What if . . . the Watergate burglars hadn't been such bunglers?

Would Nixon rank with FDR and Reagan?

Frank Wills had the graveyard shift on security at the Watergate office and residence complex in Washington D.C. on June 17, 1972. While making his rounds, he noticed that the latches on doors leading from the parking garage to the offices had been taped so that the doors would not lock. He supposed that a maintenance crew had taped the latches for some reason and had forgotten to remove the tape. He removed it and walked on.

On his next round, ninety minutes later, he discovered that the latches had been retaped. Apparently the maintenance guys hadn't been responsible for the tape, and apparently whoever was responsible was still in the building. He called the police.

The police arrived and arrested five men inside the building. They were charged with attempted burglary and planting illegal wiretaps.

What gave the story spice was the fact that the offices targeted by the intruders were those of the Democratic National Committee. This wasn't ordinary burglary or business skullduggery. It was political espionage.

Thus began the two-year unraveling of the presidency of Richard Nixon. By the time Nixon resigned in August 1974, a half-step ahead of impeachment, conventional wisdom held that hubris had brought Nixon down.

Hubris was certainly involved. Yet so was sloppiness on the part of the burglars. A moment's thought would have told them, when they observed that the original tape had been removed, that there was a security guard in the building. And it would be stupid to retape the latches. But they did just that, and they were caught.

What if they had been even a little bit smarter? What if they hadn't been caught that night? In the 1972 election, four months later, Nixon was reelected in a landslide, carrying 49 out of 50 states. If the burglars hadn't been caught, would he have ridden that landslide to the end of a successful second term and been hailed as one of the great presidents of the twentieth century? He extricated the United States from a Southeast Asian war war he inherited from three predecessors, and his policy of detente toward the Soviet Union and China foreshadowed the peaceful ending of the Cold War two decades later. Without Watergate, he would have received credit for these signal accomplishments.

Knowing what the investigations triggered by the Watergate arrest revealed, it's tempting to say no. To say that Nixon was corrupt to the bottom of his soul, and corruption always comes out one way or another.

But does it really? In Nixon's case, quite likely it would not have come out. Nixon's corruption wasn't the kind that produces bribery and graft. It was political. And it was directed at the 1972 election. If botches like that which caused the Watergate arrest had been avoided for just four months, Nixon would have been home free.

Defenders of Nixon said he didn't do much different than many others in politics had done. He simply got caught. This rationalization was self-serving, but that didn't make it wrong.

Critics of Nixon during and after the investigation harped on the importance of character in American leaders. Elect a crook and you'll get crooked politics, they said.

Maybe American politics has often been crooked, as crooked as Watergate. It's just that on most of those other occasions, we haven't been aware of the fact. When Frank Wills pulled off the tape the second time, he pulled back the veil that preserved our blissful ignorance.

The fall of a president is a big deal in American history. Fifty years later, Nixon remains the only president to resign his office. It's not unnatural to assume, even to wish, that big consequences have big causes. The idea that the fate of a nation might hinge on something as trivial as the positioning of tape on a door can be unsettling. Who knows what other land landmines we might be nearly stepping on every day?

Fear not. Historians will protect you against such unsettling. One thing we as a guild do is cast an air of inevitability over whatever it is that does happen. Biographers of Nixon search his youth and early adulthood for the keys to the character flaws that came out in Watergate. Knowing what needs to be explained, the biographers invariably find such keys.

But what if Watergate had never come to light?

Then we historians and biographers would find the keys to Nixon's greatness.