(soft music) - Watergate.

It's the name of a hotel complex in Washington, DC, but the word, it has taken on a meaning synonymous with political corruption.

The Watergate scandal is also associated with memorable quotes, like, "I am not a crook", and "What did the president know?

", and "When did he know it?"

Grand Rapids, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation and Museum are exploring its legacy during the 50th anniversary of the Watergate scandal.

We speak with a leading expert on this constitutional crisis, and what's been learned on Newsmakers.

June 17th, 1972, five men with ties to the committee to reelect Richard Nixon break into the democratic national committee headquarters.

Inside the Watergate hotel complex, the crime leading to a white house cover up.

It would lead to hearings and the impeachment of president Nixon, Gerald R. Ford would assume the presidency and later, pardon Nixon.

Here to discuss the legacy of events on American society, its political system and democracy as a whole, is Gleaves Whitney executive director of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation.

How are you?

- It's great to join you today, Patrick.

- This Watergate scandal, it takes on a different, I guess, a different way we perceive Washington and politics, every 10 years.

We get to kind of look back, peel the onion and see what has changed.

For you.

You've been following this all your life, great resource across the street at the museum to explore Watergate.

What is revealed every few years?

What do you find new and different about it?

- Well, if you go back, of course, the journalists such as yourself write the first version of history.

The first draft of history comes out, of course, in the mid seventies and what is going on with Watergate and what it means.

And at that time, there's a lot of heat, a lot of partisan heat, even our institutions, don't always show that or reflect that, which we'll get into I hope later.

And then time goes by and, you know, people start to research and because, you have to put this in a context of cold war consensus, right after World War II that begins to break down in the late 1960s.

And so everybody who came out of World War II thinking, you know, the United States can get along just fine.

We're not gonna have crises like this.

Then by the late '60s, trust in the government goes way down and Pew and other organizations have these polls, these surveys that come out that show a dramatic decline in the trust in American institutions.

And it starts really with Lyndon Johnson, Lyndon Johnson recall had been bugging a number of people what some 800 conversations from 1963 to 1969 that were secretly recorded.

And all of this is starting to emerge that he was not a great guy.

In fact, he told Nixon that he had done it when he gave Nixon the tour of the white house.

So Nixon is just inheriting a tradition, but how many Americans knew that?

In fact, if I may just go on one little side note here, sidebar, presidents have been abusing their power throughout American history.

And especially in the 20th century, we know right here in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for example, Ralph Hauenstein, who was the city editor at the Grand Rapids Herald had to deal with the FBI coming to town and planting itself here, living here, trying to get as much dirt on Arthur Vandenberg, our famous Senator from Michigan back in the 1930s, late '30s.

Ralph had to hold the line and say, "You're not gonna come into the newspaper more" where all the photographs and all the stories, and a lot of the background information on background was carried.

So we know FDR was abusing power by using the FBI and other instruments to try to discredit political opponents.

So let's establish that that is a long term trend that whatever else is going on, we shouldn't be surprised by what happened on July or June 17th, 1972, it's regrettable, but it's, you know, we shouldn't be shocked in other words.

So, you know, the first draft comes out and then every few years, I think the biggest sea change occurred in about 2004, 2005, 2006.

This period, when Mark Felt, Mark Felt's number two at the FBI, he is identified as Deep Throat.

He passes away and then people know, okay, this is who is feeding information, but it's from a very particular careerist perspective.

He has an agenda, but more recently, Garrett Graff, who was just in Grand Rapids to give a wonderful talk, along with Richard Norton Smith and Brian Lamb, and Tevi Troy on Watergate, comes into town and he just has this wonderful, excellent book, Watergate, that's just come out.

And he has been able to discover some new research, for example, the role Los Angeles Times reporting, for example, that did so much.

And then we just found out about Brian Lamb being on the secret committee to try to usher the president forward into the white house.

- I like how you present that lens.

You really do have to look at the landscape of the time.

I mean, you can use the Bible as an example, too, right?

I mean, Jewish traditions, what were the Romans up to what's going on?

So in 1972, you have to have an understanding of what's going on and you give that background on kind of this leadership what's going on behind the curtain, right?

Of doing deeds that maybe should not be conducted in the White House, but should we also, should we also expect more of our leaders in this country?

- No question.

And that's what Gerald Ford's going to do.

I know we're skipping a little bit ahead of the story, but president Ford comes into office at a time when confidence in American institutions is really declining fast.

Number of reasons, just to set the context for your audience.

But you know, you have the end of the Vietnam war.

The first major war, the United States loses.

What happened?

The superpower of the world, the leader of the free world cannot win a war in Southeast Asia.

They're in Indochina.

We lose Laos, we lose Vietnam, we lose Cambodia and there are other threats.

And of course, before that we lost China.

And you know, before that, of course the Soviet Union, Russia.

So this is not supposed to happen to a country that concluded World War II in three years and nine months.

And then we have this extended war where American leadership fails again and again, to be candid with the American people.

So by the time Walter Cronkite comes back, CBS news anchor, and he, he says, "I've been to Vietnam.

I've seen it with my own eyes.

There's no way the United States is gonna win this war as currently, you know, structured."

So Americans were shaken terribly by that.

They were shaken by the environmental crisis, because all of a sudden industry, which had propelled our consumer society, consumer goods and built the middle class, was seen as corrupted with regard to its environmental responsibilities.

And so all of a sudden, it's not just government that's making bad decisions where the public is losing confidence.

It's also the private sector.

So Americans are shaken to the core in the late '60s and early '70s.

That's the context.

Ford shows us why all of us should be doing better.

All of us should be ethical, virtue driven leaders, because the outcome is going to be much better.

If you're candid and president Ford, I should point out when through a 30 year career in Congress and in the vice presidency and presidency.

And then after that post presidency, another 30 years without one scandal.

Think of that, almost 60 years in public eye, not one scandal.

That's what we deserve as a democracy.

- I'll take us back to where we begin.

And then we'll jump again, back to president Ford, to impeachments.

'Cause that's a topic I want to get into here.

So what makes the Watergate scandal different from those other scandals that you've pointed out earlier and scandals since?

- That's a great question, because if you just look back at a number of our scandals.

go back to Grover Cleveland and the Maria Halpin affair, where, you know, he was essentially accused of rape and yet he went on to the White House.

And then you look at Teapot Dome with Warren G. Harding, you know, and then JFK of course, preceding Nixon was a potential rolling scandal waiting to happen because JFK was using the secret service.

So your taxpayer dollars in mind to procure women just about every trip outside of Washington, DC, he could, and this, this caused great, great consternation of abuse of power.

Watergate was different because the other events that I mentioned did not come out in the press quite as quickly.

Watergate was teed up because we had a press Corps who were just fighting mad at being lied to.

Whether it's general Westmoreland and Vietnam, or it was big industry here in the United States.

So the investigative journalism really flowers during this period.

And of course, everybody knows the name, Woodward and Bernstein.

And of course they, they were carrying the water, but many, many other journalists were carrying the water for an integrity in journalism.

And so you had a number of people who were on it.

They wanted to find out the depths of this scandal, and not just let Washington get away with another one.

The other thing is you had institutions that worked really well.

And again, out of this age of consensus that I mentioned earlier, Republicans and Democrats could work together in those days.

And so when the Senate launches an investigation of the president in early 1973, so about six months after the break in, you know, you have the leader of, the Senate Majority Leader, the Senate Minority Leader on the same page, it was a 78 to nothing vote to set up a committee to investigate.

78 to nothing.

The House, actually, even though, so the Democrats controlled the, the Senate and the House, but House Democrats under the leadership of Carl Albert, also were able to bring a consensus of Republicans together with Democrats to investigate this.

So America was different then.

Our media were really on top of it.

You had the institutions working in a bipartisan manner and a spirit of bipartisanship, which helped drive this.

I mean, you certainly as a journalist know the heroic journalists that came outta that period.

- And it was pure journalism, yes.

There was also a little bit of a conflict between Richard Nixon and the media also.

I mean, there was that taking place at that time.

I mean, there was a, a real hatred, at least from Nixon's perspective.

What was it that he said when he lost in California, - [Gleaves] 62.

- famous line that.

- "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.

- That's right.

So that, that of course changed about 10 years later.

The media today, I do wanna get into that role, and you said things have changed, and it has changed so much with social media, and different platforms and finding the news that you like, right?

Depending on your ideologies.

A scandal like that with, let's say the media setup that we have today, would we have had a Watergate hearing as we had it back in the early '70s.

- That's a wonderful hypothetical question.

- [Patrick] Hypotheticals are fun.

- No, and I'm not sure how to answer that, but we do know that from the polarization of social media today, that it's created a much different environment in the echo chambers and why people have split off and don't even communicate with each other anymore.

The social media environment is especially interesting today.

We're watching this, whatever your view of, of Donald Trump, this is a wonderful sociological and media study.

The, you know, if you assume that society is a bell curve and sort of the norm, the me median is right there.

The tails of the bell curve left and right have grown so powerful, unlike any other period in world history, because of social media.

All of a sudden the extremists who used to be ostracized and in the out group have these platforms.

And so they've been able to take the people who are sort of on the fringes and pull them into the respective left and right positions.

And it's, it's created a very polarized dialogue by contrast back in 1972, 73, 74, when the Watergate story was unfolding, you had ABC, CBS and NBC, you know, in our household.

My dad watched Walter Cronkite when he got home from work every day.

And so Walter Cronkite was the gospel.

I mean, this is, you know, and Huntley and Brinkley, you know, for those who were watching, what were they NBC?

So, you know, it's a very interesting evolution.

And today I think the journalist would be all over it and citizen journalists would be all over it.

But I don't know that the resolution could come so quickly because of the polarization.

- Yeah.

We had PBS also providing the hearings back in the '70s also.

- Yes, that's right.

- I remember my mother watching those.

- Yes.

- Shows my age.

- Yeah.

- You know, but the Richard Nixon, when he leaves on Marine One and gives his salute, you know, those are things I remember as a kid and here we are today, still discussing this.

What does it mean today?

What do we need to look for to guide us into the future?

What lessons have we learned?

- We really need to make our institutions work again.

The media have to work again because they play such a critical role.

The reason we have media are, and my friends on the left and right, we need to remind ourselves of this again, and again, we can't be in Washington.

We can't be in Lansing.

We can't be at every city council meeting or township meeting.

The media are our eyes and ears.

So we need to train great journalists who can go out and do their jobs dispassionately, not without convictions, but dispassionately, not in a partisan spirit to bring the facts to the American people.

I'm always a little leery of this word narrative that we use now, because narrative implies a lens, and a lens implies an ideology.

You have to be a little bit careful with that.

So we need the media to work.

We need our institutions, government to work better.

You know, we used to have a center.

There used to be a caucus for the center where conservative Democrats and more liberal Republicans could come together.

Gerry Ford, for example, began the legislative process from the center, not from the extremes out there.

That is a sea change.

We need to get back to that.

The center is not just a place for squishes and mealy mouth people who have no principles.

Think of the center as a metaphor.

The center, for example, of a battlefield is precisely where the clashes take place.

There's a way though, to do it without total carnage in a democracy that relies on information and commitment to public service.

- Years ago, I was invited over to the museum and Jon Meacham, author, historian was there.

And we talked about Gerald Ford and that approach, right?

So he, he had this art of politics that was in the morning, you've got somebody from one side of the aisle and one on the other saying, "Hey, I need your help this morning.

You're gonna do something you don't really like, but you're gonna help this guy out."

- [Gleaves] Yeah.

- And this afternoon, the roles would reverse, but that's how policy got done.

We don't see that today.

- That's absolutely right.

I mean, people are surprised.

They, they ask me when they come over to the museum.

And then I at the foundation, you know, we run a lot of educational programs, and people ask, "What is president Ford's signature legislation?"

Well, he's not known for signature legislation so much as being one of those people.

Remember the context, the postwar context there in the cold war.

He was the guy who had the art, the genius for being in the back room, for saying, "I know what you thi..

I know your principles.

I know your principles.

And I see a lot of potential common ground if we articulate the problem well, for both of our caucuses and constituents beyond."

Ford, had that genius for being able to bring people together.

And he did it with a very, he was very principled.

And at the same time, he had a sweet temperament where he never made political enemies.

He had opponents who were in temporary opposition to him maybe now and then, but he did not have political enemies.

He lived by that.

Thou shall not be my enemy.

You are my civic friend.

And even though you're on the other side of the aisle, we have the opportunity to work together, to do the people's business.

And that's the way Ford approached his work.

And as a result of that, those congresses did some great work on behalf, the American people, just to use one example, look at the civil rights legislation that Northern Republicans helped pass in those years in the 19s, well, fifties, sixties and seventies, when president Ford was in Congress.

You know, everything from the 24th amendment to the civil rights acts in the 1950s and the 1960s, 64 and 65, those signal civil rights acts.

There was no question that Republicans were gonna support that.

It was just a matter of making sure that you could build the caucus, the support in Congress, and then to the constituents beyond.

We did it as a country.

And that's what we need to get back to.

- And Richard Nixon wins in 72.

(Gleaves laughs) Sometimes we forget that.

And Gerry Ford pardons him.

But impeachment, we need to discuss impeachment, because what, the first 150 years of our history, there are two.

- We have Andrew Johnson and bill Clinton.

- And we've had three and yes, in a short amount of time.

- Nixon would've been impeached.

- Right.

But he resigns.

- He resigns that's right.

He resign, we should get that on the table.

He resigns when he sees the writing on the wall, right.

He doesn't want to go down and, you know, in ignominy, you know, having been impeached as a president of the United States.

- So Tevi Troy, who was one of your guests also, one of your guest speakers, Washington Examiner, right there.

"Watergate's Ghost" is the piece he, he wrote then.

He talks about, at least when he made his visit here, impeachment and the use of impeachment as this criminalization, - [Gleaves] Yes.

- Of political differences.

- [Gleaves] That's exactly what he said.

- That was not the intention that the founders, the founding fathers had.

- That's correct.

And again, context is important when Nixon won reelection in 1972, it was by one of the biggest landslides in US history, you know, with over 60% of the popular vote, think of that.

We have not had a president since 1972, not a president who got up to 60% of the vote in such a clean win like that, and swept.

He was, he was running against George McGovern.

He won every state, including McGovern's home state of South Dakota, every state, but Massachusetts.

So the context there is you had a very, even though people don't remember this necessarily, had a very popular president.

A lot of Democrats voted for him, a lot of independents because they thought there was such disorder.

So impeachment was entered into very soberly.

I mean, you weren't going to impeach somebody unless it was for the severest of conditions and because of the change and the media sort of reflected this popular attitude now in the late sixties and seventies, that we're tired of being lied to, you know, let's get the, S-O you know whatever, and so that's why I think in '72, from '72 to '74 is this case is being built up, but gloves come off and it's time to say, American democracy works better than this, should work better.

And it is.

And if you go back, the institutions work, this was the other point Tevi made, as well as Garrett Graff, Brian Lamb, Richard Norton Smith, they all made the point that American institutions worked beautifully to bring about the removal of the president, to force him to resign or be impeached, take your pick.

And, and that's, we live in such different times, again, for all the reasons we've discussed with the power of the extremists and the tails of the bell curve and such.

Now impeachments is going to become a, probably a quadrennial event, unfortunately.

- But that's no way to run a country.

- It's no way to run a Republic.

- No.

- It's been abused in some cases, politicized, and both Republicans and Democrats have abused it.

I'm not making a partisan statement when I say that, and there've been, you know, right here in our third congressional district, we've had a Republican, for example, vote to impeach a Republican president.

So there are a lot of layers of complexity here, and people are forced to go back on their conscience, to their virtue, to their virtue and their gut.

Are they doing the right thing for the American people?

- There's a line in the movie, All The Presidents Men, if you ever want to get caught up on Watergate, that's a pretty good place to start.

There's a line and it's Deep Throat, and the line is, "Follow the money".

- [Gleaves] Follow the money.

- Never happened.

It's part of the lore of the Watergate scandal, but money in politics and following the money.

It says a lot about where we are also.

- Well, it really does.

I mean, the money is now.

I mean, it just philosophically, you know, no matter whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, or a libertarian, if you get back to sort of our, our founding principles, I think it's a very good question to ask.

We should ask, is it right?

And say in a congressional district to have a lot of money from outside the district, flood the district and influence sort of the local color, the local texture of conversation and politics in that district.

You know, whether it's from, you know, the NRA on the right or the NEA on the left or wherever it's coming from, that's a fair question to ask, and we should be grappling with it as Americans.

You know, Watergate, it was, I think you used the, the word earlier is pure, or there was a, you didn't have all the money of special interests influencing the outcome of Watergate, the way you would have any imbroglio today influenced as soon as impeachment would be talked about.

You'd have all of these fundraising campaigns that look at how, you know, everybody who wants to run for president in '24 and is already starting to line up.

They're using everything that's happening today for national money campaigns.

And so yes, follow the money, follow the money.

- So as you look back, what was your takeaway after?

I mean, you're the professor here professors like to learn also.

Once the events wrapped up and you had a chance to kind of exhale and think about it, was there something that you learned or maybe an idea that crept in your head that hadn't been there before, when it comes to Watergate and the concept of a scandal.

- Two things, Patrick, that's a great question.

First of all, I was surprised the extent to which there's still questions we cannot answer.

I mean, Garrett Graff said "We still don't" I mean, he writes an 800 page book with footnote.

"We still don't know ultimately who decided to do this burglary most famous, most investigated burglary in human history."

And then second it reaffirms for me the importance of good people, public servants, Gerald Ford.

It was just so reinforced that we have a good man in Gerald Ford who becomes president out of the sordid history of Watergate.

- Well, there's some great resources from the foundation and the museum.

I recommend 'cause it's interactive.

And it's great just to take a peek.

fordlibrarymuseum.org, The Watergate files.

And it's like, oh, it's a file and it opens.

And, and you go through from the crime itself to the hearings.

And it's just a really, it's a fantastic resource.

I know you have a few others that you would recommend also.

- Well, yes.

I mean, I would recommend that people watch, if they go to the foundation website, watch the events that took place on June 16th and June 17th, where Tevi Troy sets the impact of Watergate on all presidential administrations since Watergate, profound point there.

And then you see this incredible dialogue between Brian Lamb, Mr. C-SPAN, and Richard Norton Smith, who's writing a 900 page biography of president Ford.

It'll be out next year.

And then Garrett Graff getting in on it.

It is a magical moment.

It's like a Monticello moment.

- I considered it organic as I watched.

- Yes, it was.

- Cause it was just fantastic.

Gleaves Whitney executive director, Gerald R. Ford Foundation.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Appreciate it.

- Thank you, Patrick.

- And thank you for joining us.

We'll see you again soon.

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