A Piece of Tape: The Watergate Story -- Fact and Fiction

by James W. McCord Jr.

Book by James W. McCord

329 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1974

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a good summation of everything happened post Watergate break-in. Unfortunately, McCord offers little primary background of his own accounts and the book pulls nearly entirely from Senate Watergate Committee testimony from Dean and Ehrlichman.

McCord attempts to answers several questions in his book such as “what did the president know and when did he know,” the attempts to blame the CIA, and the levels of which the White House staff worked with the Justice Department to limit as much prosecution as possible. Rather than using one comprehensive timeline to address these issues, McCord has more than five separate timelines that often overlap and occasionally contradict each other. If you’ve watched the Senate Watergate hearings or have read the transcripts, then you will won’t get a lot of new facts reviewing this book.

I will give McCord credit that he seemed to have poured over the Senate Watergate testimony, the impeachment documents, and his own trial transcripts to put together these timelines, but ultimately this book does not offer greater insight into the beak-in at the Watergate.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I stated when I was finished with part one of this book, It is written in an unusual format, and divided into three parts and can seem confusing and repetitive at first.

I'm amazed at how much I actually like James McCord and have to consider him as much a victim as a villain in the Watergate affair. Even though he was guilty of the break-in and admitted it, its obvious that he didn’t quite receive a fair trial, and the somewhat compromised prosecutors used perjured testimony and refused to correct the record, even on appeal.

McCord’s letter to Judge Sirica, revealing the perjury and involvement of higher-ups, was the catalyst for the unraveling of the conspiracy and subsequently the entire Nixon administration. He was lied to in order to get him involved in the break in, besmirching an otherwise unblemished career spanning decades in the CIA and the FBI.

I'm reading this while concurrently starting to watch the 1973 Senate Watergate Hearings from gavel to gavel.
I'm on day 2 (of 51!) which is McCord's first day of testimony, so I'm going slow with both.

[Devin]

Thank God for interlibrary loan! Of the Watergate memoirs, this is perhaps the most difficult to track down. (Long out of print, the cheapest copy on Amazon is currently going for more than $100.)

McCord is one of the most enigmatic of the burglars. His accounting here is one of an upstanding (if not self-righteous) patriot laying bare the corruption and extra-constitutional proclivities of the Nixon administration, but there's a lot he omits. He provides precious few details on his personal and professional background. He doesn't account for aspects of his participation in the DNC burglary that vary from strange to suspicious –– like his botched job taping the doors, or a claim from one of the burglars who said that he saw McCord through a window in the DNC prior to the break-ins, or his seemingly odd decision to not tape record the phone taps, or his assertion that he installed the "September bug" in the final break-in (even though the FBI and phone company asserted they had checked the phone in question following the break-in and found nothing), or how photos of documents from the DNC were apparently faked in the motel room where is associate monitored the phone taps...

He clearly wrote this with the agenda of clearing the CIA of any participation or involvement in the break-ins and really goes to bat for the Agency, trying to defend its honor as an upstanding institution. His advocacy for the integrity of the Agency appears either naive or deceitful in the wake of the Church committee hearings that occurred the year after this was published.

But there's a lot here, even if it is primarily his review of Watergate testimony. He conveys the confused, entangled nature of the coverup. It's just unfortunate there isn't as much focus given to his own background and experience leading up to his involvement in the break-ins.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 2 out of 5]

A Piece of Tape is a strange, rambling pseudo-memoir by James McCord, leader of the Watergate burglars, as he attempts to make sense of the strange, presidency-destroying crime he played a central role in. McCord was an interesting man who worked for both the FBI and CIA; in the latter, he directed security at Agency headquarters, covered up the MKULTRA-related death of Frank Olsen and led counterintelligence operations against far-left groups like the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He was also a mysterious one, who rarely granted interviews and whose death in 2017 went unreported for two years. McCord, writing while the scandal was still ongoing, writes fairly of his almost-accidental involvement with Hunt and Liddy, being recruited from John Mitchell's security detail to an illegal crime on assumption that President Nixon approved it. Charitably, McCord comes off as a man whose loyalty and earnest intentions were abused by amoral superiors; uncharitably, he can seem a dupe who didn't think deeply enough about what he was being asked to do. McCord takes care to exonerate the CIA for involvement in the Plumbers' activities, which he admits was one of his motives for turning states' evidence against his colleagues; he also preemptively rebuts the pro-Nixon conspiracy theories that later sprung up around the burglary. The second and third sections of the book, unfortunately, are largely digest versions of newspaper reports, Senate testimony and other public records that offer little insight into the scandal, or McCord's role in it. McCord seems earnest enough, and sometimes convincing, but his book (rarely read and now hard to find) is mostly a small rock on the mountain of Watergate literature.