The Pentagon Papers and Watergate
A third-rate burglary and a leaked war history put the newspapers against a president. The president resigned.
Open
The story goes that two newspaper reporters brought down a president.
The record disagrees. Its own institutional account credits grand juries, judges, a special prosecutor, two congressional committees, and a unanimous Supreme Court, not two reporters at a typewriter.
And when the break-in happened, almost nobody thought it mattered. A White House spokesman called it a third-rate burglary. That November, the man he worked for carried forty nine states.
Scene 1Presses stopped by court order
June the thirteenth, nineteen seventy one. The New York Times publishes the first installment of a seven thousand page classified Defense Department study of American decision making in Vietnam.
Robert McNamara had commissioned the study in nineteen sixty seven. It documents that four administrations misled the public about the war.
After three installments, Attorney General John Mitchell obtains a federal restraining order, the first prior restraint on a newspaper in American history. The Washington Post picks up the story and is enjoined too.
On June the thirtieth, the Supreme Court rules six to three that the government has not met the heavy burden required to censor publication.
Justice Hugo Black adds this in his concurring opinion.
· Concurring opinion, New York Times Co. v. United States · June 30, 1971
“The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government.”
The presses run that night.
Scene 2A photocopier, over months
The seven thousand pages had a source. Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon and RAND analyst, had helped write the study himself.
He photocopies the volumes over months and passes them to the Times. Then he surrenders to federal authorities.
This is what Ellsberg says when he turns himself in.
· Public statement after surrendering to federal authorities · June 28, 1971
“I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public.”
He is admitting, on the record, to copying classified analysis of a war still being fought.
Scene 3Tape over a door latch
Three days after the ruling, a White House unit called the Plumbers, formed to stop leaks, breaks into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, looking for material to discredit him.
Their next operations lead to the Watergate complex.
Two thirty in the morning, June the seventeenth, nineteen seventy two. A security guard named Frank Wills finds tape over a door latch and calls the police.
Five men in suits and surgical gloves are arrested inside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, carrying bugging equipment and sequential hundred dollar bills.
One of them is James McCord, security coordinator for the Committee to Re-elect the President.
Scene 4The thread
Two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, keep pulling the thread, guided in part by a source they call Deep Throat. In two thousand five he is revealed to be FBI Associate Director W. Mark Felt.
A Senate committee under Sam Ervin holds televised hearings through nineteen seventy three.
On July the sixteenth, aide Alexander Butterfield discloses that Nixon has been taping his own conversations.
The tapes become the battle.
Scene 5The Saturday Night Massacre
October the twentieth, nineteen seventy three. Nixon orders the firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who has subpoenaed the tapes.
Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy William Ruckelshaus resign rather than carry out the order. Solicitor General Robert Bork does it instead.
Telegrams flood into Congress. On November the seventeenth, Nixon stands in front of a room of newspaper editors.
This is what Nixon tells them.
· Remarks to Associated Press Managing Editors, Walt Disney World, Florida · November 17, 1973
“People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook.”
He had already recorded himself, on tape, ordering the cover up.
Scene 6The tape that ends it
July the twenty fourth, nineteen seventy four. The Supreme Court rules eight to nothing in United States versus Nixon: executive privilege does not shield the tapes from a criminal subpoena.
Between July the twenty seventh and the thirtieth, the House Judiciary Committee approves three articles of impeachment.
On August the fifth, Nixon releases the smoking gun tape, recorded June the twenty third, nineteen seventy two, six days after the break-in, on which he orders the FBI investigation obstructed.
His remaining support collapses. On August the eighth, he announces his resignation on television, effective at noon the next day.
Five accounts
Five accounts of what this was.
victorThe Investigative Press and the Leaker
The Investigative Press and the Leaker
In this account, a free press did its job. Ellsberg's leak was an act of citizenship: the public's right to know outweighed a classification stamp. The Times published against its own lawyers' advice, and Katharine Graham, the Post's publisher, facing a stock offering and a threat to her television licenses, told her editor, Ben Bradlee, to run it anyway.
The stakes were personal. Ellsberg faced a hundred and fifteen years under the Espionage Act. Graham risked her company.
Woodward and Bernstein were not the paper's stars. They worked the phones, the courthouse, and the CREEP payroll, and confirmed every fact with two sources before printing it. In this telling, the First Amendment worked exactly as designed, and the other branches acted because the press did its job first.
Read the full account
Narrative
In this account the story is about people who chose to publish. Daniel Ellsberg had carried a rifle through the Pentagon's war rooms and read the classified record of how four presidents had deepened a war they privately expected to lose. He photocopied 7,000 pages, offered them first to senators who would not touch them, then to Neil Sheehan of The New York Times. When Attorney General John Mitchell demanded the Times stop, the paper's lawyers advised against defying the government; the editors published anyway. The Washington Post's Katharine Graham, facing a stock offering and a threat to her television licenses, told Ben Bradlee to run it. In New York Times Co. v. United States the Supreme Court sided with them 6 to 3.
The Watergate half turned on two young metro reporters. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were not the stars of the paper; they worked the phones, the courthouse, and the CREEP payroll. They traced the burglars' money to a campaign slush fund. A source Woodward met in a parking garage, whom the paper called Deep Throat and who was revealed in 2005 to be FBI Associate Director W. Mark Felt, steered them past dead ends. In All the President's Men (1974) the pair described a method more than a scoop: confirm every fact with two sources, follow the money, publish what you can prove.
The lesson the press drew is institutional. The First Amendment worked as designed. A free press, protected from prior restraint, exposed official lies about a war and a crime, and the other branches then acted. Ellsberg framed his leak as an act of citizenship: the public's right to know outweighed a classification stamp. The reporters framed theirs as verification under pressure. Together the Pentagon Papers and Watergate became the founding legend of American investigative journalism, taught in every newsroom as proof that documents and sourcing, not access and stenography, are the job.
The stakes were personal. Ellsberg faced 115 years under the Espionage Act. Graham risked her company. The reporters risked their careers on stories the rest of Washington dismissed. That they were vindicated is, in this telling, not luck but the system functioning: the leak, the paper, the court, the Congress, each doing its part.
Arguments
- A free press protected from prior restraint exposed official deception about a war and a crime
- Verification discipline, following the money and confirming with two sources, cracked the cover-up
- Ellsberg's leak was an act of citizenship, placing the public's right to know above classification
- Publishers and reporters accepted personal legal and financial risk to publish
Sources
vanquishedThe Executive-Power Defense
The Executive-Power Defense
Nixon and his defenders told it differently. He had been elected in nineteen seventy two by the largest popular margin in history to that point, and this account calls the fall a hostile press and partisan prosecutors making governing impossible.
On Watergate, Nixon's defense concedes the break-in but insists he neither ordered it nor knew of it in advance. His deeper argument was constitutional. He says this to David Frost, in an interview broadcast in May of nineteen seventy seven.
“When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
Executive privilege, in this account, was not a dodge. It was confidential advice that had to stay confidential for the office to function at all.
Read the full account
Narrative
Nixon and his defenders told a different story: a wartime president, elected in 1972 by the largest popular margin in history to that point, was brought down by a hostile press, partisan prosecutors, and a leak culture that made governing impossible. In this account the Pentagon Papers were stolen government property whose publication, in the middle of a war and secret peace talks, endangered sources and negotiations. Prior restraint, the government argued, was justified precisely because some secrets cost lives.
On Watergate, the defense conceded a break-in it called unauthorized and foolish, but insisted the president neither ordered it nor knew of it in advance. The cover-up, in Nixon's memoir RN (1978), is presented as a containment effort that spun out of control, driven by aides protecting themselves. Nixon's deeper argument was constitutional. A president, he told David Frost in 1977, may take actions in the national interest that would be illegal for a private citizen: "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal." Executive privilege, in this view, was not a dodge but a separation-of-powers necessity: confidential advice, like a judge's deliberations, must stay confidential or the office cannot function.
Nixon's allies pointed to a double standard. Earlier presidents had wiretapped, taped, and covered up; Kennedy and Johnson had done worse in Vietnam and civil-rights surveillance and paid no price. The press that celebrated Ellsberg had ignored the leaks it disliked. H.R. Haldeman, in The Ends of Power (1978), argued that a Washington establishment that never accepted Nixon's 1968 victory used a security lapse to reverse two elections.
The defense does not deny the outcome. Nixon resigned rather than face near-certain impeachment and conviction once the June 23 tape surfaced. But it frames the fall as disproportionate: a burglary that killed no one, prosecuted by a special counsel structure Nixon considered unconstitutional, amplified by newspapers with a stake in the president's destruction. Ford's pardon, in this telling, was the one act that let the country move on, and it cost Ford the 1976 election.
Arguments
- Publication of stolen classified files during a war endangered sources and secret negotiations
- Executive privilege is a separation-of-powers necessity, not a cover for wrongdoing
- Earlier presidents wiretapped and covered up without consequence, exposing a double standard
- A security lapse was used by a hostile establishment to reverse two national elections
Sources
- RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
- The Ends of Power
- The Nixon Interviews with David Frost
academicThe Institutional Rule-of-Law View
The Institutional Rule-of-Law View
The scholarly account puts the credit somewhere else entirely: grand juries, judges, a special prosecutor, two congressional committees, and a unanimous Supreme Court. Judge John Sirica pressed the burglars until McCord broke.
The decisive moment was legal, and it came from a court three of whose members Nixon himself had appointed.
This is Chief Justice Warren Burger, writing for that court.
“In the performance of assigned constitutional duties each branch of the Government must initially interpret the Constitution, and the interpretation of its powers by any branch is due great respect from the others.”
Congress then writes the failure into law: the War Powers Resolution, the Ethics in Government Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The Church Committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church, examines a hundred and ten thousand documents and hears more than eight hundred witnesses. It documents CIA assassination plots and the FBI's surveillance of Martin Luther King, and builds the permanent committees that watch the intelligence agencies.
Church himself said this about what the National Security Agency could do.
“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left. There would be no place to hide.”
Read the full account
Narrative
The scholarly account, anchored by Stanley Kutler's The Wars of Watergate (1990), reads the crisis as a stress test the constitutional system barely passed. Its heroes are not reporters but institutions: grand juries, judges, a special prosecutor, two congressional committees, and a unanimous Supreme Court. Judge John Sirica pressed the burglars until McCord broke. The Senate Ervin Committee put the cover-up on live television and, through the accident of a question to Alexander Butterfield, learned the tapes existed. The tapes made proof possible.
The decisive moment was legal. In United States v. Nixon (July 24, 1974) the Court ruled 8 to 0, with three Nixon appointees joining, that a generalized claim of executive privilege must yield to a specific criminal subpoena. The president who had appointed a third of the Court complied within days. Three years earlier, in the Pentagon Papers case, the same institution had refused the executive's demand to censor the press. The pattern, in this view, is a judiciary willing to rule against the power that created it.
Congress then wrote the failure into law. The War Powers Resolution (1973) tried to reclaim the war power the Pentagon Papers showed presidents had monopolized. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (1978) required warrants for national-security wiretaps. The Ethics in Government Act (1978) created an independent-counsel mechanism. The Church Committee (1975-1976), examining 110,000 documents and hearing more than 800 witnesses, documented CIA assassination plots, the FBI's COINTELPRO campaign against Martin Luther King Jr., and NSA interception of Americans' communications, and built the permanent Senate and House intelligence committees to watch the watchers.
This perspective is sober about limits. Ford's pardon foreclosed a criminal trial of the president. The independent-counsel statute was later judged a failure and allowed to lapse. FISA's protections were narrowed after 2001. The rule of law, in the academic reading, is not a machine that runs itself; it worked in 1974 because enough officials in enough institutions chose to make it work, and there is no guarantee they always will.
Arguments
- Grand juries, judges, Congress, and a unanimous Court, not the press alone, produced accountability
- United States v. Nixon established that executive privilege yields to a criminal subpoena
- Congress codified the lessons in the War Powers Resolution, FISA, and the Ethics in Government Act
- The Church Committee created permanent intelligence oversight over the CIA, FBI, and NSA
Sources
- The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon
- Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee)
- United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683
revisionistThe Skeptical Revisionist
The Skeptical Revisionist
A revisionist account, argued by Edward Jay Epstein in nineteen seventy four, holds that the heroic press story is largely a myth the press wrote about itself. On this reading, almost every major revelation came from the FBI, federal prosecutors, and the grand jury, not from Woodward and Bernstein.
“The purposeful design of the myth is to enhance the value of the investigative reporter, without whom, presumably, Watergate would never have been exposed.”
Even the line everyone remembers, follow the money, was never said by anyone in the original reporting. It was written for the film.
On this account, the Deep Throat legend fares no better. Felt is read as an ambitious bureaucrat passed over for the top job at the FBI, not a man acting on conscience.
Read the full account
Narrative
A revisionist current, argued most sharply by Edward Jay Epstein in his 1974 essay "Did the Press Uncover Watergate?", holds that the heroic-press legend is largely a myth the press wrote about itself. On Epstein's reading, almost every major Watergate revelation originated with government investigators, the FBI, federal prosecutors, the grand jury, and Judge Sirica, not with Woodward and Bernstein. The reporters, in this view, were skilled conduits for leaks from officials pursuing their own agendas, and the film All the President's Men (1976) retrofitted a detective story onto what was really a bureaucratic and legal process.
The Deep Throat legend draws particular fire. Max Holland's Leak (2012) argues that W. Mark Felt did not leak out of conscience. Passed over to run the FBI after J. Edgar Hoover's death, Felt fed the Post partly to damage the men who had leapfrogged him and to position himself for the top job. The famous line "follow the money" appears nowhere in the reporting; it was written for the movie. The lionized informant was, on this account, an ambitious bureaucrat, and the press that canonized him rarely examined his motives.
This lens also questions the leak romance around Ellsberg. Publishing a classified history is not costless; the same logic that celebrates a sympathetic leaker is used, decades later, to condemn leakers whose causes the press dislikes. And the Watergate template, the revisionists argue, taught journalism bad habits: an appetite for anonymous sources, a scandal-first frame that turns every controversy into a "-gate," and a self-image of adversarial heroism that can substitute for the slow, unglamorous verification that actually holds power to account.
The revisionist is not defending Nixon; the crimes were real and the resignation earned. The argument is narrower and about memory: that a nation flattered its newspapers into a myth, mistook stenography of official leaks for investigation, and drew from Watergate a lesson about press heroism that the record only partly supports.
Arguments
- Most Watergate breaks came from the FBI, prosecutors, and the grand jury, not the reporters
- Deep Throat's motives were careerist, and the heroic informant image went unexamined
- The film rewrote a bureaucratic and legal process as a detective story
- The Watergate template taught journalism to prize anonymous sourcing and scandal framing
Sources
- Did the Press Uncover Watergate?
- Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat
- The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon
bystanderThe Public and the Loss of Trust
The Public and the Loss of Trust
For citizens watching, this is measured in a number that fell and never fully came back. In surveys taken in the late nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, roughly three in four Americans said they trusted the federal government to do what is right most of the time. By nineteen seventy four it was near one in three.
The televised hearings put it on every screen in the country. Aide John Dean recounts, to the Senate committee, the warning he says he gave Nixon back in March.
“We have a cancer within, close to the presidency, that is growing.”
Gerald Ford, taking the oath the day Nixon resigns, tells the country this.
“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works.”
The trust does not come back with him.
Read the full account
Narrative
For the citizens watching, Watergate is measured less in court rulings than in a number that fell and stayed down. When the American National Election Studies first asked in the late 1950s and 1960s, roughly three in four Americans said they trusted the federal government to do what is right most of the time. By 1974 it was near one in three. It has rarely climbed back. Rick Perlstein's Nixonland (2008) and Garrett Graff's Watergate: A New History (2022) treat this collapse as the scandal's largest and most durable effect.
The televised Ervin hearings in the summer of 1973 were a national civics lesson in reverse. Millions watched a White House counsel, John Dean, describe a "cancer growing on the presidency," and heard, day after day, that officials at the top had lied, wiretapped, kept enemies lists, and paid hush money. The Pentagon Papers had already shown citizens that four administrations had misrepresented a war in which 58,000 Americans died. Together the two scandals confirmed a suspicion that hardened into a worldview: that government routinely deceives, and that official reassurance is worth little.
The consequences cut in several directions. A generation of "Watergate babies" entered Congress in 1974 promising reform. Investigative journalism gained prestige and audience. But cynicism gained more. Distrust of institutions became a permanent feature of American politics, available to reformers and demagogues alike. The "-gate" suffix trivialized the memory even as it spread, so that a genuine constitutional crisis and a minor sports controversy could share a grammar.
In this account the ordinary citizen is neither hero nor villain but the party left holding the loss. The system, people were told, had worked: the courts ruled, Congress acted, the president left. Yet the felt experience was of having been lied to for years by the highest offices in the land, and of learning it only because a night watchman noticed tape on a door. The institutions survived. The trust did not.
Arguments
- Public trust in government fell from about 77% (1964) to 36% (1974) and never fully recovered
- The televised hearings and the Pentagon Papers together confirmed that officials routinely deceive
- The scandal seeded a durable, bipartisan cynicism toward institutions
- The "-gate" suffix spread the memory while trivializing it
Sources
- Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
- Watergate: A New History
- American National Election Studies, Trust in Government Index
The turn
And here is what each account cannot afford to say.
The Investigative Press and the Leaker
The press account has no room for the FBI agents, prosecutors, and judges who produced most of the actual evidence, or for how rarely a later leak investigation ended in vindication for the reporters who ran it.
From the record
The role of the FBI, prosecutors, judges, and Congress in producing the evidenceFelt's own institutional motives for leakingHow rarely later leak investigations ended in vindication for the pressThe executive defense never mentions the June twenty third tape, the one where Nixon orders the cover up himself, or the break-in at the psychiatrist's office that the same White House unit carried out, or that roughly forty eight officials were convicted, including two attorneys general and the White House chief of staff.
From the record
The June 23, 1972 tape ordering the FBI investigation obstructedThe Plumbers' burglary of Ellsberg's psychiatrist's officeThe scale of convictions, including two attorneys generalThe Institutional Rule-of-Law View
The rule of law account has little room for the emotional force of the press story, or for how many of its own reforms were later weakened or allowed to lapse.
From the record
The emotional and narrative force of the press accountHow many of the reforms were later weakened or repealedThe contingency and luck in the tapes ever coming to lightThe revisionist account, so careful about the reporters' myth, has no line for the Pentagon Papers case, where the press published against the government rather than alongside leaks the government wanted out.
From the record
The genuine risk and skill in sustaining the story before officials actedThat exposing official leaks to the public still served accountabilityThe Pentagon Papers case, where the press acted against, not with, the governmentThe Public and the Loss of Trust
And the public trust account, which counts the collapse in exact numbers, has no room for the specific legal victories that actually ended this, or for the journalists and reformers the scandal energized rather than embittered.
From the record
The specific legal and constitutional victories that defined the outcomeThe reformers and journalists energized by the scandalVariation in how different communities experienced the events
Close
Gerald Ford, who had just told the country the nightmare was over, pardons Nixon on September the eighth, nineteen seventy four. One month after the resignation.
The record
By the numbers
- Span
- 1971first Pentagon Papers story
- Killed
- No direct deaths
- Displaced
- One president resigned; roughly 48…
- Place
- United States
Key figures
- Richard Nixon37th President of the United States; resigned August 9, 19741913 to 1994
- Daniel EllsbergFormer Pentagon and RAND analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers1931 to 2023
- Bob WoodwardWashington Post reporter who investigated Watergate with Carl Bernstein1943 to ?
- Carl BernsteinWashington Post reporter who investigated Watergate with Bob Woodward1944 to ?
- Katharine GrahamPublisher of The Washington Post; approved publication under legal and financial threat1917 to 2001
- W. Mark FeltFBI Associate Director; the anonymous source 'Deep Throat,' revealed in 20051913 to 2008
- Archibald CoxWatergate special prosecutor fired in the Saturday Night Massacre1912 to 2004
- Sam ErvinChairman of the Senate Watergate Committee1896 to 1985
- Frank ChurchSenator who chaired the 1975-1976 committee on intelligence-agency abuses1924 to 1984
- Gerald FordVice President who became president on Nixon's resignation and pardoned him September 8, 19741913 to 2006
Primary sources
· Concurring opinion, New York Times Co. v. United States · June 30, 1971
“The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government.”
· Public statement after surrendering to federal authorities · June 28, 1971
“I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public.”
· Remarks to Associated Press Managing Editors, Walt Disney World, Florida · November 17, 1973
“People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook.”
· Remarks on taking the oath of office · August 9, 1974
“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works.”
Threads
- The Vietnam WarThe Pentagon Papers showed the government knew by 1967 it couldn’t win. The war continued for eight more years. 2.1 million more people died.
- September 11 and the War on TerrorNineteen men with box cutters turned the world’s most powerful military against two countries that didn’t attack it.