ALL THE PRESIDENT’S BUGS

Watergate broke slowly upon us. It was simply a nuisance story throughout the presidential campaign of 1972 and still appeared as barely a blip on our national radar as winter gave way to spring in 1973. But several events occurring in a short period of time that March spurred the Senate to convene a special panel to investigate the break-in and its connections to the Nixon administration. As all the networks began to cover the steady parade of witnesses appearing before the seven senators and their counsels, the public became spectators to the proceedings. Soon many of us became addicted.

But as thorough as these hearings appeared to be, all the facts seemed open to question because the only serious charges tying the break-in to the Oval Office came from one man, John Dean. Further, his account of events was sharply disputed by others of greater stature within the White House.

That summer, at the age of twentythree, I took a vacation with my seventy-eight-year-old grandmother. At the end of that trip we found ourselves visiting relatives in Virginia just outside Washington. Being so close and so caught up in the hearings, I made plans to attend if at all possible.

Since I assumed there would be a long wait to get into the Senate caucus room in the Old Senate Office Building (and since I wasn’t even sure where this building was), I decided to drive into Washington on Monday, July 16, to see what I was up against. I was just going to assess the situation in preparation for the real visit I would make the following day.

So it was that, twenty-five years ago this summer, I arrived on Capitol Hill shortly before 10:00 A.M. The weather was beautiful, clear, and warm. I spotted a parking space and decided to take advantage of it. A congenial passerby pointed out the building and the door I needed to enter. Once inside I was surprised at the absence of any crowd. In the foyer I spotted a newsperson doing her report on camera, a minor CBS reporter I had seen a few times on television, Connie Chung.

Continuing my efforts at reconnaissance, I asked a guard where the hearing room was. He pointed up the stairs, and to my utter disbelief I realized there was no line to get in. Like a kid at Christmas, I bounded up the Steps and into the room. I had made it on my first try.

I took a seat in the next to last row as the main actors in this national soap opera began to arrive. We applauded some but saved our main ovation for the chairman, Sen. Sam J. Ervin, Jr., of North Carolina. Must have been a Democratic crowd that day, I remember thinking.

The morning’s testimony was disappointingly unexciting, but when the panel broke for lunch I didn’t want to chance losing my place, so I stayed close until shortly before 2:00 P.M. and returned to my seat. More people were showing up now, and a line was beginning to form.

When the hearings resumed, I was surprised to see an unscheduled witness taking an oath of truth before us. I caught only his last name: Butterfield.

Sam Dash, the chief counsel, turned the questioning over to the young minority counsel (now a U.S. senator himself) Fred Thompson. Thompson established Butterfield’s identity and position within the Nixon White House. Then he asked, “Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the President?”

“I was aware of listening devices, yes sir,” came the reply.

Now I’m not sure exactly how long it took for the significance of this exchange to sink in. But I recall that the low undercurrent of whispering throughout the room stopped as if by order.

In a quick succession of questions, Thompson and others on the committee learned the locations of some of what would become known to us as bugs. Some in the audience around me even noted the irony of the new information: Watergate had started with the attempt to bug the offices of the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex. Now the President’s own bugs could help establish that Nixon was telling the truth about what he knew and when he knew it, or that he was lying.

Butterfield wasn’t there long, and neither were the members of the press once they came to grips with the new revelations. I, too, left soon afterward, and as I descended the steps, I remember thinking how worried I would be if I were John Dean. After all, Nixon would surely use these tapes to disprove everything Dean had charged.

—Jack Baker teaches history at Westmoreland County Community College in western Pennsylvania.

INSIDE THE WORKERS’ PARADISE

In November 1932, when I was twelve years old, my parents decided to return to what was then called the Soviet Union. They had emigrated, separately, to America in 1917, when both were about seventeen years old, my father from near Minsk and my mother from Odessa. They met several years later at night school in the Bronx, where they were learning English. My parents were both quite radical, in complete sympathy with the Russian Revolution. Had it occurred just a few months earlier, they probably would have remained in Russia.

By 1932 the Depression had settled in with a grimness that was keenly felt by almost all the families in the East Bronx, where we lived. My father, a skilled restaurant worker, could find no employment. At this propitious moment he discovered a group that had been recruited to install an Americanstyle mass kitchen for a huge factory on the outskirts of Moscow, and he gladly joined it. The Russian government was generous in its offer. In addition to paying my father’s salary, it would supply an apartment in a new housing development and would send my sister and me to an English-speaking school in the heart of Moscow. Carrying some shiny copper vats and other restaurant equipment, the group traveled to Moscow via ship and train, arriving just in time for the famous Russian winter.

Sometime after our arrival my mother got in touch with her sister, who now lived in Kiev, and arranged to visit her. My sister and I went along for the ride, and so we witnessed first hand Stalin’s battle with the Russian peasants, the kulaks, who were resisting collectivization of their agricultural system. Their attachment to the land ran completely contrary to Soviet ideology, and when they stubbornly refused to form socialized collectives, Stalin’s response was blunt and straightforward. He destroyed their crops and refused to allow food to be shipped into the Ukraine from elsewhere. We now know that millions of Ukrainians died of starvation during precisely this period.

Our trip from Moscow to Kiev started out normally enough. We traveled in a first-class compartment in a train that was obviously left over from czarist times, elegant if a bit shabby. When we arrived in Kiev, I was stunned to observe what appeared to be an entire city starving. Children were walking around with swollen bellies. One of the first things I saw was a dead child lying in the street; a policewoman was removing the boots from its body.

Apparently forewarned, my mother had brought food with her, and we shared it with my aunt and her son, Volodya. The trip back to Moscow was the reverse of the trip out: We left a city in starvation and arrived in a city that was normal for the time —dreary and colorless but without hunger.

The experience had a profound impact on me. What kind of society could have two cities, easily connected by rail, with such different food supplies? Why didn’t the communist authorities send some food from Moscow to Kiev and the rest of the Ukraine? I simply couldn’t understand this, but it did jolt me into a feeling that the so-called workers’ paradise was not living up to its promise. This was one of the many shocks that led me eventually to jettison my last vestiges of communist belief.

To this day, whenever I hear about the Soviet society not living up to its promise, I think back to that dead child in Kiev. The workers’ paradise was doomed from the beginning.

—Benjamin Bederson is a professor of physics emeritus at New York University and editor in chief emeritus of the American Physical Society.