Watergate 'what ifs' linger 40 years later

WASHINGTON -- Watergate's "what ifs" are still tantalizing.

What if a security guard hadn't noticed tape on a door latch outside Democratic headquarters at the Watergate office building not far from the White House? What if a calculating president hadn't taped his private words for posterity? What if Richard Nixon simply had come clean about the break-in and cover-up, and apologized?

Forty years of investigation and debate have yielded no simple answer to how a raid that Nixon's spokesman termed a "third-rate burglary" became a titanic constitutional struggle and led to his resignation.

"The shame of it all is that it didn't have to be," said Stanley Kutler, the dean of Watergate historians. "Had he been forthcoming, had he told his men, 'This is crazy, who ordered this?' . . . [He] wouldn't have had this problem."

Of course, Watergate would never have happened if officials at Nixon's re-election campaign had not responded to his demands for dirt on the opposition by hiring E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. The ex-CIA and ex-FBI operatives presented an outline that included bugging and rifling the files at Democratic National Committee headquarters.

Liddy and four others were caught early on the morning of June 17, 1972 -- actually, the second of two break-ins at the DNC -- when security guard Frank Wills, seeing the taped latch, summoned police.

While there's no evidence Nixon knew of the burglary plot beforehand, within days he was deep in a conspiracy to hide the burglars' ties to his campaign and White House. Meeting with top aides, he readily agreed to paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in hush money and urged that the CIA intervene to block an FBI investigation.

Following the money trail eventually led investigators to the truth, and began a two-year legal war involving grand juries, Congress and the Supreme Court. It ended when Nixon, facing certain impeachment, resigned on Aug. 8, 1974.

Former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste says if Nixon hadn't been forced by the Supreme Court to hand over his tapes, with their "smoking gun" of self-incrimination, things might have been different.

"The system worked," Ben-Veniste said. "But the system would not have worked had not the president taped himself."

Why did he do it? In his memoirs, Nixon said he wished his administration to be "the best chronicled in history." But without doubt he also wanted evidence in case someone attacked his decisions or motives.

What the system did, though, is capture him ordering Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman to get CIA Director Richard Helms to claim national security grounds in blocking the probe.

The president spent months battling disclosure of conversations like that. But Kutler wonders what if instead, early on, he had adopted a different strategy and made a clean breast of things. Might America have forgiven him?

"One of the mysteries of Watergate is why didn't Richard Nixon come on television, look the camera in the eye -- he was a master of that -- and say, to us, the American people, 'Yes, I had knowledge of this,' " said Kutler.

In the end, the best explanation for why Watergate led to Nixon's fall may be the president's brooding personality.

"When all the journalists, all the president's men and even the president's enemies fade into the mists of history, we have Richard Nixon left," Kutler said. "That's what we remember."