Why Nixon and Watergate Still Matter: An Interview with James Reston, Jr.

James Reston, Jr., who assisted David Frost with research for his 1977 interviews of Richard Nixon.

(Courtesy of Harmony Books)

With the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Watergate break-in coming up this Sunday, one of the hottest tickets on Broadway is Richard M. Nixon. Played by Frank Langella (who just won a Tony Award for his performance), Nixon cunningly spars with Michael Sheen’s David Frost in a live re-creation of the famed television interviews that the British TV personality held with the ex-President in 1977. The interviews were a landmark in the history of both American politics and television, and they attracted some 50 million viewers. The play, Frost/Nixon (which next year will be a motion picture from Ron Howard), was developed from James Reston, Jr.’s The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews (Harmony, 208 pages, $22), just out this month. From his home near Washington, D.C., James Reston answered questions about his involvement with the interviews and how they came about. (Special thanks to Robert Bowmaster, who did background research for this interview.)

I’ve been trying to explain to my daughter why Watergate was so significant. It’s not easy after all these years to put it in perspective for someone who didn’t live through it, and I feel we are in danger of losing sight of its importance, of why a “third-rate burglary” started a chain reaction that toppled a President. Can you sum it up in a few sentences for my daughter?

Watergate was the most important political scandal in America in the twentieth century and possibly the biggest scandal of the entire American Presidency. It was so largely because a criminal conspiracy was run right out of the Oval Office in the White House. The scandal was not about the burglary at the Watergate complex in Washington but about the cover-up of the involvement of President Nixon’s reelection campaign in the burglary. That cover-up lasted over two years, as the efforts to hide presidential malfeasance began to unravel and other abuses of power came to light.

It put the nation through a terrible agony and jeopardized our national leadership at home and abroad. When it was over, President Nixon resigned, the first American President ever to do so, and a number of his cabinet members and top campaign officials were indicted and went to jail. Nixon himself was pardoned by his successor, President Gerald Ford, relieving him of the duty to testify about his criminal activities. The only time he was forced to answer for his actions was in the famous interviews with David Frost in 1977, three years after his resignation.

I don’t think there has ever been anything like those interviews before or since. You write in the foreword to The Conviction of Richard Nixon that “this bout of heavyweights—Nixon and David Frost—remains the most-watched public affairs program in the history of television. More than 45 million people tuned in.” Tell us how you came to be involved in it, and why David Frost was chosen to do the interviews instead of an American journalist or commentator.

I had helped Frank Mankiewicz, Robert Kennedy’s former press secretary and a man about Washington [and George McGovern’s campaign manager in 1972], to write two books on Nixon. The first, called Perfectly Clear: Nixon From Whittier to Watergate, was the first book to, largely at my urging, call for the impeachment of Richard Nixon, even as the Senate’s Ervin Committee hearings were just getting underway. When David Frost came to Washington, looking for someone to help him with the Watergate research, he heard about me and my work with Mankiewicz. Once I agreed to come on board, the rest of the Frost team was built around me.

David Frost was chosen by Nixon for two reasons. First, he offered the most money, outbidding CBS and Mike Wallace by about $300,000, and second, Nixon misjudged him as a lightweight, thinking he could easily fend off any Watergate questions Frost might pose and, in the process, rehabilitate his reputation.

Do you think Nixon succeeded in doing that, to a degree? In a portion of the transcript from a meeting between Nixon and Charles Colson, Nixon says, “Here we’ve done great things. We’ve got greater things to do, and they are talking about this goddamned Watergate.” Do you think Nixon’s successes as a President, particularly in foreign policy, should outweigh or at least counterbalance our memory of Watergate?

No, I do not, any more than the war in Iraq should be counterbalanced by any other subject as we judge George W. Bush. The Watergate scandal defines the Nixon Presidency, and it is because of that scandal that he is generally regarded as the worst President in American history. Of course he was an immensely complicated man, and those very complications make him fascinating. So too, the six years of his Presidency involve other important areas, some of which can be regarded as accomplishments. But it is the historian’s job to define and to characterize. For me the Nixon Presidency is Watergate, with 25,000 American soldiers dead in Vietnam thrown in as complement, not counterpoint.

It seems to me that one of Nixon’s worst legacies was the so-called Huston Plan, named after its architect, Tom Charles Huston. You call it “arguably the most anti-democratic document in American history. It was a blueprint to undermine the fundamental right of dissent and free speech in America.” If implemented, it would have allowed the government to wiretap, open mail, commit burglaries, and virtually spy on college students. Give us a refresher. Who exactly was Huston, and how close did his plan come to being put into action?

The Huston Plan was as you have described it. Crafted in 1970 by Mr. Huston, who was a relatively low-level White House operative, it was never formally implemented, though some argue that its techniques were folded into an existing FBI program known as COINTELPRO. The latter existed from 1956 to 1971 and involved covert mail openings, electronic surveillance, smear campaigns, and even—a term I love—“surreptitious entries,” or break-ins, against innocent Americans. When these activities came to light, high-level FBI and CIA officials testified that they had never given a thought to the legality, morals, or ethics of these programs. They were “pragmatists.”

In the Frost interviews, we could not prove Nixon’s knowledge of these abuses of power. There were layers of plausible denial between the President and his government’s snoopers and burglars. But America lost a little of its soul in those abuses. Now when President Bush authorizes warrantless entries and the much more sophisticated techniques of electronic surveillance now available, he operates in the spirit of Nixon’s statement to Frost: “If the President does it, that means it is not illegal.”

In your afterword you write, “It might be argued that the post–September 11 domestic abuses find their origin in Watergate. In 1977, the commentators were shocked when Nixon said about his burglaries and wiretaps, ‘If the President does it, that means it is not illegal.’ In 2007 the issue has returned with a vengeance.” How would you compare and contrast Nixon’s years as President with those of George W. Bush? Is Nixon in danger of losing his unofficial title of worst President ever?

No one ever accused Richard Nixon of being an idiot. He was immensely clever, and as a target of Frost’s prosecution, he had a Proteus-like ability to change his colors and his arguments to fend off every thrust. His knowledge of foreign affairs was profound, and outside of Vietnam his accomplishments in that field were considerable. Bush seems to me to be a far less complicated character, and therefore less interesting as quarry after his Presidency. It is hard to imagine him ever acknowledging the full disaster that Iraq has become, or bearing witness to the damage the war has caused to this country, much less ever apologizing for his actions. But I leave the lists of best and worst to People magazine.

—Allen Barra is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine.