair “loaned” him a large amount of money as well (Grossman
291). The investigation led to criminal prosecutions. Fall was indicted for conspiracy and for accepting bribes. He was sentenced to a year in prison and fined $100,000
(Strauss 117). In another trial for bribery Doheny and Sinclair were acquitted, but
Sinclair was sentenced to prison for contempt of the Senate and for employing detectives to shadow members of the jury in his case. The oil fields were restored to the U.S. government through a Supreme Court decision in 1927.
Finally under President Kennedy’s administration, there were numerous sex scandals. In 1960 a stripper named Blaze Starr slept with Kennedy in New Orleans
(Strauss 133). In 1960 he met Judith Campbell Exner while in Las Vegas NV. They began a multi-year affair, with many visits by Exner to the White House. Exner was also linked to mobster Sam Gianncanna while she was involved with Kennedy (Strauss 135).
In 1961 President Kennedy began an affair with Marilyn Monroe. Also, in 1962 Mary
Pinchot Meyer slept with Kennedy in the White House, where they also allegedly smoked
Marijuana (Strauss 136). Presidential scandals have been a part of United States history such a long time that it took the public a long time to realize how important it was that
President Nixon was linked to the Watergate break-in. However, the wrongdoings were so extensive that it had an everlasting impact on an entire generation of United States citizens and changed the way people viewed the office of the President. Tsui 12
Richard Milhouse Nixon first made it into the White House after the election of
1960, when he served as vice president to President Dwight Eisenhower. Nixon ran in the 1960 presidential election, but lost to John F. Kennedy. He was defeated again in
1962, when he ran for governor of California (Greenberg 30). However, in 1968, Nixon recovered from his previous political defeats and he won several primary elections and for the second time became the Republican candidate for president. In this election, he was successful in defeating Hubert H. Humphrey, his Democratic opponent, and former
Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama, his American Independent Party opponent
(Greenberg 66). In 1972, for his second term as president, Nixon was victorious over
Democratic Senator George S. McGovern of South Dakota.
At that time, the nation was divided due to the Vietnam War overseas and the racial crisis at home. Nixon immediately sought to confront the question of American involvement in Vietnam. There were 540,000 American troops in Vietnam sent by
Presidents Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson, more than 325 men being held prisoners of war, and America was sharply divided over our purpose and our presence in
Vietnam (Kutler 38). However, during his first term, Nixon created a plan and with the support of the majority of the American people, he sought to end America's role in
Vietnam without concluding America's role in the world. Nixon began the phased withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Vietnam and achieved a cease-fire agreement, which ended United States military involvement with North Vietnam on January 27,
1973. However, he previously had ordered invasions of Cambodia (1970) and Laos
(1971) and the ‘saturation bombing’ of North Vietnam (Greenberg 118). Nevertheless, Tsui 13 he did end the war by signing a peace agreement in 1973, which help end a bitter time in
United States history (Greenberg 120).
While in office, Nixon’s accomplishments included revenue sharing, the end of the draft, new anticrime laws, and a broad environmental program. When he ended the military draft, he created an all-volunteer system for the U.S. armed services. Nixon kept his promise and appointed Justices of conservative philosophy to the Supreme Court
(Kutler 58). One of the most dramatic events of his first term occurred in 1969, when
American astronauts made the first moon landing although this was a mission initiated by
Kennedy and Johnson.
Some of Nixon’s most acclaimed achievements came in international relations.
During visits in 1972 to Beijing and Moscow, he reduced cold war tensions with China and the U.S.S.R. His best meetings were in 1969 with Russian leader Leonid I.
Brezhnev, which produced a treaty to limit strategic nuclear weapons. In 1972, Nixon visited the People’s Republic of China which led to greatly improved relations with that country (Kutler 79). Also, in 1974, his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, negotiated disengagement agreements between Israel and its opponents, Egypt and Syria (Kutler
84).
Domestically, Nixon’s actions were much more controversial. He reversed many of the social and economic welfare policies of President Johnson. He vetoed new health, education, and welfare legislation and reduced congressionally approved funds for domestic programs that he opposed. Nixon weakened the federal government’s commitment to racial equality and sponsored anti-busing legislation in Congress
(Greenberg 161). During his first term in office, he was challenged by overwhelming Tsui 14 economic troubles, including sharply rising prices. In an attempt to halt inflation, he put government controls on prices and wages; although these controls had an insignificant effect (Greenberg 180).
Despite these problems, Nixon and Agnew easily won reelection in 1972.
Widespread distrust of his Democratic opponent, Senator George S. McGovern, brought
Nixon a landslide victory. However, within a few months, his administration was under attack over the so-called "Watergate" scandal, coming from a break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee during the 1972 campaign. The investigation of the break-in led to the Watergate Scandal (1972-1974), which was an American political scandal and constitutional crisis that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
This scandal was a two-year series of events that began with the Nixon administration’s abuse of executive power toward the goal of undermining political opposition in the public anti-war (Vietnam) movement and the Democratic Party (Kutler 142). It was investigation by reporters and then the Congress of the United States which revealed the truth about the scandal. This process helped bring about the prospect of certain impeachment for Nixon, which led to his resignation on August 9, 1974.
On June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a security guard working at the office complex of the Watergate Hotel, located in Washington D.C. (See Appendix 1), discovered a piece of tape that held a door unlocked (Feinberg 12). Wills removed it, assuming the cleaning crew put it there; however, he returned later to find the the tape had been replaced. He contacted the D.C. police at 1:47 a.m. (Frank Wills’ Watergate Security Log). When the police came to the hotel five men were discovered and arrested for breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. These men were: Bernard L. Tsui 15
Barker, a realtor from Miami, Florida and former Central Intelligence Agency operative;
Virgilio R. Gonzales, a locksmith from Miami, Florida; James W. McCord, a security coordinator for the Republican National Committee and the Committee for the Re- election of the President and a former FBI and CIA agent; Eugenio R. Martinez, who worked for Barker's Miami real estate firm and had CIA connections; Frank A. Sturgis, another associate of Barker from Miami with CIA connections (Feinberg 23). Three weeks earlier, these men broke into the same office to place listening devices. This time they broke in to try and fix wiretaps that were not working and possibly photograph documents. The second break in was just one of the mistakes made by the burglars. The telephone number of E. Howard Hunt was found in McCord’s notebook. Hunt worked for the White House, while McCord was officially employed as Chief of Security at the
Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP). This suggested that there was a link between the burglars and someone close to the President (Feinberg 26). However, Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler dismissed the affair as a “third-rate burglary.” Most
Americans at this time initially thought that no President with Nixon's advantage in the presidential race would be foolish or unethical enough to risk being connected to such a burglary.
The initial investigations of Watergate were heavily influenced by the media, particularly the work of two reporters from the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and
Carl Bernstein. At first, very few people believed the Watergate burglary was significant in any way. The reporters faced many difficulties in trying to investigate the story and were often blocked by the government (Ambrose 111). At every point along the way,
Nixon and his top aides denied they had done anything wrong. However, helped by Tsui 16
Woodward’s mysterious informant, known as Deep Throat, they unraveled the basic story of what the Nixon White House had done to sabotage the Democrats (Feinberg 49).
The political investigations began in February 1973 when the Senate established a
Committee to investigate the Watergate scandal (See Appendix 2). The public hearings of the Committee included the evidence provided by those who worked for Nixon including John Dean, his former White House Counsel. The Committee also uncovered the existence of secret White House tape recordings, which started a major political and legal battle between the Congress and the President (Ambrose 124).
Key investigative findings included that President Nixon and White House Chief of Staff H. R. “Bob” Haldeman were tape-recorded on June 23 talking about using the
CIA to hinder the FBI’s investigation regarding the Watergate burglaries. Nixon wanted the CIA to slow the FBI's investigation by saying national security would be put at risk
(Ambrose 137). The investigation also uncovered how Nixon sabotaged his political enemies. For example, Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy worked in the White House in the
Special Investigation Unit called the “Plumbers” (Feinberg 75). They conducted investigatons and ran secret operations against the Democrats and anti-war protestors.
They broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg, a psychiatrist. Ellsberg was a former employee of The Pentagon and State Departmen; and he leaked the Pentagon Papers, a classified Defense Department study of the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam
War and the previous political and military conflicts in the Southeast Asia region, to the
New York Times (Ambrose 146). He was prosecuted for espionage, theft, and conspiracy. The Plumbers found nothing useful and then left, and due to this government misconduct the Ellsberg’s trial was closed (Ambrose 152) (See Appendix 3). Tsui 17
The investigation revealed that the most senior and powerful members of Nixon’s administration were involved in the covert operations and the cover up. This included leading figures in the White House, such as Attorney General John Mitchell, chief of staff
Bob Haldeman, leading aides Charles Colson and John Ehrlichman (Feinberg 94). But like most investigations, this one started at the bottom and worked its way up. On
Janurary 8, 1973, the Watergate burglars and Liddy and Hunt went to trial. All except
McCord and Liddy pleaded guilty and were convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and wiretapping. The CREEP paid for their defense and it was alleged it paid for them to not cooperate with the government investigation (Feinberg 106). Trial judge John Sirica gave the group thirty-year sentences, but indicated he would reconsider if they cooperated. McCord evntually complied and told of CREEP’s role in the burglary and the payoff for the burglars' silence (Ambrose 187). It was found that Mitchell, who had at one time headed CREEP, and campaign managers Jeb Stuart Magruder and Fred
LaRue paid for the break in and many other operations from a secret slush fund maintained at CREEP. Magruder claimed he overheard Nixon order Mitchell to conduct the break-in to get information about Larry O’Brien, the director of the Democratic
Campaign Committee (Ambrose 193). This shows how the investiation progressed.
Many important findings were revealed to the public through the hearings held by the Senate Watergate Committee. John Dean was one of the key witnesses and many other former administration officials gave testimonies, which were broadcasted through most of the summer of 1973. The public hearings were politically damaging to Nixon.
One of the most famous moments occurred when Republican Senator Howard Baker of
Tennessee asked the memorable question, “What did the president know and when did he Tsui 18 know it?” (Feinberg 134). This turned the focus of the inquiry to Nixon's personal role in the scandal for the first time.
One of the most critical findings in the investigation came on July 13, 1973, when
Watergate Committee Deputy Minority Counsel Donald G. Sanders asked Alexander
Butterfield, deputy assistant to the President, if there was any kind of recording system in the White House. Butterfield reluctantantly said that there was a system in the White
House that automatically recorded everything in the Oval Office (Ambrose 263). This fact changed the Watergate investigation completely. The tapes from this system were soon subpoenaed by special prosecutor Archibald Cox and the Senate, so they might prove whether Nixon or Dean was telling the truth about certain meetings. Dean had testified that he had discussed covering up Watergate directly with the President many times. Nixon refused to give up the tapes, citing the principle of executive privilege, and ordered Cox to drop the subpoena (Ambrose 278). When Cox refused, Nixon ordered attorney general Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson and several of his deputies refused to fire Cox, so Nixon forced them to resign. He finally found Solicitor General
Robert Bork who agreed to fire Cox. When Nixon forced Richardson and the other
Justice Department officials to resign on October 20, 1973, it was called the “Saturday night massacre.” Nixon was forced to permit the appointment of a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who continued the investigation (Ambrose 282). Nixon continued to refuse to turn over the actual tapes, but he released edited transcripts of many of them. On November 17, 1973, Nixon publicly stated that “I am not a crook.,” and continued to claim he was innocent of all charges related to the Watergate case
(Ambrose 289). The investigation and the fight over the tapes continued for the rest of Tsui 19
1973 and into 1974. The issue of releasing the tapes went to the Supreme Court. On July
24, 1974, there was a case called United States v. Nixon. The Court ruled that Nixon's claims of executive privilege over the tapes were invalid; and he was forced to give them to Jaworski. On July 30, 1974, he complied and released the subpoenaed tapes.
Due to the government’s investigation, Nixon’s position was becoming precarious. The House of Representatives was about to impeach him. In August, 1974, a previously unknown tape from June 23, 1972 was released. On it was a disscussion between Nixon and Haldeman about blocking the investigations by having the CIA falsely claim to the FBI that national security was involved. The evidence was conclusive that Nixon was involved in the cover-up and that is why the tape was referred to as a “smoking gun” (Feinberg 170). With this final piece of evidence, Nixon's few remaining supporters left him. The ten congressmen who had previously voted against all three Articles of Impeachment in Judiciary Committee announced that they would all support impeachment when the vote was taken in the full House (United States v. Nixon).
Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974 to avoid being impeached. He was succeeded by
Gerald Ford, who pardoned Nixon for his crimes on September 8, 1974. Ford says, “I feel that Richard Nixon and his loved ones have suffered enough and will continue to suffer, no matter what I do, no matter what we, as a great and good Nation, can do together to make his goal of peace come true” (Hofstader 521).
People who experienced life during the Watergate scandal had various opinions on the events surrounding this topic. Initially, after the burglary, most people did not understand what the break-in was about. There was no concept of a systemic plan of covert actions by the White House so the Watergate burglary, by itself, made no sense. A Tsui 20
Washington Post writer explains that “there was no immediate explanation as to why the five suspects would want to bug the Democratic National Committee offices or whether or not they were working for any other individuals or organizations” (Lewis). After all facts had been revealed, the way people in the United Stated viewed the President in particular and government in general had been changed forever. The post-Watergate opinion is reflected by this statement from the Washington Post, “It is that a group of people acting on behalf of, and indeed in the name of the President of the United States subverted the political process in this country in the last election in a way which has no parallel in any presidential election in this country that we have ever heard about” (“The
Heart of The Watergate Matter”).
Historians have long debated the issue of Watergate. Several historians believe that the press, especially the work of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, was the key to revealing the political corruption. These historians tend to believe that the press played one of the most essential roles in the Watergate investigation. For example, David
Greenberg stated, “In Watergate it was unclear at first whether the FBI would pursue crimes beyond the break-in itself. If the Post hadn't kept Watergate alive, it's not certain that the bureau, or the Senate, would have kept digging. Woodward and Bernstein's work shaped the way Watergate unfolded” (Greenberg 128). However, other historians have argued that the press merely placed themselves in the scandal as a way to increase its role. For example, historian Stanley Kutler thought that Woodward and Bernstein’s account, which placed them at the center of the scandal, was “self-serving” and
“exaggerated,” part of “the press' excessive claims for its role” (Kutler 165). This historian, like numerous others, thought that Nixon’s scheme and cover-up would have Tsui 21 been discovered even without the work of the press. Kutler remarks that there was
“almost nonexistent” media coverage that took place long after the break-in, when for months “fewer than 15 of the more than 430 reporters in Washington…worked exclusively on Watergate” (Kutler 180). In referring to the media Kutler says, “It did not play the leading role, but it did play a role” (Kutler 186). Overall, there were many differing opinions on the subject of Watergate, but most historians agree that Watergate was a “political disgrace of the Nixon administration” (Zinn 398) and it shocked the
“nation and tested the constitutional and political system” (Kutler 26).
The Watergate scandal led to the resignation of President Nixon and the imprisonment of many of his top aides. However, it also caused many changes such as new laws and regulations. There were changes in campaign financing regulations.
Watergate aided the passage of amendments to the Freedom of Information Act in 1986 and laws requiring new financial disclosures by key government officials (Ambrose 316).
Other types of personal disclosures, such as releasing recent income tax forms is now expected but not legally required (Feinberg 169).
The media became more confident and aggressive especially when reporting on the activities or personal conduct of politicians. They also became more cynical in reporting on political issues. Since Watergate was first investigated by the Washington
Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, ‘new’ reporters hoped to became more aggressive in order to be like them (Greenberg 351). Woodward and Bernstein’s work led to the development of teams of “investigative” reporters for newspapers around the world. Also, the Watergate scandal left such an impression nationally and internationally that many scandals since then were labeled with the suffix “-gate.” Tsui 22
Also, because Nixon and many senior officials involved in Watergate were lawyers, the public image of the legal profession was damaged. The public demanded direct federal regulation of lawyers; as to difuse this demand the American Bar
Association (ABA) launched two reforms (Kutler 347). First, the ABA decided that
Model Code of Professional Responsibilty was a failure; so they replaced it with the
Model Rules of Professional Conduct (MRPC) in 1983. The MRPC is in 44 of the states and it is a reminder to lawyers that the as long as the legal profession behaves properly it can remain self-governing. Second, the ABA made law students, at ABA-approved law schools, take a professional responsibility course.
In the end, after 40 government officials were indicted and the president resigned, many concluded that the system of checks and balances worked. However, the relationship between government officials and other authority figures and the public was altered forever. This is why it is essential to gain the view of the government’s investigation of the Nixon administration. Tsui 23
Interview Transcription Interviewee/ Narrator: Terry Lenzner Interviewer: Erin Tsui Location: Terry Lenzner’s Office in Washington, D.C. Date: December 28, 2005
Erin Tsui: This is Erin Tsui and I am interviewing Terry Lenzner as a part of the
American Century Oral History Project. The interview took place on December 28, 2005 at Terry Lenzner’s office in Washington D.C. So we’re going to start with some information about your background.
Terry Lenzner: Okay.
ET: Could you describe yourself growing up?
TL: I grew up in New York City, and my father had a very strong belief that playing football was important. He was the son of a first generation immigrant, and he had six brothers and sisters and he was the youngest. Instead of going to school, he went out and played football. He could have gotten a football scholarship to University of
Pennsylvania, so that kind of made his life and he sort of imposed all that on me. I was the youngest of three brothers.
ET: So you were the captain of the Harvard football team?
TL: Yes. Tsui 24
ET: What did you learn from that experience?
TL: I had three experiences as captain. I was captain of my high school football team, which was Phillips Exeter Academy, and we were undefeated in my senior year. We beat four college freshman teams, and I learned there that teamwork and working together and living together for three or four years was essential to success in a sport like that. I was captain of the Harvard freshman team, and we only lost one game. It was a very successful year, even though we were all just suddenly thrown together without having prior experience. By the time I was a senior and I was captain, frankly, Harvard teams in those years degraded over time. People became interested in social lives and clubs and academic ventures, and we didn’t have as successful of team in football as we did because there were so many diversions in Cambridge. So it wasn’t as great as the other two prior experiences.
ET: What were or who were your biggest influences in your life while you were growing up?
TL: My father. But one of the most important influences was I had a government teacher at the Exeter who was an absolute inspiration to a lot of us in getting interested in public service. In my class there was a guy from Colorado who had the same teacher, his name was Henry Bragdon and he really lived history and he lived public service, named Tim
Wirth who became a United States Senator for Colorado. One of the reasons I went into the Department of Justice out of law school was because of Henry Bragdon, and he was Tsui 25 just terribly important to a number of people who’ve had significant careers. Especially here in Washington, one of President Clinton’s top lawyers in the impeachment inquiry was also a graduate of Exeter at around the same time I was there. He sort of helped shape my life. My most significant experience with him was I had just finished examining a witness on television at the Watergate hearings, and I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked around and it was Henry Bragdon standing there with this huge smile on his face because, of course, I had become what he wanted me to become (smiles). He had come down from Exeter with his class to see the hearings, and then I spent a couple hours with his class after the hearings just talking to them about what was going on.
ET: That’s nice.
TL: By the way, I just told you about my dog Henry, and I actually named him after
Henry Bragdon.
ET: Really?
TL: Yes.
ET: That’s nice. You went to Harvard, right?
TL: Yes. Tsui 26
ET: Do you think your education prepared you for life after school?
TL: Actually, that’s a very good question. I also went to Harvard undergrad and Harvard
Law School, and it didn’t prepare me at all for what I started doing after I left law school.
To me it’s an interesting story. I was at a big law firm one summer, just for the summer, which a lot of law school students do in New York City. One of the senior partners there was Lloyd Garrison, who was the grandson of the abolitionist whose name I think was
Henry Lloyd Garrison. At the end of the summer Mr. Garrison said to me, this was 1963,
“I’ve been watching you and I think you should go down and see my friends at the Civil
Rights Division of the Department of Justice.” I said, “That’s very thoughtful Mr.
Garrison, but I haven’t really thought much about civil rights. It hasn’t really been part of my life.” He said, “Just do what I tell you to do and go down and see the people at the
Civil Rights Division.” I did, and they offered me a job and they told me that in 1964, the next summer which was when I would get out of law school, was going to be the
Freedom Summer in Mississippi, and if I came to the Division they would send me to
Mississippi to work for the Department of Justice on civil rights issues in the state of
Mississippi. The reason I’m telling you this is because I did do that and the first case I worked on was the investigation of the murder of three civil rights workers, which was made into a movie called Mississippi Burning1. When I got to Mississippi to work on that case, of course, I was in culture shock because I grew up in New York and here I was
1 Mississippi Burning was a movie released in 1988, starring Gene Hackman and William Defoe as two FBI agents investigating the disappearance of some civil rights activists. Tsui 27 in a small town in Mississippi and I didn’t have the slightest idea how to conduct an investigation. None! I thought to myself, “Why did I go to three years of Harvard Law
School and not learn how to gather factual information?” So the answer is, for that particular skill, I didn’t have any training at all.
ET: So it prepared you more to become an attorney?
TL: A regular, practicing attorney and be able to analyze legal issues effectively, but not how to gather factual information.
ET: So why did you become an attorney?
TL: Why did I become an attorney?
ET: Or decide to go into that area?
TL: There was nobody in my family who had become a lawyer, ever, as far as I know. I was interested in the law. I had interesting issues involving the law. I taught a seminar when I was in law school on the study of artists in society and the law, and I thought it was probably the best plateau for a whole variety of different things I thought I might want to do.
ET: You mentioned, also, the civil rights workers being murdered in Mississippi? Tsui 28
TL: Yes.
ET: How was it working with Attorney General Robert Kennedy?
TL: I only met Mr. Kennedy once, so I really wasn’t working daily with him. I was working more with the head of the Civil Rights Division who was appointed by the
Attorney General Kennedy. That was a fellow named Burke Marshall and also, of course, the senior lawyers in the Department of Justice and FBI agents in the field down in Mississippi. It was inspiring to be in the Department of Justice in those days because they had a group of assistant attorney generals that have never been matched since. This was 1964 through 1967 I was in the Department.
ET: You said that you weren’t sure how to conduct the investigation. How did you end up going about the investigation in Mississippi?
TL: I was working with senior departmental attorneys and senior FBI agents, so I started to pick up how they organized the case, how to gather factual information, how to prepare a strategy for conducting an investigation, and I found that I liked it a lot and I was pretty good at it. So it sort of came naturally to me.
ET: Did you also consult on the Atlanta Child Murders? Tsui 29
TL: Yes, I was the Special Counsel to the Missing and Murdered Children Task Force in
Atlanta.
ET: What was your opinion of that investigation?
TL: It was a mixed task force. It was federal, state and local people, and traditionally they didn’t communicate well with each other. They were also sort of sensitive about their turf and their power and authority. So it turned out to be fairly effective, but they went off in different directions and they were, in terms of technology and equipment, still in the pen and pad phase.
ET: Who do think was responsible for the murders?
TL: I don’t know.
ET: Do you think it was the guy who they caught?
TL: They certainly…I don’t think he was responsible for all the murders, no. There were a number of victims who had come from families that were suspect in terms of brutality and treatment of the kids. They found Williams, I think his name was Williams2, by accident, in many respects. In part, we knew that the bodies had been in water because
2 Wayne Williams was convicted on February 27, 1982, of murdering 21 children in the Atlanta area. Williams has always maintained his innocence and there are many who believe that he was not the only killer in this case. Tsui 30 we found particles of things that indicated that he was probably throwing them into the water to make any clues he had left on them or DNA disappear. So the police stationed people at all the bridges around Atlanta, and one night they heard a big splash in the river they were standing by and they ran around and caught this guy. It was Williams and he had just thrown a body into that water.
ET: Was that before or after Watergate?
TL: Before. Wait, that had to be after Watergate.
ET: Prior to Watergate, what were your other professional experiences?
TL: I was in the Civil Rights Division. After the Civil Rights Division I went to New
York City and I worked as an Assistant US Attorney in the southern district of New
York, which is the federal jurisdiction. I was asked by the former head of the Civil
Rights Division, a fellow named John Doar who was president of the board, to come help him out during the school strike in the 1970s in New York. So I did that. That was probably the worst job I ever had in my life. After that, I was introduced by Mr. Doar to
Don Rumsfeld, who had just been appointed to head the Office of Economic
Opportunity, which was the anti-poverty program under the newly elected President
Nixon. I worked for him for six weeks as a consultant. My wife was still in New York, so I wanted to leave and go back to New York and Rumsfeld said, “No, no. I want you to stay with me and here are three jobs that you can have. I want you to be my Special Tsui 31
Assistant. Then after awhile, he appointed me to head up the Legal Services Program for the poor, which were 2,500 lawyers then working on behalf of the poor people throughout the country. I was replaced as Special Assistant by Dick Cheney. So if you look over here (walks towards picture), this is a picture of the Senate Watergate committee at work. Here is Senator Weickert, Senator for the Republicans from Florida, that’s Fred Thompson, that’s Howard Baker, that’s Senator Ervin, that’s Sam Dash, that’s me, that’s Senator Inouye (pointing to different people in the picture). Next to it is a picture with me shaking hands with President Nixon with Rumsfeld standing there, and that half figure you see over in the corner, that’s Cheney (points to half figure).
ET: Really?
TL: Yes, and they fired me. They didn’t like Legal Services Program, and Legal
Services Program kept suing people like Governor Reagan and Republicans and
Republican mayors. We represented a lot of migrants, and they didn’t like that, so that’s why they fired me. At that point, I went to work with former Attorney General Ramsey
Clark on the Berrigan case, which was a federal criminal indictment against eleven priests and nuns headed up Father Philip Berrigan and Daniel Berrigan.
ET: How did that case go?
TL: We won it, but it was a four month trial. It was really rigorous. It was in
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which is not a great place to be anytime, as far as I can tell. Tsui 32
What it taught me, because the government chose Harrisburg because they thought it would be the most unfavorable place for our clients, the priests and nuns who were
Catholic, and what it proved to me was that the jury system in the United States was very effective. When we first did the jury interrogation, we thought the best we could do was maybe get a hung jury, but we got acquittals for all of the defendants. To me that showed the wisdom of the jury system and the wisdom of the American people.
ET: So did all these experiences before Watergate, do you think they helped you prepare for what you were about to do in Watergate?
TL: Absolutely. No question about it. A lot of them were high profile cases, and I think it made me more comfortable being in a high profile investigation like Watergate became. Also, I think the most important thing you have to have when you’re involved in these kinds of cases is a good sense of humor (smiles). If you take the whole thing too seriously, you get carried away with yourself. We had some… as I used to say to my staff people on the Watergate committee, “If the public could see behind the stages of our hearings, we probably would not be as well respected as we are being respected.”
ET: Right (laughs).
TL: We did some really strange things, and of course, the senators all appointed their own staff people and that didn’t necessarily mean that they were all qualified. It meant that they were politically qualified, but it didn’t necessarily mean that they knew what Tsui 33 they were doing as part of the investigation. So, in truth, we had very few really good, effective investigators. We had a number of them, but the great majority of the people were really political appointees.
ET: So the famous Watergate break-in was on June 17, 1972. What were you doing at that point in time?
TL: 1972? I think we were probably preparing for the Berrigan trial.
ET: Do you think that this was really shocking to you, the break-in?
TL: I was preparing for the Berrigan trial, so I wasn’t paying that much attention to this particular incident. When I heard about it, I just immediately assumed it was political spying, it’s got to be. I don’t believe in coincidences and they weren’t in the Democratic
National Committee offices because they were trying to steal typewriters. So I thought immediately that it was a political break-in, but I had other things to focus on at that time.
ET: Right. So how did you come to be in the Special Counsel to the Watergate
Committee? Tsui 34
TL: Senator Ervin, who was the chairmen of the committee, asked one of the most famous lawyers from the Democratic side, Edward Bennett Williams3, to nominate people for positions on the Watergate Committee. He was a great lawyer and when I was fired by President Nixon, Williams, who I really didn’t know and who was eminently famous and really a lion of the Bar, nominated me to be the Assistant Chief Counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee, and Senator Ervin accepted that recommendation.
ET: How was it like working with Senator Ervin?
TL: It was fantastic. It was absolutely fabulous. He was a man of huge wisdom. He was extremely learned in the law, but he had this very country, folksy personality that made people laugh. He made people think and he made people proud of being an American, which is pretty unique for one man to be able to do. So it was terrific and he was very supportive and very encouraging. Because of my prior experience with President Nixon, the White House tried to have me kept off the Committee and they tried to pressure
Senator Ervin into not having me on the Committee, but he decided ultimately that wasn’t going to carry the day.
ET: So he still nominated you?
3 Edward Bennett Williams was a famous trial lawyer and an influential Washington insider whose clients ranged from the teamsters' leader James R. Hoffa to Senator Joseph McCarthy. He was the founder of the Washington law firm of Williams & Connolly and was thought to be one of the most powerful figures in American public life. Tsui 35
TL: Yes.
ET: How far had the Watergate scandal progressed before you began investigating it?
TL: All we knew when we began investigating it was that there had been these arrests of these individuals, a number of whom were formerly from Cuba, so they were Cuban
Americans. They were caught, and one of the people that had been caught had a book that had some reference to an individual in the White House. That was Howard Hunt, who turned out to be one of the major players in the break-in and cover-up.
ET: Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg. Do you think that that was part of Watergate and the conspiracy?
TL: Yes, absolutely. Watergate became what was known as a series of horror stories about what the government had been doing to the citizens in the United States. I always felt the most serious offense, and everything that became known as Watergate, and one of the issues we ran an investigation of, was the use of political money to affect the outcome of the Democratic Party’s primaries. So they sent teams of people out to try to hurt the leading Democratic contender so that he would not become the nominee of the party.
They felt that if they could undermine the best candidate, with lies about the other candidates allegedly coming from him and things like that, that they would have an easier time with the election. They spent a lot of money trying to do that. I thought that was a Tsui 36 much more pervasive attack on the Constitution than even the Watergate break-in and cover-up.
ET: Really. So you thought the Pentagon Papers showed more scandal in the government then?
TL: The Pentagon Papers was completely separate and apart from Watergate. We only touched on that because of the Ellsberg…
ET: Right, break-in.
TL: The break-in of the Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. I should tell you that after the
Berrigan trial was over, I was asked by Ellsberg’s lawyers to help in that case as well, and I did for awhile. They asked me to stay out and help them with the trial, but I had had enough of that kind of work, so I didn’t. But I got to know Mr. Ellsberg.
ET: What was your role in the Watergate investigation?
TL: I was assistant Chief Counsel so I had a role in the phase one, which was the break- in and cover-up. I interrogated a variety of people including two, actually three people on television, one of whom was a witness that had been called up by the President to undermine John Dean’s testimony, which was against the President. They sent up a man who I actually had interviewed and he was kind of a surprise witness and nobody was Tsui 37 really prepared to cross-examine him, so since I had interviewed him, I examined him.
The one thing that I remembered from the interview was he couldn’t remember what meetings he went to and we had his calendar and he couldn’t remember what the meetings were about, even though they were with the Attorney General and the President and other people. So I thought, “How does he remember so specifically what John Dean said or did on particular dates when he couldn’t remember where he was on certain dates.” And that was the basis of my testimony, I mean of my examination.
ET: Right. So what was your opinion of John Dean?
TL: I’d rather not say.
ET: Do you think he was the most important witness, though?
TL: Yes, of course he was the most important witness. In some ways the most important witness was Alexander Butterfield4 because Butterfield was the one that told us about the taping systems of the White House. If we hadn’t had the tapes and the special prosecutor hadn’t had the tapes, there would have never been an impeachment inquiry, in my judgment, or at least a successful impeachment inquiry.
ET: How was the investigation conducted? How did you conduct it?
4 Alexander Butterfield was Deputy Assistant to President Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1973. Among his responsibilities was the United States Secret Service, which included the operations of the secret taping system whiich Nixon had installed in the White House. Tsui 38
TL: My strategy was to start at the... first of all…was to collect the names of the people in the White House, their staffs, and then people on the Committee to Reelect the
President, which was Nixon’s campaign committee with the theory being that the break- in and cover-up was clearly designed to effect the outcome of the election, whatever their motives were. So it had to involve either the White House or the Committee to Reelect the President or both. We just didn’t know.
ET: Right.
TL: We just had these low level figures who at the time we had no knowledge of how far it would reach into the White House, if at all. Frankly, at the beginning of it, I never thought it would reach the President of the United States. I never thought he would allow himself to be involved in something like that. But as the horror stories unfolded, it became closer and closer and closer to the President, and when the Republicans, a number of Republicans in the House Impeachment Inquiry, joined with the Democrats to vote counts of impeachment, that was the beginning of the end of the President.
ET: Right. How did you feel as the horror stories began to unfold? What was your opinion about it being so close to the President and being related to the President?
TL: The higher up the events implicated senior people in the White House, the likelihood was more and more that it would involve the President himself. They would not have Tsui 39 done certain things like raise money to the President’s lawyer… the President’s personal lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach, was running around gathering money to pay the burglars so they wouldn’t talk, and that was pretty close. I actually went out to California with a former FBI agent and interviewed Kalmbach, and we had a subpoena for him and he said,
“I destroyed all those records.” My FBI agent stayed with him for two or three weeks and they recreated almost all of the records from his memory of incidents in things that he had been involved in.
ET: Right. How was your opinion of the President affected from Watergate?
TL: Since I had a falling out with the senior people at the office of Economic
Opportunity, I wasn’t too enchanted with him even before Watergate. I felt that, in hindsight, he had allowed himself to be corrupted, and I think that there were certain things we investigated that demonstrated that he actually enhanced his income and assets in ways that were improper.
ET: So how did this scandal affect your life?
TL: It was a time of huge tension because it was in the papers everyday. It was on television, gavel to gavel, and people become fascinated by it. We had a listed phone.
We’ve never had an unlisted phone. So I would get people calling me at home suggesting questions to be asked. I would get telegrams suggesting questions to be asked or commenting on the hearings from people I knew or hundreds of letters from people I Tsui 40 didn’t know who were watching it daily and who liked some of the things we did. But also some people were very angry that we were doing what we were doing. I can remember a committee meeting with the senators when they became concerned that the public would get mad at them because we were displacing the soap operas that people like to watch.
ET: Right. Who do you think was the most important senator on the Watergate
Committee?
TL: I think that I’d have to say there were three very, very important senators on the
Watergate Committee; Senator Ervin because he was not a partisan figure. Senator
Baker, the Republican senior person on the Committee, was not a partisan figure, and as a result, it was close cooperation between the Republican staff people and us, Republican senators for the most part and the Democratic senators. There was one Republican senator, Senator Weickert from Connecticut, who was so, what can I say, furious about what was going on and all these stories coming out about people’s rights being trampled on that he voted with us, the Democrats, almost all of the time and he was very tough in his questioning. Of course Senator Baker asked the question that became sort of the whole keynote to the Watergate Committee hearings, which was “What does the
President know and when did he know it?”
ET: Right. Tsui 41
TL: That was Senator Baker. He was Republican. A lot of people were critical of
Senator Baker because they thought he was working closely with the White House. I always thought that Senator Baker was very balanced and that it wouldn’t be a
Democratic minority and a Republican majority, and the Democrats had been working with the White House. I didn’t see anything wrong with that and anything wrong with the Republican senator, senior senator, talking to and communicating with the White
House about what was going inside the Committee. It seemed to me completely appropriate, but there were Democrats on the Committee that thought it was a war. I never saw it that way. I became friends with Fred Thompson, who was the senior lawyer for Senator Baker. I became friends with some of Weickert’s people. It was probably the last bipartisan, high profile investigation I’ve conducted since then.
ET: So most of the Republicans were against conducting this investigation?
TL: You can’t generalize like that. Certainly, at the beginning, the President and his supporters were strongly against the hearings. Once Ervin got involved in it with Baker, they couldn’t be stopped.
ET: Right. So what were your opinions on the ones who were opposed to this investigation?
TL: I understood why they were opposed to it, but in hindsight, it seems clear that it was the right thing to do. The country, we were in the middle of the Vietnam War, we had all Tsui 42 these crises going on. I remember interviewing the President’s press secretary in the
White House at about ten o’clock at night. It was bizarre because there we were in the
White House and at the end of the interview he said, “Come on down to the Press Room and we’ll have a fake press briefing where you could ask the questions as if you were a reporter.” So here we were in the White House, now it’s about 11:30 at night, there’s nobody around, and we were doing this play, this theater in the Press Room with Ron
Ziegler5 saying, “Ask me some questions.” I’d ask him some questions and he’d play like he was the President’s press secretary, which he was. I think a lot of the people in the Administration were having meltdowns. The younger people, I could always tell with the younger people, when they were getting to the point where they decided that they had to come clean with their major activities that were improper. It became very emotional because some of them, of course, I knew from my previous experience with Don
Rumsfeld. So it was a difficult time, and I, frankly, was glad when it was over. I mean, it was exciting and exhilarating, but I was glad for the country when it was over.
ET: What, in your opinion, what was the worst violation committed in the Nixon administration?
TL: I thought that the attempts to utilize secret funds to influence the outcome of the
Democratic Primary were probably the worst attack on the Constitution. I think the other thing was the corruption of people in the Administration and out. A friend of mine was then a federal district court judge sitting on the Ellsberg case, as a matter of fact. He was
5 Ronald Ziegler was White House Press Secretary under President Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1974. Tsui 43 approached by one the senior people at the White House to become FBI director. Clearly the intent was to influence him corruptly, as the judge in the Ellsberg trial, and when that came out, his reputation was tarnished, even though he was a very, very fine person and a very good judge. They touched people, and when they touched people they corrupted them. So, the young people’s careers were ruined. There was an almost hysterical incentive in the White House to claim credit for doing things to people who were considered to be the enemies of the President. That’s the famous Enemies List of
Watergate that we came upon. They actually targeted people to get to them. They targeted the Washington Post…pulled their tax returns and see if they could get them on a violation of the tax laws. I think Watergate started in February of 1969. I know that this is not something that people are focused on, but the inauguration was in January ’69, and in February ’69, Ehrlichman, who was the president of the senior counsel, flew to New
York and met in the New York Airport with a former New York City policeman whose name I can’t now recall. They hired him and they barely had moved into the White
House. They barely knew where the light switch was and they were hiring a guy to spy on their enemies. I think that’s when Watergate began. Then they started building up more and more people in the White House that were going to spy on their enemies. They sent people up, when Senator Kennedy’s6 car went off the bridge in the Vineyard, they sent somebody up to see if they could poison his reputation. That was the culture of the
White House.
6 Edward Ted Kennedy is a senator from Massachusetts. On July 18, 1969, after a party on Chappaquiddick Island near the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Kennedy drove away with Mary Jo Kopechne. The car plunged into a pond and landed upside down under the water. Kennedy survived bu Kopechne died. Tsui 44
ET: About the enemy list, did you use the enemy list in any way, or what they were doing with that, to pin it against them?
TL: We certainly look into whether or not they had targeted and specifically initiated actions at the Internal Revenue Service to see if they could find tax violations, if they were following people around, and if they were tapping people’s phones. In fact it turned that they were tapping people’s phones. So we interviewed people to find out what their vulnerabilities were and what they thought the government might be doing against them.
Then we subpoenaed documents and individuals to come testify about what, if anything, they had done with Enemies List.
ET: What do think the turning point of the investigation is?
TL: The turning point of the investigation for us really was John Dean. When John Dean decided to cooperate with us and tell us what he knew, that was clearly the turning point.
The real question was: was Dean telling us the truth about it? The senior people that he met with in the incidents that he testified about weren’t cooperating with us. So it was hard to get cooperation until the tapes came out.
ET: What was your opinion of the “smoking gun” tape? Tsui 45
TL: It was, I think, the nail in coffin for the President because it indicated that he knew and encouraged the cover-up. I personally felt by that time, that they would never have broken-in the Watergate Democratic National Committee complex if the President hadn’t authorized it. They just wouldn’t have done it. I have my own separate theory about why they broke in, which is too elaborate, and its all speculation anyway. But I actually believed then, and I believe today, that the President knew about it before it took place.
ET: How did the phrase “smoking gun” become a part of American culture?
TL: Excuse me?
ET: The phrase “smoking gun”?
TL: I joke about that because a lot of my clients use that term when their talking to me about what kind of results they want from our investigation. So I think we inadvertently created a hurdle in people’s minds to match what was deemed to be the “smoking gun” tape. Whenever it comes up I say, “You know I was in the Watergate Committee and that’s a hurdle that, I’m sorry, but it’s becoming almost impossible to achieve the same kind of result that we achieved in that.” It just captured the imagination of people. There was a number of things that came out like: “what did the President know and when did he know it”, the “smoking gun”, and “you can’t put the toothpaste back into the tube after it gets out”. One of my witnesses was very funny, the guy that was going around moving the money around for the payoffs to the burglars so they wouldn’t talk, and he was also a Tsui 46 former New York City policeman named Tony Ulasewicz. He told me that he made so many phone calls, long distance phone calls, to California to talk to the President’s lawyer about the money situation and to talk to people at the White House, that he went out and bought what a bus driver used to use in the old days, which is one of those things that you strap on to your belt and its got quarters and dimes and nickels in it. I purposely asked when he was on television, a question about that. He was a very funny guy, anyway, and it got a roar of laughter. I did it on purpose because I thought, “You know, everyday is another horror story and the country, it’s just going to become too grim.
Here’s this really funny guy with a really funny story and I’m going to let him tell it.” It became a very famous incident, but Senator Weickert objected to it very seriously because it was demeaning to the Committee that I should make a joke out of it.
ET: Right. What were your feelings when President Nixon resigned?
TL: I was glad that it was over. It was a nightmare for the country. It was exhilarating for those of us who were in it, but I took a quiet, sort of ironic pleasure in having him resign, since in affect he fired me from the position because I was trying to carry out what the statute mandated the Legal Services Program to be. I was sad for the country that it happened and I think it disrupted us for awhile, but I think it was also a very good lesson.
I think it was really like a call-in show for the public because we’d get hundred of telegrams every week. We’d get thousands of calls and people really felt a part of it, of the participation in asking the highest leaders of the country what was this all about? I thought it was very healthy. I think that was the healthiest part of it was that people Tsui 47 really felt they were part of the process. I thought every four or five years, we ought to have the senior members of the government come up and answer questions about what their doing and why their doing it. It would be very healthy if you could recreate the
Watergate culture of participation throughout the country. I think it would be very healthy.
ET: So how did you think the pubic felt? What did or how did they feel about what was going on? We’re they scared?
TL: I think when the President fired the special prosecutor, who was Archie Cox and who had been a Harvard Law School professor, I think the people did feel scared. I remember talking to some of his staff people and they were asking us to take their records because they didn’t know what was going to happen to the files of their investigation.
They thought they were going to get turned over to the White House and the White
House would just destroy them. The FBI had been out and circled around their offices and had not let them in or out. It was a pretty terrifying time.
ET: Did you ever have an idea who Deep Throat was?
TL: I had two nominations for Deep Throat. One was Alexander Haig who had been
Chief of Staff of the Nixon White House in the end of the administration but also had been a military person and would have had access as Chief of Staff to a lot of information of the kind that was coming up in the Woodward-Bernstein stories and books. I also Tsui 48 thought if it wasn’t Haig, it was Mark Felt7, and it turned out to be Mark Felt. My first choice was actually Haig because he smoked and Deep Throat smoked and Haig was very secretive. That was my guess.
ET: Did you have any covert sources yourself?
TL: We had some people who talked to us who were either still in the administration or had left the administration, but wanted to help us. I remember when the tapes came out I started immediately writing a subpoena for the Committee to serve on the President of the
United States for his tapes and other documents that we wanted. So when it came time to vote on the subpoena, I had already had a subpoena written and they voted on it. Then they authorized me to go down and serve it. That’s a picture of me actually at the
Executive Office Building next to the White House (points to picture). The secretaries who knew we were coming because of all the publicity came out of their offices, some whom I knew, and whispered to me “Nice going”. So that was kind of interesting.
ET: How did you feel the subpoena went? It went well?
TL: How did I feel about the subpoena?
7 W. Mark Felt was the number two man at the FBI during Watergate and announced on May 31, 2005, that he was “Deep Throat.” Tsui 49
ET: Yes.
TL: We never got the tapes. The courts ruled that the special prosecutor could have the tapes because he was conducting a criminal investigation, but we couldn’t have them. So we never did get them.
ET: When you were subpoenaing the President were you nervous? What were you feeling during that time?
TL: I felt, because we were handing the subpoena to his personal lawyers, that the way to handle it was totally professional, courteous, not dramatic, and just do it as if I was back in the US Attorney’s office of the Civil Rights Division.
ET: Did you ever act any different because it was the President?
TL: No. I don’t think so.
ET: So the whole time you remained you investigated it as if it was just a regular case?
TL: I knew it wasn’t a regular case, but I also, and you’d seen a picture of me meeting with the President, didn’t have enough respect and I was not in awe of a public figure to really be nervous about it and anything, frankly. Tsui 50
ET: How did you feel about the public’s reaction to the revealing of Nixon’s corruption?
TL: I thought that the public’s reaction was appropriate. I don’t think they saw it as a partisan issue. I think they saw it as a man who was corrupt, who had done good things as President but also had become corrupt and had corrupted people immediately around him. The thing I think that concerned me the most was we recommended legislation be passed to correct some of the things that occurred during the Watergate horror show, and not many of our reforms were, in fact, enacted.
ET: Which ones were?
TL: The only one that I know of that got enacted was one that said that if you put out false information about who you were and what you were doing, which was the dirty tricks that I talked about in the Democratic Primaries, then that became a criminal offense. I take that back. We did get campaign finance reform at that time because part of the investigation was investigation of the corrupt financing activities of the political campaigns.
ET: Did you have any fond memories of the Watergate investigation?
TL: After my cross-examination of the witness who had been sent up by the White
House, I remember Senator Ervin leaning over to me and saying, “That was a terrific cross-examination”. Coming from him, that was a very fond moment. I think that I had Tsui 51 some fond moments with Fred Thompson and some of his people, as well as Sam Dash, who was the Chief Council for the Committee. Other than the Ervin comment, I really can’t think of anything.
ET: How did you feel during the cross-examination?
TL: The cross-examination of the witness the President sent up, what really happened was he was a surprise witness. At lunch after the morning session, the Democratic staff was having lunch together, the Chief Counsel Mr. Dash said, “Whose the next witness?
It’s Richard Moore and who is going to cross-examine him?” We said, “Sam, if you didn’t assign a cross-examine person then you automatically became, as the Chief
Counsel, the one to do it. He said, “I’m kind of tired from this morning. Who interviewed him?” I said, “I interviewed him.” He said, “You do it then.” So I didn’t have much time to prepare. I just focused on the things that he couldn’t remember when
I first talked to him. At one point I asked him, “When I saw you a month ago you said
‘X’ and when I asked you today you said ‘Actually it was Y’. Which answer is correct, sir?” He said, “I’ll stand by my answer, whatever it is.” This brought down the house of course, and I stopped asking questions. I thought, “He couldn’t even remember what his answer was. So, why bother cross-examine him any longer?” But I got a lot of heat for that, for cross-examining him the way I did. Since Ervin thought it was okay, I didn’t really care what anybody else thought.
ET: So were you and Ervin really good friends? Tsui 52
TL: I think we weren’t good friends, but I think that I had a lot of respect for him and I think it was sort of mutual. I had one fun moment I have to tell you. I was walking with
Ervin through the hearings to his hideaway office in the capital. We were walking through the capital, of course in the summertime, and he saw out of the corner of his eye, these two fat women with shorts on. They had spotted him, so they were coming over to talk to him. He didn’t have any use for that, so he said, “Terry, come on. Walk this way with me.” (Both laugh) We sort of moved as fast as we could just to go down the hallway and get into his office before they accosted him. I think he felt that people that dressed like that in the Capitol were kind of disrespectful of the Capitol.
ET: Were there any comic relief? Was there any comic relief during the whole investigation?
TL: Oh yes, there was comic relief. Senator Inouye had lost one of his arms in World
War II. So Senator Ervin, when they had a vote, would always say, “Okay, everybody that is in favor of the proposal or the subpoena, raise their right arm, right hand.” Then he would look at Dan Inouye and he’d say, “Not you Danny, you can raise your left hand” because he didn’t have a right hand. The funniest moment for me personally, was
I went in to ask them to grant me a subpoena for the President’s two brothers, Ed Nixon and Don Nixon, Rosemary Woods, the President’s secretary, and somebody else that was controversial. I went through the whole explanation why I needed this, and there was the senator from Montana, or New Mexico, Senator Montoya. He wasn’t the brightest, well I Tsui 53 shouldn’t say that. (Erin laughs) He started taking notes. I thought to myself, “I’ve never seen him take a note. I must be doing pretty good here. He’s writing down furiously.”
So after I got the subpoenas voted on, they left. He left his pad there, so I went over to see what he thought was all the significant things that I had mentioned. On the pad was written, “Senator Joe Montoya…Senator Joe Montoya.” He was practicing his signature.
(Erin laughs) He wasn’t writing anything with any interest to me. (Terry laughs) That was pretty funny (smiles).
ET: So when you look back on the whole Watergate investigation, what stands out in your mind the most? What will you never ever forget?
TL: I think what stands out the most to me is the fact that we, with relatively few resources, were able to go from a case that had four or five low level burglars to searching through the people at the top of the government agencies, the White House, the
President’s two chief counselors, Haldeman and Erlichman, John Dean, the President’s
Counsel, and the President’s personal lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach. We reached into virtually every nook and cranny of the government, and it was a pretty amazing process, a pretty amazing process. What I take from it is that the system worked, two parties got together and did the right thing. I thought it was a great tragedy for the country. As a consequence of that, I decided as I was leaving the Watergate Committee that I would never make any money out of it. I didn’t want to write a book, I didn’t want to talk for money. So I have never received a dime for doing anything connected to the Watergate investigation because I just thought a lot of my colleagues wrote books and went on T.V. Tsui 54 shows and things like that. I just thought we’ve had enough of it. It was more of a tragedy. People shouldn’t profit from a tragedy and I just wasn’t going to do that. It was sweet and bitter at the same time. That’s the way I felt about it, and it was very exhausting, emotionally and physically. We did a lot with a very small number of people.
ET: So, was it hard to try to get all that small information and use it to show as a whole the corruption in the government? How did you do that?
TL: My strategy was to go from the ground up. You start with the assistants, secretaries and staff people because people in power, whether it’s arrogance or not, forget that they have junior people that are seeing and hearing a lot of things. Just to prove it, there was very famous sort of dirty trickster by the name of Chuck Colson8. I think Colson had a worse reputation than he probably deserved, but he had a very bad reputation for doing dirty tricks. (Terry laughs) We subpoenaed his secretary, we had a standard document subpoena that we used, and she came back after we gave her the document subpoena with a document. She had left the government. I said, “This document is mind-blowing. This document is from the President’s Chief Counsel, John Erlichman, in the White to the
President’s other Chief Advisor, Robert Haldeman. It says John Mitchell perjured himself during his testimony before the financing investigations. I said to her, “Why are you still in possession of this document?” She said, “When I left the government I took it.” I said, “Why did you take it?” and she said, “It was interesting and I took it as a
8 Charles W. Colson was Special Counsel to President Richard Nixon. Tsui 55 souvenir.” (Erin laughs) It kind of proves my point that we could collect a lot of information from people who see things and hear things and to some extent it may be repugnant to them to see people acting in some of the ways they do. So as we gradually climbed up the ladder to more and more significant people we got more and more significant information, but at least we knew what the questions were to ask. One of the things I thought could have tripled the Committee. At one point the Committee was thinking of just calling in the top aids and asking them what they knew about the
Watergate break-in and cover-up. I was strongly against that because I felt that we wouldn’t even know what questions to ask at that point in the early stages of the investigation, and we didn’t. They finally agreed that what we did was the right way to do it.
ET: Did that strategy help you with future cases?
TL: Yes, absolutely. It became standard strategy for me. I learned a lot of it from the civil rights investigations that I did and from the criminal investigations that I did.
ET: What are your opinions on Woodward and Bernstein?
TL: I think they were the right people at the right place at the right time, and I have tremendous admiration for what they achieved. It would have not been Watergate hearings if it hadn’t been for those two reporters. I think it demonstrates really what reporting should be. Having said that, during that time period it became a very, very Tsui 56 competitive industry. I had reporters, a very famous syndicated reporter, call me up and say, “I understand and I want you to confirm that the President’s lawyer testified in executive committee”, that’s with no one around, “that you were asking the questions and he testified that the cash money that your investigating went to the President’s two brothers and his secretary, Rosemary Woods. If you come down to 16th Street and
Pennsylvania Avenue and confirm it there, I’ll source it to a source close to the White
House,” being that we would be standing close to the White House, “But if you don’t source it to me and if you don’t confirm it to me, then I’m going to source it to you.” I thought that was really bad ethical behavior.
ET: Yes.
TL: That wasn’t Woodward or Bernstein.
ET: Historian Stanley Kutler claims that that Woodward and Bernstein’s account, which placed them at the center of the scandal, was “self-serving” and “exaggerated” and part of
“the press’ excessive claims for its role.” What would you say to him?
TL: I don’t know what he bases that on.
ET: He talks about that they were just placing themselves in the scandal to benefit themselves in the press, and he was just looking at their role in general. Tsui 57
TL: I don’t necessarily agree with that because I think they were young, aggressive, ambitious reporters, and they were doing their job. They were assigned to do Watergate.
They didn’t choose it because they thought it was going to be an advantage to their careers. Nobody knew at that time when they started investigating it that it was going to become the Watergate break-in and cover-up. All they knew at the time was what we knew, which was that these Cuban Americans and Howard Hunt had been caught in the
Democratic National Committee offices. The fact that they kept digging and digging and digging showed that they had great instinct. It wouldn’t have been an impeachment inquiry, much less the Watergate hearings, if it hadn’t been for them, in my judgment.
ET: So historian David Greenberg said that without their work it would have never been revealed. You seem to agree with that?
TL: I agree with that, absolutely.
ET: Why would you say that? Is it because they kept digging and digging and digging?
TL: The White House classified the Watergate break-in as a third rate burglary. The country didn’t immediately react to it. The other hero of this story is Judge Sirica who sat on the trial of the burglars. When James McCord, the former CIA guy, was convicted, he wrote a letter to Sirica saying that basically the whole story hadn’t been revealed. So Sirica started giving out hard sentences to make sure that people would cooperate with the government. That’s really what got the whole thing beyond where it Tsui 58 was and started to give it some coverage and some focus. But up until then, nobody was paying any attention to it.
ET: What role do you think the media played in the investigation?
TL: I think it became like an avalanche after the Senate Watergate Committee got started. Everybody wanted a break and I think the role was vitally important, but I think there were times when it became overly competitive and they lost track of their own ethics.
ET: How do you think that affected the media in the future?
TL: I think it affected a lot more than just the media. It was the beginning of sort of a
“gotcha” game, and a lot of people started going into journalism because they thought they could become the next Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein.
ET: In your opinion, what do you think the biggest mistake made in the government was during Watergate?
TL: The biggest mistake was the cover-up, as it always is. It’s always the biggest mistake. I mean, look at the wiretapping issues that are going on right now in the government, which they tried to cover-up. Anybody that’s been in public service and gone through some of this stuff would know, and should know, that you just can’t get Tsui 59 away with things anymore. The best thing to do is to say, “We screwed up. Let’s correct it. Let’s get rid of the people that screwed up.” Find out what happened and expose it and correct it so it doesn’t happen again.
ET: How do you feel that Watergate affected President’s to come?
TL: I think it created sensitivity in most of the presidents since then that they had to have people around them to tell them “that was a dumb thing to do” and people around them that were ethical and concerned about integrity and the process and making sure the process didn’t become perverted or corrupted. However, that hasn’t always worked and arrogance has, I think, crept back into the government at certain levels.
ET: Do you think the government or the public was affected more after this scandal?
TL: Man, that’s a tough question. I’m not sure if I could answer that. I think in some ways the public was affected more because I think that the public saw it as the system really working. The government had gone off the tracks and now we’re putting it back on the tracks. So I think the public may have felt, again because of the participatory nature of the hearings and the reaction to the firing of Archie Cox which swept the country like a storm, I think the public was more affected than the government was.
ET: You said awhile back that people would write to you? Did you ever go by their responses? Tsui 60
TL: Yes.
ET: Which one was a prominent response that you followed?
TL: I think they there were questions that people posed that we looked at and didn’t use a lot, but used on a couple occasions. I don’t remember the specific ones now. Some of the mail was pretty angry. A lot of it was very favorable to us.
ET: So the ones that were angry, did that make you feel worried about the public’s opinion of you?
TL: My assistant set up a “stone file” and some other file. The stones were all the negative letters. I felt that the people that wrote angry, negative letters were predisposed towards Nixon anyway and they were going to hate or despise anybody who took a stand against him.
ET: With most of Nixon’s administration, did you feel that they were not going to cooperate and participate? Were you ever concerned with that issue at all?
TL: That was an assumption I made right off the bat. They were not going to be cooperative or to be helpful. Tsui 61
ET: So when you started to break the lower people and then the authority figures started to reveal a little bit more, how did you feel about that?
TL: The only people that really cooperated and gave us anything valuable were people that were about to be indicted or were already under indictment. That’s the only reason that John Dean cooperated. So I think for the most part, most of the very, very senior people didn’t tell us what they really knew.
ET: Do you feel that the punishments that the different administration people got was enough or did you think it should be harsher?
TL: I thought almost all the ones I could think of, who were incarcerated, received appropriate sentences.
ET: Did you think that the President should have been convicted after he resigned?
TL: Erin, I thought because of the investigative work I had been doing involving the specific issues of personal corruption, I was of a mixed mind. Because of that I thought,
“Maybe he should stand trial,” but I also thought that because he’s been through so much…
ET: …Already. Tsui 62
TL: He’s resigned, his reputation is shattered, and we don’t have to worry about him any longer. Let’s just get on.
ET: So after the whole Watergate scandal, did you feel that it should just move on or did you have any things that you would have wanted to go back and change?
TL: There were some issues I would have liked to have followed up on in terms of investigative work. I think the only thing I would have changed would have been the focus that the Congress didn’t give to the recommendations that we made for further changes in the laws.
ET: What was main one that you wanted but that didn’t happen?
TL: The whole issue of taking political funds and using it to try to improperly affect the other party’s political operations in some way or another. I thought that should have been made a criminal violation.
ET: Any others?
TL: That’s the one that springs to my mind that I was most concerned about.
ET: If there was one thing that you would tell a high school student about Watergate, what would it be? Tsui 63
TL: The cover-up is always worse than the underlying crime.
ET: Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you think should be covered?
TL: I don’t think so. I think we’ve covered a lot. I think they were very good questions.
ET: Thank you.
TL: Very good questions.
ET: Thank you. Tsui 64
Interview Analysis
Richard Ben-Veniste, former Chief of the Watergate Task Force, claimed, “The break-in and burglary of the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the
Watergate office building on June 17, 1972, was not the isolated and loopy ‘third-rate burglary’ portrayed by the Nixon administration. It was a significant violation of law authorized by Nixon insiders at the highest level -- if not the president himself -- to continue illegal electronic eavesdropping and photographing of confidential records.”
The Watergate break-in led to the resignation of the most powerful man in the United
States of America. In order to fully comprehend the significance of the Watergate scandal, it is important to consider the opinions of not only people who experienced it, but also historians who analyzed relevant events. Whereas oral history presents first hand personal accounts, historians offer an outsiders perspective. However, the two are linked as historian Edward Carr explains, “History cannot be written unless the historian can achieve some kind of contact with the mind of those about whom he is writing” (Carr
930). Oral history lets the historian see into the past, thus providing them the underpinnings for their interpretations. Personal accounts provide an insight that no one else can provide and are essential to all history, even though opinions may differ between participants in history and historians. Though there will be unconscious preconceptions when history is based on personal experiences, oral history is still the most efficent way to record the facts. Mr. Lenzner’s personal account of Watergate reinforceed certain conclusions reached by historians regarding the immorality of profiting from Watergate and the success of our system of government; however, he contradicted those who fault the press for the role it played in uncovering the scandal. Tsui 65
In the beginning of the interview, Mr. Lenzner discussed his background. He was an attorney/investigator and worked on many significant cases. For example, he investigated the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi, and he was the
Special Counsel to the Missing and Murdered Children Task Force in Atlanta. He discussed in detail, his professional experiences prior to the Watergate investigation.
These included working at the following: the Civil Rights Division of the Justice
Department, as an Assistant US Attorney in the southern district of New York, the Office of Economic Opportunity (for Donald Rumsfeld) as head of the Legal Services Program, and with former Attorney General Ramsey Clark representing Daniel Berrigan. Mr.
Lenzner explained how Edward Bennett Williams nominated him to be Assistant Chief
Counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee and then he detailed his experience investigating Watergate. He explained how one of the Watergate burglars had been caught with a book that referenced an individual in the White House. This information led to Howard Hunt, who worked in the Nixon White House. From then on, “Watergate became what was known as a series of horror stories about what the government had been doing to the citizens in the United States” (Tsui 35).
Mr. Lenzner discussed his role as assistant Chief Counsel, working on the break- in and the cover-up. He interrogated numerous people, such as John Dean, who was one of the key witnesses for the Committee. Another time, he successfully cross-examined an individual who tried to undermine Dean’s testimony on behalf of the Nixon administration. Mr. Lenzner also interviewed Alexander Butterfield, who disclosed that there was a taping system in the White House. Mr. Lenzner recalled, “If we hadn’t had the tapes and the special prosecutor hadn’t had the tapes, there would have never been an Tsui 66 impeachment inquiry, in my judgment, or at least a successful impeachment inquiry”
(Tsui 37). He explained his strategy, which was to start the investigation with all the names of the people in the White House, and then to work from the bottom up. In his opinion, the worst violations committed by the Nixon administration were, “the attempts to utilize secret funds to influence the outcome of the Democratic Primary” and “the corruption of people in the Administration and out” (Tsui 42). As the interview progressed, he described how John Dean’s cooperation was the turning point in the investigation. Then, he moved on to talk about the “smoking-gun” tape. Mr. Lenzner felt that even though the findings from the investigation were hard for the country, it gave the public a sense of participating in the government process. He spoke about Deep
Throat and about his efforts to subpoena the President for the tapes. Mr. Lenzner also related some personal reflections such as his feelings for Senator Ervin, specific cross- examinations, and some comic situations that occurred throughout the Watergate investigation. He was proud that the Watergate investigators accomplished a great deal with relatively few resources and that his strategy of always probing from the ground up was successful. He said Woodward and Bernstein were critical because they developed the story when no one else was interested. In his opinion, there would have been no
Watergate without their work. This concluded the interview.
Mr. Lenzner strongly supported the view that people should not have profited from the Watergate tragedy. Historian Richard J. McGowan criticized those who committed crimes only to become wealthy from writing or speaking about what they did.
He said one of the worse aspects of Watergate was it made “rich guys out of the bad guys” (McGowan). McGowan believed it was wrong for “publishers and networks [to] Tsui 67 fork over fortunes so convicted criminals could publicly revise and rationalize their roles in the political raping of America” (McGowan). Furthermore, McGowan thought that the
Senate Watergate Committee played a pivotal role, but the attention was directed to the crooks, such as G. Gordon Liddy, who has profited immensely from the notoriety that he gained from being part of the scandal. Mr. Lenzner’s interview supports McGowan’s opinion. Mr. Lenzner thought that no one should profit off of such a tragic event.
Despite numerous offers to do so, he has never written a book or given a speech for money about Watergate. He thought, “It was a great tragedy for the country” and because of that he decided he “would never make any money out of it” (Tsui 53). Mr.
Lenzner said, “I just thought we’ve had enough of it. It was more of a tragedy. People shouldn’t profit from a tragedy and I just wasn’t going to do that” (Tsui 54). Even though Mr. Lenzner discussed profiting in general and McGowan focused on criminals profiting, they agreed on the same principle. Since the country had just been through this horror, in both their opinions, profiting from the Watergate scandal was wrong.
Mr. Lenzner agreed with historians that the system of government worked well and that Watergate had an enduring impact on the public. Historian Michael Beschloss said, “the system worked with Richard Nixon in Watergate in 1974, [but] the presidency was never the same afterwards” (Lehrer). He felt the system of checks and balances within the government were efficient in bringing Nixon to justice; however, he also claimed that it changed for the worse, the way the public viewed presidents there after.
For example Beschloss stated that “After 1974, schoolchildren had the assumption oftentimes that presidents did not tell the truth, that they got involved in crimes” (Lehrer).
Mr. Lenzner said that the system of the government was successful because it led to the Tsui 68 resignation of the president. He said, “We reached into virtually every nook and cranny of the government, and it was a pretty amazing process…What I take from it is that the system worked, two parties got together and did the right thing” (Tsui 53). However, he thought that this process had a great affect on the public. Mr. Lenzner thought, “That the public saw it as the system really working. The government had gone off the tracks and now we’re putting it back on the tracks (Tsui 59).” He felt that Watergate enabled the public to participate in government. Whereas, Beschloss and Mr. Lenzner agreed in the success of the government system, they differ as to the affect of Watergate on the public.
This is an example of the differences between a personal account and the interpretations of an historian.
Finally, Mr. Lenzner contradicted the views of historians who claimed that the role of the media in the Watergate investigation was minimal at best and self- aggrandizing at worst. He believed the media was essential to the investigation.
Historian Stanley I. Kutler claimed that Woodward and Bernstein’s account, which placed them at the center of the scandal, was “self-serving” and “exaggerated” and was part of “the press’ excessive claims for its role” (Kutler 165). He thought Woodward and
Bernstein were not essential to the case. For example, he stated, “Even if media coverage during Watergate had been cautious and passive, Nixon would have been forced out of office because an independent court system combined with a Democratic Congress was intent on getting to the bottom of the scandal” (Kutler 167). In his opinion, the press did not create any new opportunities in the Watergate investigation, and the investigation would have revealed the corruption in government even without the work of the press.
On the contrary, Mr. Lenzner believed that the media played a critical role in the Tsui 69
Watergate investigation. He thought without the initial work of the two reporters, the
Watergate hearings would not have taken place. He said, “the White House classified the
Watergate break-in as a third rate burglary. The country didn’t immediately react to it”
(Tsui 57). It was the media coverage that aroused the attention of the country. Mr.
Lenzner stated that after the media started to dig deeper into the burglary, “it became like an avalanche [after the Senate Watergate Committee got started]” (Tsui 58). It was important for the press to keep “digging and digging… [and] it wouldn’t have been an impeachment inquiry, much less the Watergate hearings, if it hadn’t been for them, in my judgment” (Tsui 57). Though both Kutler and Mr. Lenzner discussed the same issue, they reached opposite conclusions regarding the media’s role in Watergate. This may be attributed to Kutler viewing the issues years later, while Mr. Lenzner actually conducted the investigation and saw it from through the eyes an investigator. Though they contradict one another, this illustrates how history needs to include all perspectives of a topic, and how oral history adds to the work of historians.
Mr. Lenzner played a significant role in history because he helped prove that the
Nixon Administration perverted the American system. There may be a debate about the role of the media or whether the impact of Watergate was good or bad, but all agree that it was one of the most important events in American history. One of the most important lessons that Mr. Lenzner learned from his experience can be seen in some of the more recent corporate frauds such as Enron and Martha Stewart. He said, “The cover-up is always worse than the underlying crime” (Tsui 63). Tsui 70
Appendix 1: The Watergate Hotel
This is the Watergate Hotel, where the offices of the Democratic National Committee during the 1972 campaign were located. The five burglars broke into this building to adjust wire-tapping that was previously installed and to photograph Democratic documents. 9
9 http://www.learnersonline.com/weekly/lessons02/week24/061702-2.jpg Tsui 71
Appendix 2: The Senate Watergate Committee
These are some of the Senators in the Senate Watergate Committee. The person seated on the far right is Senator Ervin and the man standing in the middle (background) of the picture is Terry Lenzner. 10
10 http://images.encarta.msn.com/xrefmedia/sharemed/targets/images/pho/t052/T052160A.jpg Tsui 72
Appendix 3: The Pentagon Papers
Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times; he was prosecuted for espionage, theft, and conspiracy. The Plumbers broke into his office and found nothing useful, and due to this government misconduct the Ellsberg’s trial was closed. 11
11 http://planetwaves.net/astrology/images/a2.jpg Tsui 73
Appendix 4: Woodward and Bernstein
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were Washington Post reporters. They were the first ones to investigate the break-in, and their work helped reveal the Watergate Scandal. 12
12 http://my.brandeis.edu/news/images/bernstein_woodward_ap_bild.jpg Tsui 74
Audio/ Video Time Indexing Log
1. Interviewer: Erin Tsui
2. Interviewee: Terry Lenzner
3. Date of interview: December 28, 2005
4. Location of interview: Terry Lenzner’s office in Washington, D.C.
5. Recording Format: Audio Type: Cassette
Minute Mark Topic presented in order of discussion in recording Tape 1 Side A 5 minutes Harvard football experience; his influences (father and Mr. Bragdon)
10 minutes Investigation on the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi
15 minutes Work on the Special Counsel to the Missing and Murdered Children Task Force in Atlanta and prior to Watergate experiences
20 minutes Work in Berrigan Case, which shows effective jury system
25 minutes Experience in the Senate Watergate Committee and his role in the investigation; description of Senator Ervin
30 minutes Important witnesses Dean and Butterfield roles in the investigation
35 minutes Impact it had on his life; the public’s involvement with unlisted telephones; the important senators; the worst violations of the Nixon Administration
40 minutes Corruption in the administration (enemy’s list and ruined careers)
45 minutes Turning point John Dean; the “smoking gun” tape; examples of comic relief; Deep Throat; his experience writing and serving of the subpoena
Tape 1 Side B 50 minutes Unsuccessful subpoena and his feelings about it; his feelings toward Nixon; the public’s reaction to the corrupt president; legislation reforms the Senate Watergate Committee tried to pass Tsui 75
55 minutes Fond memories of Watergate; the cross-examination of Richard Moore; his respect for Ervin; comic relief examples
60 minutes Amazing process of the investigation; the system worked; reasons why not to profit from Watergate; the strategy of the investigation (from the ground up)
65 minutes How authoritative figures forgot that the people below them knew a lot (Chuck Colson)
70 minutes Strategy for future cases (same as the one for Watergate); opinions of Woodward and Bernstein; opinion what reporting should be
75 minutes Disagreeing with Historian Kutler and agreeing with Historian Greenberg; influences on media later; importance of Sirica; the biggest mistake is the cover-up
80 minutes Watergate’s affect on presidents to come; how in some ways the public was affected more than the government; mail he received from the public; the lack of cooperation; the appropriateness of the punishments
85 minutes Feelings after the Watergate scandal; issues he would have like to change/ follow up on; the cover-up is always worse than the underlying crime Tsui 76
Works Consulted
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Feinberg, Barbara S. Watergate: Scandal in the White House. New York: Franklin Watts, 1990.
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Greenberg, David. Nixon’s Shadow [The History of an Image]. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 2003.
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Lehrer, Jim. “A Historical Look.” Interview. Online NewsHour. 15 February 1999.
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McGowan, Richard J. “Watergate Revisited.” The Barns Review. 2 February 2006
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United States v. Nixon. 20 August 1974. Landmark Cases Supreme Court. 9 December 2005 < http://www.landmarkcases.org/nixon/nixon.html>.
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: The New Press, 2003.