By Ron Rosenbaum

June 12, 2005 | 8:00 p.m

I don't want to spoil the party, but while everyone's celebrating Deep Throat as if he "solved" Watergate, the real culprit, the perpetrator of the initial crime, the man who actually ordered the Watergate break-in, has escaped.

That would be Richard Nixon, who was driven from office because he covered up the crime of others, not because he ordered the crime himself. In fact, if you accept Nixon's story at face value, as all too many journalists and historians have-the story Nixon repeated in his memoirs, the one he took to his grave-Nixon didn't order the Watergate burglary. Indeed, he was deeply shocked when he learned about it in the papers the next day. And he proceeded to sacrifice his Presidency in order to cover up for the overzealous acts (including the burglary) of his loyal subordinates. As Rutgers professor David Greenberg, the author of the valuable study Nixon's Shadow, wrote in a New York Times op-ed in 2003: "[M]ost historians have absolved him of blame" for ordering the break-in. And so have most journalists. Either that or they try to trivialize the question, as if it didn't make a difference whether Nixon essentially got away with the crime that started it all-and the lie about his role. This is the real scandal for journalists: Amidst the orgy of nostalgic self-congratulation that the Mark Felt revelation has prompted, it seems to have been forgotten that journalists have abandoned the most basic crime-reporter responsibility-pin down whodunit. As in who ordered it. None of the official investigations, the Senate Watergate Committee, the House Impeachment Committee, the Special Prosecutor's report were able to pin it directly on Nixon. As a result, as Mr. Greenberg attests, in most mainstream biographies and histories of Nixon and Watergate, Nixon gets a pass. He lied about everything else, but on this one thing-the initiating act of the fall of a government-we should just take his word; he's telling the whole truth. Instead, the order for the burglary is attributed to the "underlings" that Nixon blamed it on. The Nixon spin has prevailed. With few exceptions, journalists and historians have become accessories after the fact to Nixon's Last Lie. They've been content to meekly accept Richard Nixon's version of the truth, or to tell us that it doesn't matter. In doing so, they've got things reversed: First find out the truth, then let us decide whether it matters or not. After all, this is Richard Nixon! Whatever you think about his politics and his behavior, he is one of the great complex characters in American history-and this dimension of his character, whether he "came clean" after he left office or took a guilty secret to his grave, is somehow seen as insignificant! For all the self-congratulatory celebration of this single source (Deep Throat was, of course, one among many)-as if Mark Felt, and only he, opened the secret door-the remaining Watergate scandal is the widespread indifference among historians and journalists to the origin of it all. As a result, Nixon's self-serving lie is in danger of becoming incorporated into the received historical portrait of him, of Watergate and the Nixon Presidency. It's generally not a good idea to allow lies to fester in history, especially the kind of lie that gives rise to so-called "Stab in the Back" myths: Nixon wasn't a perpetrator, but rather a victim of overzealous underlings and a vindictive press; perhaps then we should admire him for being a stand-up guy and throwing away the Presidency to save the likes of Mitchell and Haldeman. Let me repeat: Historians and journalists who are prepared to believe Nixon capable of all manner of lies somehow seem content to accept his word that on this one, the very heart of the matter, he was telling the God's honest truth. This tendency has disturbed me ever since I covered the Watergate impeachment hearings back in 1974. As White House correspondent for The Village Voice, I lived down in Washington for half a year until the bitter end, when I was present in the East Room of the White House as Nixon made his teary farewell before hopping into the copter for exile. Back then, nobody seemed concerned about establishing the truth about the most basic question of Watergate: Who ordered the break in? By that time, people were mainly interested in hustling Richard Nixon out of town. The smoking guns about his participation in the cover-up were plentiful, so few aside from me in The Voice and Mary McCarthy in The New York Review of Books seemed to care any more about the question of who started it all. (Ms. McCarthy figured out the narrator question in Nabokov's Pale Fire, so Watergate must have been a snap.) Even Woodward and Bernstein, in their books and public pronouncements, have not, so far as I have seen, gone on record with whether they accept Nixon's denial that he ordered the break in. (I asked an associate of Woodward to pass the question on to him, but as of press time haven't received a response.) As an admirer of Woodward's conscientiousness and thoroughness, I'm sure he will address this question in his upcoming book. In fact, I'd suggest that Woodward and Bernstein reunite for one final Watergate assignment: proving to everyone's satisfaction (since no one will listen to me) whether Nixon lied about his lack of foreknowledge of the break-in. I keep trying to get journalists to pay attention to the fact that, for all the triumphalism of the profession over Watergate, the burglary remains unsolved. I raised this point in a 1982 essay on Watergate theories that I did for The New Republic, when I pointed out that the only "evidence" that Nixon didn't know of or approve of the burglary in advance were his own self-serving declarations that he was shocked and surprised when he first learned of it from newspaper reports. "Most Watergate investigators have been content to let RN by with this Big Surprise version of his reaction," I wrote, pointing out that "the only Watergate observer to take an unequivocal Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! stand on Nixonian foreknowledge has been Mary McCarthy. Why so shy, the rest of them? Perhaps they don't want to be perceived as knee-jerk Nixon haters eager to believe the worst about RN. Perhaps everyone is still waiting for another smoking gun to surface." In fact, some 15 years later, something close to "another smoking gun" did emerge-two, in fact-although by that time the conventional wisdom had settled into concrete and few cared. In 1997 (as I reported here in The Observer in the Jan. 11, 1999, issue), University of Wisconsin professor Stanley Kutler's book of newly released Nixon White House tapes, Abuse of Power, contained some significant disclosures that seemed to confirm Mary McCarthy's prescience, her willingness to survey the evidence and come to a conclusion that Woodward and Bernstein and all the other journalists, for all their investigatory prowess, failed to reach: Nixon approved the break-in. Before I get into the details, I'd like to talk about what I'd call history by compromise rather than evidence: distorting history to make journalists seem "fair and balanced." Over and over, when I'd talk to journalists about this question, I'd hear the same refrain: We got rid of Nixon on so many other grounds-the cover-up, the "plumbers," etc.-so why press the matter of the original burglary? It's really not a big deal, and it will be better for our image if we don't pursue the truth too vigorously; it will seem like piling on. In other words, the consensus on Nixon, the unwillingness to "pile on," is really some self-serving attempt to protect the image of journalists. It's journalists spinning themselves! This isn't the way history should be written: Will the truth be seen as something to ignore because it's "piling on"? And then there are those who offer the weak defense that "it doesn't really matter; we already know Nixon was bad." Yes, in chronicling the greatest constitutional crisis of the past century, what does it matter if we let a few details slide? In evaluating the character of one of the greatest American characters, shouldn't it matter to biographers whether he really "came clean"? Or whether he went to his grave having successfully perpetrated one last lie. Shouldn't it matter to those who study "Presidential character" that they may have misjudged, in a crucial way, the character of this President? The entire storyline would have to be shifted to a certain extent, from self-sacrifice (Nixon taking the bullet for subordinates) to self-destruction (Nixon ordering the act that would lead to his being driven from office). "Why is this man laughing?" Esquire's Dubious Achievement Awards would perennially ask. Now we know: He's laughing because he played even his most relentless tormenters for suckers on this issue. The Deep Throat frenzy plays into Nixon's endgame: He was betrayed by a Judas; he was crucified because he sought to be the savior of his followers like … oh, some other figure in history. One has to wonder whether, if all the tens of thousands of man-hours devoted to figuring out who Deep Throat was had been spent investigating the key unresolved question of Watergate and the Nixon Presidency, we'd have a definitive answer. In fact, we're much closer to a definitive answer than most are aware of, and for that we have Stanley Kutler to thank. He's the real Woodstein of the past three decades, relentless in suing to get more of the White House tapes released, assembling teams to transcribe the audio, publishing the transcripts and pointing to the extremely suggestive nuggets to be found there. It's amazing how complacent just about everyone but Mr. Kutler has been about this. As I tried to point out in my 1999 Observer piece, we now have more than one "smoking gun" that subverts the Nixon Big Surprise line on the break-in, if historians and journalists would only pay attention to it. Let me try to put the "new" disclosures (in fact, now eight years old) in context. Nixon's story is that on the weekend of the Watergate break-in (which took place on Saturday, June 17, 1972), he was relaxing at his Key Biscayne retreat with not the slightest notion that burglars were breaking into Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate. Or that anyone connected with him had anything to do with it. When he gets back to the White House on June 20, he has a conversation with his top aide, H.R. Haldeman, but we don't know what was said because the two-minute talk seems to have been erased. (This two-minute electronic hum that is all that's left may be as important as the far more famous "18-minute gap"). But the second conversation that day was recorded and recovered, and in it there's a remarkable disclosure-one that contradicts not just all Nixon's statements on the matter as President, but all his elaborate explanations in memoirs and interviews afterward. A key fact about it is that this tape was released after all the self-serving Nixon memoirs and interviews, so Nixon may not have been aware of how tellingly it contradicts them. In this tape, Nixon starts off giving what will be his public line, the lie he will stick to; that he was shocked that burglars would choose to break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters, because political sophisticates know that party headquarters aren't where the juicy stuff is to be found. "My God, the committee isn't worth bugging, in my opinion," he tells Haldeman. Of course, the House and Senate investigations of Watergate-and other Nixon tapes-make clear that Nixon was very aware that there was potentially juicy stuff in this particular party headquarters, because it contained the office of D.N.C. chairman Larry O'Brien, who would've been in a position to know the details of Nixon's unsavory financial relationship with Howard Hughes (who had O'Brien on his payroll as a lobbyist), among other potentially scandalous things. Tapes made before the break-in at O'Brien's D.N.C. office show Nixon to be absolutely obsessed with O'Brien and the damage he could do. For him to say he couldn't understand the stupidity of breaking into O'Brien's office because "the committee isn't worth bugging" is palpable disingenuousness-an obvious lie. Of course he knew it was worth bugging, because he ordered it. But I didn't give you Nixon's full quote to Haldeman: "My God, the committee isn't worth bugging, in my opinion." And then he says (and this is the phrase I singled out in my 1999 column): "That's my public line." "That's my public line"! He had to lie to cover up the fact that he knew exactly why some burglars broke into where they did. As Mr. Greenberg put it in his Times op-ed on July 29, 2003: "[A]s the journalist Ron Rosenbaum has noted, the wording ["public line"] implies that he had some private suspicion to the contrary." (To say the least.) But there's more on this true smoking-gun tape. Nixon's knowledge of why the D.N.C. was worth bugging is confirmed by Haldeman on the June 20 tape. Haldeman says the D.N.C. wasn't worth bugging, "except for the financial thing. They thought they had something going on that." To which Nixon replies, "Yes, I suppose." Not "What financial thing?" Rather: "Yes, I suppose." Not exactly the shocked and surprised reaction to the burglary that was his "public line." And yet journalists and historians have bought the "public line" almost without exception. Even after the Magruder revelation. In my 1999 piece, I quoted the great reporter J. Anthony Lukas (who, by the way, identified Mark Felt as Deep Throat back in the 70's, as did Edward Jay Epstein) on the nature of "the financial thing": "The Nixon forces were trying to determine what O'Brien knew about some shady dealings between Nixon and Howard Hughes, particularly $100,000 passed from the multimillionaire to the President's friend Charles (Bebe) Rebozo, part of which was apparently later spent on furnishings and jewelry for the President and his family." (Potential Senate candidate-and Nixon son-in-law-Ed Cox: Anything to say?) Back in 1987, Lukas got Jeb Magruder-the man who gave the Watergate burglars the final go-ahead (after getting pressure from higher-ups)-to admit that "the primary purpose of the break-in was to deal with the information that has been referred to about Howard Hughes and Larry O'Brien and what that meant as far as the cash that had been supposedly given to Bebe Rebozo and spent later by the President possibly." Here the second, even more definitive smoking gun in the tapes that Mr. Kutler got released comes into play. A tape in which Haldeman tells Nixon what Magruder could testify to: that one of Haldeman's aides called Magruder and said, "Haldeman has said that you cannot delay getting this operation started any longer and the President has ordered you to go ahead immediately and you're not to stall any more, you're to get it done." "The President has ordered"! Nixon claimed to be shocked at hearing this. In my 1999 Observer piece, I called for Magruder to come forward and finally tell everything he knew. Especially about a phone call he was said to have been present for in the office of Nixon campaign chief John Mitchell, when Mitchell received a phone call from Nixon urging him to get the Watergate burglary going. (This information is deducible from a footnote in Citizen Hughes, by Michael Drosnin.) I concluded my 1999 column by saying: "Mr. Magruder might be the only one who knows the truth. I'm hoping somehow this column will find him and he will … give us, if he can, the answer we lack to this momentous unresolved question." (The phone message I'd left for Magruder was never returned.) It wasn't until my conversation last week with David Greenberg that I learned that Magruder, four years later, did come forward. That Magruder told a PBS documentary that, as Mr. Greenberg puts it, "he heard Nixon through the phone telling John Mitchell, then in charge of the campaign, to proceed with the break-in." If you ask me: Case closed! I think it's clear that Nixon ordered the break-in. Yes, some have said that Magruder hadn't reported this before, but he hadn't been cornered by the disclosures on the newly released tapes before. So he had to come clean: He heard Richard Nixon's own voice through the phone ordering the break-in. Yet nobody seems to care. Frankly, I think Prof. Stanley Kutler-the historian who took up the case that journalists abandoned with his dogged pursuit of the truth on the unreleased tapes-deserves at least as much credit as Mark Felt for giving us a true picture of the Nixon White House's crimes. And what about Mary McCarthy (and what about me?)-don't we deserve credit for consistently fingering the prime suspect in the Watergate burglary? (Mark Felt never did.) Or do you still believe Nixon's Last Lie?