New evidence has surfaced in the fifty years since President Nixon’s resignation. This seminar gathers together three prominent authorities on Watergate, the biggest political scandal of the 20th century.
For 50 years, we were taught a carefully curated history of Watergate. It was the nation’s greatest political scandal: a White House-led cover-up, the only resignation of a sitting president, and the conviction of some two dozen members of Richard Nixon’s administration. However, with the opening of new archival material, a fuller history emerges that prompts us to challenge what was previously known.
>> Luke Nichter: Hello. My name is Luke Nichter, the James H Kavanagh chair in Presidential Studies, professor of history at Chapman University. And we're here at the Hoover Institution, where we've just come from a fascinating history working group seminar with my two guests today, Dwight Chapin and Geoff Shepard. And Dwight and Geoff each worked in the Nixon White House.
They are each authors of recent books, and they join me in the stimulating seminar where we got into some new evidence dealing with Watergate, which is just in time for this commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Watergate. Which continues between now and August of next year in 2024, leading up to the 50th anniversary of Richard Nixon's resignation and his pardon by Gerald Ford.
So welcome, both of you. Welcome to Hoover.
>> Dwight Chapin: Thank you.
>> Geoff Shepard: Good to be here, Luke.
>> Luke Nichter: Now let's start with your books, since you each have a recent book. Dwight, first give me a summary of your book. Why a book?
>> Dwight Chapin: Why a book? Well, my book is called The President's Man, and it's the memoirs of Nixon's trusted aide.
And that was me. And I wrote this book. Most books are written six minutes after somebody leaves the White House. I took 50 years to give some perspective to all of this, and I cover the journey that I had with Richard Nixon as a young man from age of 22 up through basically right now, because I still am out talking about the legacy of Richard Nixon.
I talk about the journey, and particularly in reference to Watergate and some of the subjects we talked about today. I talk about what I know now that I did not know then.
>> Luke Nichter: And you're probably too modest to suggest this. But I suspect that of everyone left with us, your relationship with Nixon probably goes back the furthest and really are the last person who was closely associated with him.
Is that fair to say?
>> Dwight Chapin: I think it's fair to say. I was a very young man. I was a student at the University of Southern California when I first started working for him when he ran for governor in 1962. And then I ended up moving to New York after he had moved there and became his personal aide and worked with him all the way through until he became president of the United States.
And then I became his appointment secretary.
>> Luke Nichter: Geoff Shepard, in your case, we're talking about three books, so a larger corpus of work. How would you summarize that work to date?
>> Geoff Shepard: Well, the three books are all on Watergate. I joined the Nixon White House staff as the youngest lawyer two weeks out of law school.
I stayed for five years, and toward the end, I was deputy counsel on his Watergate defense team, as your viewers know, it ended badly. President Nixon resigned in disgrace, and two dozen members of his administration went to prison. We lost big time. I discovered about 15 years ago that the records of the Watergate special prosecution force are kept at our national archives, and under certain circumstances, you can review them.
I like to think I know what to ask for, and I know how to recognize something when the document seems to contradict conventional wisdom on Watergate. So I have these three books. The first one describes how the Watergate scandal was helped along by Kennedy Democrats who wanted back in the White House.
The second book, published in 2015, is concentrates on how the Watergate defendants did not get fair trials or due process of law because of shortcuts taken by the prosecutors. And my most recent book, the Nixon Conspiracy, which came out in 2021, describes how Nixon himself was brought down by falsehoods and misrepresentations made in secret to the Congress.
So my whole rationale is documents, because I think my story is so astounding, it needs and it benefits from showing the actual documents that leave this paper trail.
>> Luke Nichter: And I think you also are too modest to say this, but I recall you were the youngest attorney on Nixon's defense team.
And so, to your delight, or perhaps horror, here you are 50 years later. You really are the greatest living expert on the details having to do with Watergate.
>> Geoff Shepard: Well, that's true. It's also, I not only lived through it from stem to stern, but I've spent most of the last 15 years researching it.
So there are others who were there, but their lives have gone on.
>> Dwight Chapin: He's still living it every day.
>> Geoff Shepard: Every day.
>> Luke Nichter: So let's fast forward and bring viewers up to today. So here we are 50 years later. And 50 years ago, I mean, almost on a weekly or in some cases, some weeks, a daily basis, we are commemorating some 50th anniversary of something, as Watergate unfolded in 1973 until the resignation in 1974.
So for the next year, plus, almost on a weekly basis, there's something we can look back and say 50 years ago today, this happened. So 50 years later, here we are. We've just come from this seminar. Why should we care?
>> Geoff Shepard: Well, one, we really should have a correct understanding of what happened.
So one of the things we did in the seminar, I produced a spiral brown notebook of some 19 documents for the participants to study. We talked about some of them, but they can look through them. But my website contains references and links to 100 documents that indicate something was amiss.
It was amiss then, and if we're not careful, if we're not astute, the same kind of situation can become a miss today. You get political prosecutions. This is not politics and electoral votes. This is deciding to put people in prison you don't like. And that can become very, very controversial.
And I maintain that's what happened then. And you learn about that and you look at what's going on today, you might worry about the same sorts of things going on.
>> Luke Nichter: Dwight Chapin, same question 50 years later. Why should we still be talking about this?
>> Dwight Chapin: It's incredibly important.
Geoff's points are right on the money. You have to understand the documentation and the nuances of all of this and what was done wrong. But I would add into what Geoff said the critical importance of understanding what was going on politically, the juxtaposition of the powers that were after Richard Nixon.
Nixon came in at a real high point in his political life. He had gone to China. He had had the Salt Talks in Russia. He had an incredible landslide victory with a 17 million margin against George McGovern. I mean, he was riding incredibly high. And there were oppositions to him that had tremendous power and harnessed together to come after him.
And in all fairness, he was brought down by a conspiracy that had the fundamental base, if you will, of this misused judicial system, the misuse of the prosecutors, this whole episode that Geoff describes so well. And that was kind of the culmination of this. I mean, he's up there.
How are they going to get him? And they get him by cheating.
>> Geoff Shepard: And what's so intriguing from our perspective is that just within the last ten years, four caches of documents have surfaced showing internal deliberations by the special prosecution force that show they were having secret meetings with the judges.
They were suppressing exculpatory information. They were cutting so many corners that you can't in good faith claim that Nixon and his aides got the due process of law that they're promised by the Fifth and Sixth Amendments. And this unfolding, I believe it's just starting. There's so many more things to come out.
If you understand how it unfolded, then you can look at documents even 50 years later and say, wow, if we had known that, then these things couldn't have happened. And then you come down to it. What is the major way to prevent it? And you cling back to a free press.
The real ace in the hole for the rule of law, which we're all aligned with, requires a free and vibrant press.
>> Luke Nichter: And for me, this, we're talking about an academic subject. I was born after Watergate. But you two lived through this. I mean, is it possible to sort of think, what if back then we knew then what we know now?
I mean, what are the ramifications of this? I mean, especially for me, a non-attorney, when you talk about sort of judicial misconduct and ex parte meetings and prosecutors talking to judges and judges talking to people on the Ervin committee, what does that all mean, in terms of help a non-attorney understand why that's so significant.
>> Geoff Shepard: You begin with three truths, three unassailable truths. There really was a break in. They were caught red handed. The question was, who knew there really was a coverup? The question was, who was involved in the cover-up? And Nixon really did resign. So I complain about due process.
It doesn't mean the people were innocent. I mean, I got my friends and my enemies and people I blame, but it means they didn't get a fair trial. And we guarantee our citizens, by the Bill of Rights, a fair trial.
>> Dwight Chapin: What we didn't know then, that we now know is of interest.
But what really needs to be underscored is that this kind of thing can happen and that we have to be vigilant about it, and that we need to make sure that we continue with a press that is vigilant and is on top of this kind of activity, if it's happening and searches for the truth, be the press people, Republican or Democrat.
And there's just a need for an element of fairness here. Richard Nixon was an incredible man and a very distinguished person, a great president. And he was brought down by this, and there is a complete misunderstanding of what this man was all about. And I think one of the things that's happening here, thanks to Jeff and other work by others, that we're starting to understand that indeed, he has a legacy that is much more important and much more sterling, if you will, than the public has been led to believe.
And this is very good for him because it's fair and accurate.
>> Luke Nichter: For me, when I look at some of these newly disclosed documents, it's an important lesson about various details about Watergate. But really, as I look at it from more of an academic standpoint and taking this into the classroom and how do I utilize some of this new content?
It's almost, to me, appears to be a sort of case study for political warfare and how it happens. And I say that because it could happen again, it could happen to a Democrat or a Republican. And here we have a very well documented case for exactly how this happened.
Now that this new documentation is coming out. Do you agree with that take?
>> Dwight Chapin: I do.
>> Luke Nichter: And at the time, did you feel that this was political warfare?
>> Dwight Chapin: Yes, if you don't have honest people and keep people honest, you're going to have this kind of activity.
And what Geoff has uncovered here is a manipulation to bring down a president. And the motives of these people were such that it has to throw into question whether our democratic process worked the way that it was supposed to work at that time. It's working now because we're back in there.
And thanks to people like Geoff and future historians coming along, we're going to get more and more of the truth. There's a tremendous amount of documents left to be reviewed, as you know so well. There are incredible number of tapes to be researched. So there's a lot of ground to be plowed here to find out even more than we know as of this time.
>> Luke Nichter: Geoff, you can have the last word here.
>> Geoff Shepard: Politics can be very rough and tumble. There's no question about that. People feel strongly in different points of view. But when prosecutions become politicized, alarm bells ought to go off. Because to twist statutes in order to go get someone is not the way our system was set up.
And it turns out that's what was done in Watergate. And we didn't know about it because nobody on the press was willing to look into it. Today we have more diversity of views from the media, but you've got the same risk when prosecutions become politicized. And I think that's the alarm bell that we have to be mindful of.
>> Luke Nichter: If there's some truth, any truth at all, the 18 year olds in my classroom, they'll really be the next generation who tries to make sense of this. Maybe even after I'm gone, we wish them well. I think we will still be learning about this subject for a very long time.
>> Geoff Shepard: I agree. It was the dominant political challenge of the previous century. The political scandal, huge, went on for three years. Lots of currents and eddies and differences of opinion and a ripe topic for study.
>> Luke Nichter: So I think we'll end it right there. Just want to say thank you to Dwight Chapin and Geoff Shepard for joining me here today for new revelations about Watergate at 50 here at the History Working Group at the Hoover Institution.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Luke A. Nichter is a Professor of History and James H. Cavanaugh Endowed Chair in Presidential Studies at Chapman University. His area of specialty is the Cold War, the modern presidency, and U.S. political and diplomatic history, with a focus on the "long 1960s" from John F. Kennedy through Watergate. He is a noted expert on Richard Nixon's 3,432 hours of secret White House tapes, and a New York Times bestselling author or editor of seven books, the most recent of which is The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and the Making of the Cold War.
Luke’s next book project, under contract with Yale University Press, is tentatively titled The Making of the President, 1968: Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, George Wallace, and the Election that Changed America, for which he was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for 2020-2021. The book draws on interviews with approximately 85 family members and former staffers, in addition to extensive archival research involving first-time access to a number of key collections that will recast our understanding of the 1968 election.
Geoff Shepard is an attorney and former official in the Nixon and Ford administrations. He came to Washington in 1969 as a White House Fellow, after graduating from Harvard Law School. He then joined John Ehrlichman’s Domestic Council staff at the Nixon White House, where he served for five years and worked closely with senior officials at the Department of Justice. As a result, he knew and had worked with virtually all of the major Watergate figures. He also worked on President Nixon’s Watergate defense team, where he was principal deputy to the President’s lead lawyer, J. Fred Buzhardt. In that capacity, he helped transcribe the White House tapes, ran the document rooms holding the seized files of H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Dean, and staffed White House counselors Bryce Harlow and Dean Birch on Watergate issues and developments.
Over the past decade, Geoff has uncovered internal documents within the Watergate Special Prosecution Force that call into question everything we’ve been told about Watergate. His first book, The Secret Plot to Make Ted Kennedy President (2008), focuses on the political intrigue behind the successful exploitation of the Watergate scandal by Kennedy administration loyalists. His second book, The Real Watergate Scandal, Collusion, Conspiracy and the Plot that Brought Nixon Down (2015), focuses on judicial and prosecutorial abuses in the Watergate prosecutions. His third book, The Nixon Conspiracy, Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President (2021), describes prosecutors’ work with the House Judiciary Committee to bring about Nixon’s impeachment.
Dwight Chapin worked as the Personal Aide to former Vice President Richard Nixon during his presidential campaign, becoming Special Assistant to the President after Nixon’s election victory. He became Deputy Assistant to the President in 1971, and visited China three times: with Henry Kissinger in October of 1971, with Alexander Haig in January of 1972, and with President Nixon in February of 1972. Chapin served as “Acting Chief of Protocol” for these trips. Chapin remained in his role as Deputy Assistant until he left the White House Staff in March 1973.
Chapin was also President and Publisher of Success Magazine for five years, and later served in Asia as Managing Director of Hill and Knowlton Public Relations. In 1988 Chapin established Chapin enterprises, an independent communications consultancy, which he operated for the next thirty years.
Chapin published an in-depth memoirs about his time with Nixon, The President’s Man (2022), which relates his memorable experiences and concludes with new insights about the break-in that brought down Nixon’s presidency.
