DEMOCRACY WATCHIs There Anything to Learn about Watergate? New History Says Yes

By Christina Pazzanese

Police arrested five burglars inside Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1972. Within a day, their ties to President Richard M. Nixon’s re-election campaign emerged and thus began the slow unraveling of Nixon’s presidency known as Watergate. Garrett Graff ’03, historian and author of a new book, Watergate: A New History, spoke to the Harvard Gazette’s Christina Pazzanese about the 50th anniversary of the scandal and its legacy. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Christina Pazzanese: The burglary and arrests at the Watergate are what’s thought of as the beginning of the Watergate scandal, but you say Watergate is more accurately emblematic of a way of thinking that drove decisions in the Nixon presidency. Can you explain?
Garrett Graff: I think America misremembers Watergate as an event, the break-in of the DNC offices, when history has shown us that Watergate was more of a mindset. It was this dark, paranoid, conspiratorial, corrupt mindset that enabled a whole series of crimes and abuses of power that permeated the entire Nixon White House from the campaign of ’68 right through his resignation in ’74. It encompasses a dozen distinct but interrelated scandals with overlapping players, differing motives, differing targets that led the Nixon administration deeper into this morass of scandal. In many ways, the burglary on June 17, 1972, was the equivalent for America of walking into the second or third act of a play without understanding that the play had been underway for some time before.