Watergate Quotes

“At heart, Sussman was a theoretician. In another age, he might have been a Talmudic scholar. He had cultivated a Socratic method, zinging question after question at the reporters: Who moved over from Commerce to CRP with Stans? What about Mitchell's secretary? Why won't anybody say when Liddy went to the White House or who worked with him there? Mitchell and Stans both ran the budget committee, right? What does that tell you? Then Sussman would puff on his pipe, a satisfied grin on his face.”
― Carl Bernstein, All the President’s Men

“I went first. The card I drew was "Watergate." "Oh, come on," I said. "This is ridiculous."

"Don't whine," said Carter, his grin annoyingly smug. "We all take a random chance here."

They started the timer. I drew some remedial waves that immediately got a "Water!" from Cody. That was promising. Then, I drew what I hoped looked like a wall with a door in it. Apparently, I did too good a job.

"Wall," said Hugh.

"Door," said Cody.

I added some vertical lines to the door to emphasize the gate aspect. After a moment's thought, I drew a plus sign between the water and wall to show their connection.

"Aqueduct," said Cody.

"A bridge over troubled water," guessed Hugh.

"Oh my God," I groaned.

Unsurprisingly, my time ran out before my teammates could figure it out, though not before they guessed "Hoover Dam" and "Hans Brinker." With a groan, I flounced onto the couch. The other team then got a shot at it.

"Watergate," said Carter right away.

Hugh turned on me, face incredulous. "Why didn't you just draw a gate?”
― Richelle Mead, Succubus Shadows

“Sussman had the ability to seize facts and lock them in his memory, where they remained poised for instants recall. More than any other editor at the Post, or Bernstein and Woodward, Sussman became a walking compendium of Watergate knowledge, a reference source to be summoned when even the library failed. On a deadline, he would pump these facts into a story in a constant infusion, working up a body of significant information to support what otherwise seemed like the weakest of revelations. In Sussman's mind, everything fitted. Watergate was a puzzle and he was a collector of the pieces.

-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward”
― Carl Bernstein, All the President’s Men

“So many of the professional foreign policy establishment, and so many of their hangers-on among the lumpen academics and journalists, had become worried by the frenzy and paranoia of the Nixonian Vietnam policy that consensus itself was threatened. Ordinary intra-mural and extra-mural leaking, to such duly constituted bodies as Congress, was getting out of hand. It was Kissinger who inaugurated the second front or home front of the war; illegally wiretapping the telephones even of his own staff and of his journalistic clientele. (I still love to picture the face of Henry Brandon when he found out what his hero had done to his telephone.) This war against the enemy within was the genesis of Watergate; a nexus of high crime and misdemeanour for which Kissinger himself, as Isaacson wittily points out, largely evaded blame by taking to his ‘shuttle’ and staying airborne. Incredibly, he contrived to argue in public with some success that if it were not for democratic distempers like the impeachment process his own selfless, necessary statesmanship would have been easier to carry out. This is true, but not in the way that he got newspapers like Rees-Mogg’s Times to accept.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“When all is said and done, Donald Trump will make History completely forget about Richard Nixon.”
― Ed Krassenstein

“You know, all this is speculating. I don't think any of us really know what's going on. I think there's always that pendulum action in American politics, and I expect Nixon to run into trouble in the next few years. I think there's going to be disillusionment over his war settlement. I think the economic problems are not going to get better and the problems in the great cities are going to worsen, and it may be that by '76 somebody can come along and win on a kind of platform that I was running on in '72.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72

“I'm not sure I've ever profited on the legacy of Watergate.”
― John W. Dean, Blind Ambition: The White House Years

“James Reston, Jr.: You know the first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it simplifies; it diminishes, great complex ideas, stretches of time; whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot.”
― Peter Morgan, Frost/Nixon

“Trump/Russia is Far Worse Than Watergate. It’s basically Watergate on Russian-made steroids. That would also help explain Trump’s man-boobs and crazy mood swings.”
― Ed Krassenstein

“The denunciation of scandal is always an homage to the law. [...] Capital, immoral and without scruples, can only function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever revives this public morality (through indignation, denunciation, etc.) works spontaneously for the order of capital.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“Bernstein was impressed by Sloan's thoughtfulness. Sloan seemed convinced that the President, whom he very much wanted to see re-elected, had known nothing of what happened before June 17; but he was as sure that Nixon had been ill-served by his surrogates before the bugging and had been put in increasing jeopardy by them ever since. Sloan believed that the prosecutors were honest men, determined to learn the truth, but there were obstacles they had been unable to overcome. He couldn't tell whether the FBI had been merely sloppy or under pressure to follow procedures that would impede an effective investigation. He believed the press was doing its job, but, in the absence of candor from the committee, it had reached unfair conclusions about some people. Sloan himself was a prime example. He was not bitter, just disillusioned. All he wanted now was to clean up his legal obligations - testimony in the trial and in the civil suit - and leave Washington forever. He was looking for a job in industry, a management position, but it was difficult. His name had been in the papers often. He would not work for the White House again even if asked to come back. He wished he were in Bernstein's place, wished he could write. Maybe then he could express what had been going through his mind. Not the cold, hard facts of Watergate necessarily - that wasn't really what was important. But what it was like for young men and women to come to Washington because they believed in something and then to be inside and see how things worked and watch their own ideals disintegrate.”
― Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward

“The elimination of Mr. Richard Nixon leaves intact all the mechanisms and all the false values which permitted the Watergate scandal.”
― Claude Julien

“Men who are loudly charged with repression before they have done anything to substantiate the charge are apt to proceed to substantiate it.”
― Stanley I. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon

“Lee Harvey Oswald fired the starting gun of America's nightmare years. This insignificant man's bullets didn't just echo through Dealey Plaza in 1963. The shockwaves from them arguably fuelled the turbulent events of the rest of the 1960s and only dissipated with Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War.”
― Stewart Stafford

“I have worked with him [Nixon] in every national campaign in which he has taken part ... And I am deeply grateful for the many kindnesses and courtesies he has shown me over the years. I am not unmindful of the loyalty I owe him."
He continued for a few minutes without revealing his position. Then he said, "There are frightening implications for the future of our country if we do not impeach the President of the United States ... If we fail to impeach, we have donned and left unpunished a course of conduct totally inconsistent with reasonable expectations of the American people."
"The people of the United States are entitled to assume that their President is telling the truth. The pattern of misrepresentation and half-truths that emerges from our investigation reveals a presidential policy cynically based on the premise that the truth itself is negotiable."

Rep. Caldwell (Republican from Virginia) then stated that he would vote to impeach Nixon, July 24, 1974”
― Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein

“A litany of scandals came to public attention in the wake of the political fallout from Watergate, uncovering slush funds for domestic and foreign bribery. The SEC offered an amnesty for companies admitting to questionable or illegal payments; over 450 US companies admitted making such payments worth over $300m to government officials, politicians and political parties. Over 117 of the self-reporting entities were Fortune 500 companies.”
― Andrew Feinstein, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade

“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?

We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
― John Ehrlichman

“It has been suggested that Nixon’s antidrug campaign was, in actuality, a bid to establish his own intelligence network. It has also been suggested that it was exactly that bid which brought the sucker setup that was Watergate and Nixon’s political assassination.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation

“For nearly two years the country had been blitzed by the minutiae of Watergate and force-fed the images of increasingly uninteresting men.”
― Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA

“On Monday, June 19 [1972], by a unanimous 8–0 decision, the Supreme Court finally upheld Judge Keith’s ruling, effectively outlawing most of the 'national security' wiretaps on 'domestic subversives.'
The close proximity in time between the June 19 ruling and another momentous incident, two nights earlier, is intriguing. Attorneys for the defense later theorized that there was an advance leak from somewhere in the court that the government was going to lose its case that Monday, and this was why five men had broken into the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel on Saturday, June 17—they were sent in to remove previous taps.”
― Sean Howe, Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s

“Watergate cannot be reduced to a question of Nixon’s personal psychology. He was not deceiving himself, only others. He was not deceiving his class.”
― Carl Oglesby, The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate