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- [00:00]
A
The following podcast contains explicit language. Hey, Slow burn Listeners, after seven episodes, we're getting close to the end. On January 30th, you'll hear the final chapter of Slow Burn, in which impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon begin and the President resigns under pressure. But before that, we wanted to give you something else. As you've heard me say on this show, Slow Burn is a production of Slate Plus, Slate's membership program. Ever since Slow Burn launched, Slate plus members have been getting a bonus episode each week featuring an interview with someone who has a unique perspective on Watergate. Today I'm going to play some samples for you from a few of those interviews. Our goal with these bonus episodes has been to give listeners a deeper understanding of Watergate, one that goes even further than the stories we've been telling in the main episodes. Here's one example. A few weeks back, we put out an interview about the judge who presided over all of Watergate's most important courtroom proceedings. The judge's name was John J. Sirica. I've mentioned him on the show a few times, but I don't think I've adequately conveyed how significant he was or how complicated his legacy is. On the one hand, Judge Sirica was as instrumental as anyone in getting people to pay attention to the Watergate break in and making sure that White House officials were held accountable for it. On the other hand, some legal experts think that he acted unethically in various ways, that his appetite for publicity and power prevented him from giving the Watergate defendants a fair trial. So I spoke to someone from the Senate Watergate Committee staff, a lawyer named David Dorsen, who feels very strongly about Sirica and the controversy surrounding him. If you want to hear that interview, sign up for Slate Plus. Today you're going to hear excerpts from some of the other interviews I've done. For instance, we've got Dick Cavett, who you may remember from his cameo in episode one, talking about the hate mail he received for spotlighting Watergate on his talk show. We've also got a staffer from Congressman Wright Patman's Banking Committee, talking about how she and her colleagues thought they were being wiretapped by the White House during Patman's Watergate investigation. Then we've got the guy who started a fan club for Senator Sam Ervin, the star of the Watergate hearings. And finally, we've got the FBI agent who helped break open the Watergate case during its opening weeks. He told me why he thinks journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in particular get way Too much of the credit. Nixon's downfall. Like I said during this episode. I'm just going to play you a little bit of these interviews. If you want more, head over to slate.com slowburn for now, here is Dick Cavett, the legendary talk show host who used his airtime on ABC during the final months of the 72 election to shine a light on Watergate when few others in the media were doing so. Among others, Cavett had on Ted Kennedy, who took the opportunity to speculate openly mere days after the break in about the Nixon campaign's potential involvement. Cavett also had on Nixon's Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, who assured Cavett's viewers in September of 72 that the break in had been subject to one of the most thorough investigations in FBI history. I'm curious how you came to take it seriously. I mean, what about it made you want to not just question Ted Kennedy about it, but to have Klein Dienst on so early? No one else was, you know, it seemed to me that besides maybe some folks at CBS and obviously, yeah, it was kind of a non story. So what drew you to it and what made you think it was worth your time and attention?
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B
You know, I wish I had the answer to that, but I sensed something was there that simply had to be attended to. Obviously I had no idea how it was all going to end. And little did we dream that someday we would have available to us an audio tape of the President, as Johnson said of the United States, Nixon ranting, screaming, railing at the anti war movement, railing at the press, his record breaking obscenities against Jews and fags, and just about anything you could think of. He was really a vile man and.
- [04:05]
A
Railing against you, right?
- [04:07]
B
And me, if I ever need a lift, I just go to YouTube and Cavett Nixon and there he is saying to hold him and Cavett, there must be some way we can screw him when the most powerful man in the world wants to screw you. Well, there are several jokes you can make about that. When I see myself referred to as somebody who helped bring down Nixon, I kind of recoil because it doesn't sound like me or something. I never had that as a conscious, a motive for having those folks on. But when it became clear that he was in deep, I guess I took a sort of pleasure in having some of them on. Amazing reaction to them. The audience seemed to oh God, who was the Attorney General who went to jail? He was the most popular of all the Watergate people that I had on. Mitchell, Thomas Mitchell, not Thomas Mitchell. That's a movie actor, John Mitchell. John Mitchell, yeah. The audience just liked him so much. And of course he was guilty as hell, as we found out later when.
- [05:21]
A
You had Kleindienst on and he sat there and said, you know, we looked into this and we did the most thorough investigation since Kennedy and we are satisfied that it was these seven people who have already been indicted. Did you think he was lying? Did you sit there and listen to him and think, this guy's not telling the truth?
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B
I thought he was probably lying. I remember thinking at times I wish I had a polygraph secretly attached some way somehow. I had a memorable moment with him during a commercial break. I said to him something along the lines of, did you see this article by so and so? I named it Writer probably then about how there's going to be big, big trouble coming for Nixon. And did you read his article? I said, and he said, fuck him. An old lady sitting near the stage jumped and were startled.
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A
Tell me about the viewer reaction that you got to your early coverage. I mean, with. With the Kennedy thing, for example, like when Kennedy floated this at that time. Very premature, arguably, and rather incendiary speculation, even with a sly look. Did you hear from people about that?
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B
Oh, I got a lot of hate mail. Yeah. And the network got nervous and they would say, you have more people like Buddy Hackett on like you did last night. Well, I had Buddy Hackett on, but I also had them on.
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A
So you got hate mail about Kennedy?
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B
I don't know if I got it specifically. I probably did, but anytime. All I see you're trying to do your favorite beating of the Nixon administration again. My favorite has been quoted before from Waco, Texas, not surprisingly, because I've read hate mail of shows I worked on and many of them are from Waco, Texas. Dear Dick Cavett, you little sawed off faggot communist shrimp. It was in an envelope, so there was a return address. And I wrote back, I'm not sawed off. I don't know if they got it.
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A
One thing that was amazing to me about watching the clips from your show from 72 and early 73, why did these people agree to go on? That's nothing to say against your show or the place your show had in the culture. But just if you're a Kleindienst and you know you're gonna have to sit up there and lie, why would you volunteer for that?
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B
I wondered about that. I wondered if it's some kind of just a basic V of I'm going to see myself on the TV screen It's a powerful allure. Still, by now, just about everybody's been on television. But I think it might be as simple as, be sure to tell my nephews and cousins they can see Uncle Biddle on television tomorrow night at 11:45 or so. I don't know, because they didn't gain anything by it. If they'd made lovely, dazzling impressions that caused people to write in and say, gee, he seemed like such a swell guy.
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A
All right, that was Dick Cavett, probably the most charming man I've ever spoken to and someone I'll get to share stage with at the Watergate Hotel for the upcoming Slow Burn Live event. Next up, we have Jane Derista, a former staffer of the House Banking Committee. As you'll remember if you heard episode two, a Texas congressman named Wright Patman tried to investigate Watergate in the months leading up to the 1972 election, and his efforts were met with very effective resistance from the Nixon White House. D' Arista told me about one possible avenue of interference that we didn't get into in episode two. Do you remember any specific conversations you had with him about Watergate?
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C
No, I don't. He was so careful at that point to not talk about it, because we had pretty good indication that we were being tapped and the phones were being tapped. They weren't being tapped so well, that we didn't know. And we didn't get to the point where we surmised by any means that, you know, there were bugs in the ceiling or whatever. On the other hand, you would answer the phone and then you hear this click, and every now and then the phone would go buzz. So we had people come and look at our phones, and they couldn't find anything or. Or didn't find anything. And they assured us that that was not true. But in point of fact, we really did. It went on, and it was obvious to us that there was an interest in doing so, in somehow getting into our telephones. And who knew by whom. We weren't sure. My point is that I didn't want to be in the inner circle on this, because I understood quite well that you wanted to keep that inner circle very small and that anything casually said or any phone call I might have made or, you know, it was just better to not know. Follow it. Yes. But not know the details.
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A
And. Sorry, this was. This all went on during Patman's Watergate investigation, right?
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C
That's correct.
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A
And so you guys felt like the wiretapping that you guys were suspecting was connected to that investigation?
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C
We Thought so. One of the more overt things that happened was that the staff director was called up about his DC Income tax, and it became very harassing. It was not the IRS, and that was rather clever. It was a D.C. tax, District of Columbia tax, and I think it would have raised eyebrows had it been irs. But they went this way, and it was just a harassing action. At any rate, we did feel that there was an ominous situation for us that these were powerful people and they didn't want this to happen.
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A
That again was Jane Derista, who served on the staff of Wright Patman's House Banking Committee. Next we've got a clip from my interview with Rob Coughlan, who as a young man in 1973, founded a fan club devoted to Senator Sam Ervin, the chair of the Senate Watergate Committee that captivated the nation during the spring and summer of 1973. After our interview, Coughlin very kindly sent me an official Sam Ervin fan club membership card. You can see a picture of it in the Slate Plus Facebook group.
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D
Senator Ervin was not a big hero of mine. He had voted against all the civil rights bills, and he was a, you know, conservative Democrat from North Carolina, and so. And I was a, you know, liberal activist type Democrat here in California. But I liked his wits and his bouncing eyebrows and just thought he was a great guy right at the beginning.
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A
Did you say his bouncing eyebrows?
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D
His bouncing eyebrows. They were fabulous. They're like, you know, pogo stick eyebrows going up and down. And he'd say things like, don't stand on the windy side of the law, things like that, and things you don't hear in California. Then I like the way he was handling the hearings. He was courteous and friendly and really trying to get at the bottom of the issue. So I had kind of a begrudging admiration for him. I have a political button collection. I've been involved in a lot of politics, and I'm a political junkie. And so I thought, oh, yeah, I got to get a Sam Irvin button for my collection. And they said they didn't have any, that he had never had buttons or used them in his campaigns.
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A
You called his office?
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D
Yeah, I called the Senate office and just asked if I could get a button. And they said, no, he doesn't have any buttons. So that gave me the idea that, well, I'll bet you people would like to have some piece of historic memorabilia from these Watergate hearings. And I got together with this friend of mine who was kind of an entrepreneurial guy, and he said, well, we could raise some money and print up some buttons and sell them ourselves. And then that evolved into the idea of starting a fan club for Uncle Sam, we call them. And there were me and a couple of other friends, my wife and David Oak and a couple of other people had this idea to start a fan club. And the key part was we said we want lots of card carrying members. Like, you know, the John Birch Society was always whining about, oh, the card carrying communists are all over. You know, that was the big fear then was the communists were going to take over. Like everybody's afraid of terrorists these days. Uh huh.
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A
So you wanted card carrying?
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D
We wanted them to be card carrying members of the Samurin Fan Club. So we thought they can just send us a self addressed stamped envelope and we'll print up membership cards and send them back to them. It turned into a Frankenstein of success. We went and rented a post office box at Stanford University near my office. And we asked the postmaster, he said, well, we want to get this box mailbox for mail. And he said, well, what's the name of your organization? And we said the National Sam Irvin Fan Club. And he said we'll get a small box. And we had our press conference on July 3rd.
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A
You had a press conference?
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D
We set up a press conference at the Press Club in San Francisco and we had it set up just like a Nixon press conference.
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A
What does that mean?
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D
Well, we had it set up with the bust of Abraham Lincoln and a picture of the family and an American flag behind me, just like the Nixon Oval Office type of thing. The women passed out chocolate chip cookies on red, white and blue plates. And we did it on July 3rd. So the stories would be in the July 4th editions of the paper. And we didn't know if anybody. You never know if anybody's going to show up at your press conferences or not.
- [15:42]
A
And you just what you called a bunch of reporters or.
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D
Yeah, just said, we're going to announce the formation of the National Sam Urban fan Club on July 3rd at the Press Club at 10 o' clock in the morning. Come on by. Well, the place was packed. We had reporters from Reuters and New York Times and Time magazine and international reporters. There must have been 50 people there. The room were overwhelmed by it. And the next day the press was fabulous all over the country. And July 4th I was getting phone calls from radio stations all over the country.
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A
That again was Rob Coughlin. And now to close things out, we're going to turn to Paul Magallanis, a former FBI agent who helped tie the Watergate burglary to Nixon's reelection campaign. Here's Magellanis talking about his first meeting with a crucial source, an employee of the Committee to Re Elect the President named Judy Hoback.
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E
Finally, she said, you know what? I can trust you. She says, let's go to my house in Maryland. She said, I'll tell you anything you want to know, and we'll talk there. I said, okay, fine. So we went out there. We did research into the wee hours of the morning. She gave us all kinds of information. She told us, here was the bookkeeper, auditor of Cleaves. She saw millions of dollars in cash exchange. She saw money given to Liddy, money given to McCord. She had the safe that she went into, all kinds of money in there. And money just poured into the creep. And she had the role of accounting for all of that money.
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A
Before we get any further, can I ask you first to tell me what you were thinking as you were getting this information? I mean, even. What was your reaction? I mean, was it surprising to you? Was your mind reeling? What were you thinking?
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E
Well, first of all, I was thinking of partially solving this case, because this is the first breakthrough. This is an investigation that involves the presidency and his men. That's what was going through my mind. They were finally getting somewhere on this case. That was really a. A dramatic turn and heartbreaking because, you know, we're investigating the presidency.
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A
Now, that night when you were talking to Judy Hoback, you said you talked into the wee hours in the morning.
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E
Yes.
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A
Did she seem scared to you? Did she seem like she was just nervous to be telling you these things, or was she getting them off her chest? How did you understand her motives? I guess. Or how did you understand her mindset?
- [18:28]
E
Relieved. She was relieved to tell us all of the information she had because she knew it was wrong. She wanted to get this information out, but she didn't know how. And Peggy Gleason, her friend, gave her the avenue to get this thing out. She wasn't nervous. She was kind of very confident. She knew numbers, she knew dates, she knew names. She wasn't afraid. She wasn't threatened afterwards. She was afraid and threatened. And by that I mean by WNB, Whitzburn and Bernstein Publishing, my. We call them interview SD302, almost word for word in the Washington Post. And then he called me, and she said, you told me this was going to be confidential. He told me it was never going to be public. What could I tell the woman? That was a really, really bad experience for me when that happened.
- [19:34]
A
You remember reading in the paper?
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E
Reading in the paper under the byline and Witchcraft. Give me the name.
- [19:43]
A
Okay. Woodward and Bernstein.
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E
Woodward and Bernstein. That's it.
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A
I thought you were joking. I thought you were joking.
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E
But no, no, I just. I don't like those names for some reason.
- [19:55]
A
I understand. I understand the feeling of seeing your interview essentially having been leaked to the press. I imagine it's like a double whammy in a way, because one who's leaking it and what happens now, but also in the history books, what gets written is that the reporters uncovered this right when in fact they were merely reporting on work that you had done.
- [20:19]
E
Absolutely. It's the greatest myth in the history of journalism. I think they got all of the information from Mark Felt, as you know, the infamous Mark Felt. Teeth, throat. They followed our investigative leads, got more information. In fact, after they, you know, they got the identity of Judy Hovak, they went to her house and then she reluctantly talked with them. And it's all the same things he told us, or a little less, actually. And so they take credit for everything that we did. And they're the ones that saved the Republic.
- [21:04]
A
All right, and that is a wrap. If you want to hear more, sign up@slate.com slate and if you have questions or comments about Slate plus or Slow Burn, email us@pluslate.com Slate plus members made it possible for us to make this series and I would love to have you all join them. Also, we are going to do a special Q and A episode for Slate plus after the finale. If you have questions that you'd like answered, email us@slowburnlate.com Again, that's slowburnlate.com the slate plus bonus episodes were produced by Jeff Friedrich. Special thanks this week to Chow2. We'll be back January 30th for the season finale of Slow Burn. See you then. The new year brings new health goals and wealth goals. Protecting your identity is an important step. Your info is in endless places that could expose you to identity theft leading to lost funds. LifeLock monitors millions of data points per second. If your identity is stolen, our restoration specialists will fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Resolve to make identity, health and wealth part of your New year's goals. With LifeLock, save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock.com SpecialOffer terms apply.