Newly Released Watergate Files Show Nixon Faced Espionage From Within His Own Government

By James Rosen | Commentary, The New York Times

On July 1, 1975, under gray skies, two Watergate prosecutors arrived in the office of the White House counsel. Also present was the deputy national security adviser, Air Force Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft. They were gathered for a burial.

The intended object was a 297-page transcript created the previous week, when eight members of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, joined by a stenographer and two members of a federal grand jury, among others, interrogated Richard Nixon under oath near his home in San Clemente, Calif. Over two days, the ex-president’s grand jury testimony consumed 11 hours. Then came an interview by the prosecutors, undisclosed until now, that lasted an additional two.

President Gerald Ford had pardoned Nixon for all crimes he committed or might have committed in office, but the threat of perjury still hung over him. It was, by all accounts, the first time that any president appeared before a grand jury and the only time that Nixon testified in depth about Watergate.

Since early 1973, when the scandal morphed from a caper covered chiefly by newspapers into a televised national obsession — the dawn of saturation coverage — the nation had endured a cascade of headlines, resignations, hearings, trials, reports, memoirs and archival releases. In the eyes of prosecutors, the former president figured centrally in what one termed the “organized criminal activity” of the Nixon administration: the Ellsberg break-in, the Kissinger wiretaps, Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters cash, Howard Hughes and the casinos, the sale of ambassadorships, I.R.S. abuses, C.I.A. assassination plots.

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