[explogate 05: all the president’s men]

THE EXTENDED CUT

Mike Hertenstein
Sep 7, 2018 · 6 min read

[get out your notebook, there’s more]

The extended cut, with till-now missing footage, opens cross-cutting between the Explo candle-ceremony and the break-in at Democratic National headquarters. By the time the Jesus Sound Explosion gets underway, so does the Watergate investigation. The first report hits the Sunday paper: “5 Held in Plot to Bug Democrats’ Office Here,” a story with nine contributors including a pair of twenty-somethings named Woodward and Bernstein.⁵¹

Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) realizes that this is much bigger than he thought.

Bob Woodward (played by Robert Redford) scribbles down leads on his yellow pad as he and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) trace the caper to White House. After the big zoom-back to show the needle-in-haystackness of it all, editor Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards) snarls it’s not enough.

On Monday, in the Washington Post, under their first joint byline, the soon-to-be-famous duo reveals that one arrestee is ex-CIA and on the payroll of CREEP (Committee to Re-Elect the President).⁵² That same day, according to H. R. Haldeman’s diaries, Nixon tasks Billy Graham to “put pressure” on George Wallace — to keep the Alabama governor from running as an independent.⁵³ In 1968, Wallace nearly ruined everything by stealing the white supremacist vote: Nixon is determined not to let that happen this time with his “Southern Strategy,” which “dog-whistles” his commitment to maintaining “Law and Order” (woof). But so much depends on Wallace — just recovering from a near-fatal assassination attempt a month before — not playing the spoiler. Billy Graham is confident that he can get to Wallace through his wife, a new Christian convert.⁵⁴

The next day, Nixon and Haldeman first discuss Watergate —or so it is has been presumed, since that day’s Oval Office tape happens to be the one with the infamous “accidental” 18 ½-minute erasure.⁵⁵ By the end of the week, Haldeman tells Nixon that the FBI has linked the burglars to CREEP, suggesting they use the CIA to halt the investigation (with a vague warning that dust might be stirred on Old Operations best kept quiet.) That tape will be the “Smoking Gun” that wrecks Nixon’s alibi two years later and loses him his job.⁵⁶

“The truth is, these are not very bright guys and things got out of hand.”

On July 14, the New York Times announcing George McGovern’s nomination lands on Woodward’s door, with the note inside leading to the iconic parking-garage scene: a cigarette-smoking figure in the shadows (“Deep Throat,” played by FBI agent Mark Felt) offers his cryptic advice to “follow the money.”

Meanwhile, the President’s Men share their own dark whispers. If they can’t block the FBI investigation,⁵⁷ Nixon agrees,⁵⁸ they can make CREEP deputy Jeb Magruder the fall guy.⁵⁹ They may have to spend more of that money being followed to Wallace supporters⁶⁰ shaking down Nixon for a payoff⁶¹ to keep him out of the race⁶²; the governor plays his cards close to his vest.⁶³

Billy Graham (played by Gregory Peck, of similar age and moral gravitas) visits Wallace’s hospital bed, then phones Haldeman to say “there’s almost no chance” the governor plans to get back in race.⁶⁴ Around this time, Graham also submits “the names of all his Christian youth types” to the Nixon team, along with his view that the president can win the black vote by splitting it, garnering “religious blacks who are scared of the criminal elements.” (Graham tells Haldeman “we’re in good shape with the Jews.”)⁶⁵

That phone call comes the same day as the scene in All the President’s Men where Bernstein reads the New York Times story linking phone calls by the Watergate burglars to CREEP.⁶⁶ Bernstein goes to Miami, where he comes up with a name that Woodward tracks to a Nixon campaign-fundraiser. Their August 1 story definitively links the break-in to Nixon’s campaign.⁶⁷

[stranger things]

Now comes the big scene in the film where Post editors are split on whether this “dangerous” story is worth pursuing. None of the other papers are reprinting their stuff. Besides, the story just doesn’t make sense. The GOP is winning handily while the Democrats seem to be giving the election away. On August 12, Billy Graham goes political-non-political, announcing that “he will take no part in politics this year” while at the same moment making sure everybody knows that he’s voting for Nixon.⁶⁸

A month or so later, John Mitchell is quoted in a Post article that says that (in Jason Robards’ line) “the former Attorney General — the man who represented law in America — is a crook.” In film as in life, Mitchell threatens Woodstein that if they publish that story, Katherine Graham, the Post’s publisher, would get a part of her anatomy “caught in a big fat ringer.”⁶⁹ A week or so later, McGovern speaks at Billy Graham’s alma mater. Wheaton was also Bob Woodward’s home town, with no apparent connection. What did connect for the reporters, was Watergate as one incident in a “massive campaign of political spying and sabotage” run out of CREEP and the White House itself.⁷⁰

The newsroom: typing out the first draft of history.

Either that campaign worked, or word of it came too late, or McGovern blew it, or all the above: in spite of everything, on November 7, Richard Nixon won re-election as President by a record landslide. The classic film ends with Nixon’s second inaugural. The extended cut ends maybe not with the same scene but in the same general tone. The television blares on in the background as the teletypes clack, the reporters sweat out their first drafts, catching hell on all sides and getting a pep talk from their editor: Get back out there and get the story.

It could well be that this story requires a Netflix mini-series. An even more expanded version might include, for instance, Henry Kissinger warning the president that ending the war too quickly would mean the collapse of the country whose survival was the rationale for all that bloodshed. White House tapes reveal discussion of postponing the inevitable for at least a “decent interval,” i.e. delaying “peace with honor” until after the election.⁷¹

In another Twilight Zone –like episode, the UN takes up North Vietnamese claims that the US has been bombing the dikes holding back floods from the agricultural lowlands — which critics consider a war crime.⁷² Nixon, almost simultaneously, orders his team to hold back the UN until after the election, while telling Kissinger that after the election they’ll able to let go with apocalyptic destruction on the enemy. “Frankly, Henry, we may have to take the dikes out…No foolin’ around.”⁷³ When Nixon last brought up this idea, Kissinger had warned that such a move would “drown about 200,000 people.” Nixon infamously replied: “I’d rather use a nuclear bomb… I just want you to think big, Henry, for Chrissake.” Even more shocking: back in April 1969, Billy Graham himself enthusiastically passed along, with other recommendations from a group of former missionaries, the idea of bombing the dikes.⁷⁴

For End Times watchers, Kissinger was a candidate for Antichrist.

The crazy just never stops. It’s pretty much a settled issue that GOP nominee Richard Nixon sabotaged Democrat LBJ’s peace talks prior to the 1968 election. (Johnson called it “treason.”)⁷⁵ That Nixon’s mania against leaks came of his mounting fears of being exposed for various illegal deeds — his and Kissinger’s secret bombing of Cambodia, the expansion of the war into that nation which opened the way for the genocidal Khmer Rouge. That the President’s covert-ops team had actually considered murdering Jack Anderson to plug those leaks — a project waylaid by Watergate.⁷⁶ There has been some dispute over whether Nixon and Kissinger really did delay ending the war on purpose until after the 1972 election. But one scholar who builds a strong case that they did also points out how well these Nixonian methods have worked for other presidents, keeping America mired in unwinnable wars that presidents can punt to their successor.⁷⁷ What is less disputable: one week after Nixon’s second inaugural came the cease fire in Vietnam.⁷⁸

For America, the war was over — and with it, the antiwar movement and so, it would seem, “The Sixties.”

Even so, certain flames of Explo ’72 would still be flickering into early 1973.

NEXT [explogate 06: it only takes a spark]

© 2018 Mike Hertenstein. All rights reserved.

Mike Hertenstein

Written by

Scholar in the garret, monk in the cell, heckler in the back. Late-life seminary student. Writer, reader, listener, watcher.

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