Room 2: Initial Reactions to the Break-In (1972)
The Washington Post’s first article on the Watergate break-in
On June 18, 1972, The Washington Post published a report about an intriguing local crime story about five men, including an alleged ex-CIA officer, who were arrested the day before for breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s DC headquarters in the Watergate complex, in what the paper described as “an elaborate plot to bug the offices.” The story was published on the front page of the Post, but it appeared below two news analyses on the Vietnam War. In the months following, most other sources did not cover the story substantially or at all, leaving the Post to publish 200 stories in the first six months following the break-in.
What’s missing from the article is almost as significant in retrospect as what was included. For example, President Nixon is not mentioned in the article in any capacity. This seems like a glaring omission now at first glance, but at the time of publication, there had never been any point of comparison for political scandals. The article says that one of the suspects described their group as “anti-Communists”, which is a rather vague term. Although one could have other suspicions about the political motives of the burglars given that they were breaking into the DNC’s office months before the 1972 presidential election, news articles generally don’t get written based on suspicions (and they certainly didn’t back then).
Though Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are credited as contributors at the bottom of the article, the byline shows the article was written by a less familiar name, Alfred E. Lewis. Lewis was a longtime police reporter for the Post; the fact that a local crime reporter wrote this first story and not a member of the Post’s political team makes clear that the story wasn’t expected to go beyond the local crime beat.
(Sources: Lewis, Perloff & Kumar, the artifact itself)
Walkie-talkie used in the break-in
This artifact represents one early sign that there may have been more to the Watergate break-in than was initially reported. The article above mentioned that the Watergate burglars had one walkie-talkie with them. But you can’t do much with one walkie-talkie, so that discovery raised the question: where was the other walkie-talkie? As it turned out, there were two walkie-talkies on the other end, operated by E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, who were ultimately arrested and convicted for their roles in the burglary. Hunt and Liddy were former intelligence officials who worked for the Committee to Re-elect the President, indicating a connection between the Nixon campaign and the Watergate break-in. Nevertheless, Watergate didn’t become a story that dominated the national press until March 1973, when burglar James McCord said there was “[t]here was political pressure applied to the [Watergate] defendants to plead guilty and remain silent”.
This particular artifact was used as an exhibit in the trial U.S. v. Liddy, which ended with Liddy’s sentencing in January 1973. It is now in possession of the National Archives and Records Administration, though the picture shown here was taken in 2012 by an employee of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library & Museum, while the walkie-talkie was on loan to the museum. Additional images are available at https://catalog.archives.gov/id/245243888
(Sources: “The Watergate Story”, Lewis, Perloff & Kumar, Prasch, Cousineau)