From Nixon to Trump, 50 years in the shadow of the Watergate scandal

Watergate is many things.

The mother of all political scandals.

The monument to journalistic investigation chiseled onto the screen by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in

.

The touchstone of a newspaper,

that was changed forever by that coverage.

The hinge between the old and the new Washington.

And the three pairs of buildings (three houses, two offices and a hotel) that make up the complex of the same name.

All of them are in one way or another celebrating this Friday, the 50th anniversary of that Saturday morning in which five

related to the CIA, the Cuban exile in Florida and the Committee for the Reelection of Richard Nixon raided the Democratic headquarters.

Richard Nixon, on the day of his resignation, on August 9, 1974.- (AFP)

They arrived in the city that same day from Miami, and stayed at the Watergate Hotel, in a room whose furniture offers guests, half a century later, a trip back in time at a rate of 1,449 dollars (about 1,370 euros) per night.

From there, suits and surgical gloves, they crossed the parking lot to the offices.

It wasn't the first time that, as part of an electoral espionage plot, they had entered the enemy's lair to take pictures and bugs, but they were caught when an employee named Frank Wills twice discovered duct tape on a door to prevent it was closed and he called the police.

At 2:30 they were arrested.

A few days later, the White House spokesman, Ron Ziegler, called them "third-party thieves" in the first of the cover-up maneuvers of a conspiracy with a view to the 1972 elections, which ended on August 9, 1974 with Nixon's resignation.

So this Friday also officially opens the 26 months of commemorations of the great milestones of Watergate, among them, the investigative committee in the Senate that glued millions of Americans to their televisions in the summer of 1973, as they intend to do these days the committee that tries to prove the involvement of Donald Trump in the attack on the Capitol of January 6, 2021.

The internalities of Watergate changed the relationship between power and the written press, which reached the zenith of its influence and turned to history, especially the couple formed by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, from

But not only:

which joined the train in motion, when a newly hired Seymour Hersh proved that the White House had bought the silence of the "thieves";

the

which published a 246,000-word transcript of Nixon's Watergate recordings;

or

One of its reporters took the cat to the water with an interview with Alfred Baldwin, an early whistleblower and the most wanted man at the beginning of the scandal (the night of cars was in a building opposite and he saw how the police entered looking for his buddies).

The

has been, however, the one that has highlighted the anniversary the most.

“Follow the money”

One of the myths surrounding its coverage has resurfaced this week.

It is the one that tells that Deep Throat, the official who pulled the blanket, responded to Woodward with the phrase "follow the money" when he felt that he could not fit the pieces of the investigation puzzle.

It turns out that the informer, who turned out to be Mark Felt of the FBI, never told him that, but when the book became a successful movie, the phrase caught on.

Woodward was a local journalist who, like his co-signer, Bernstein, landed on the subject because it initially seemed like a minor police matter and it was the weekend.

Bob Woodward (right) and Carl Bernstein, in the office of the 'Washington Post' on May 7, 1973. AP

This Monday, the commission of the assault on the Capitol also launched its particular "

when the representative of California Zoe Lofgren suggested that Donald Trump invented a foundation called the Electoral Defense Fund to collect 100 million dollars of donations from his supporters, which They trusted that this money would help him in his crusade to challenge an alleged fraud, despite the fact that there was no evidence and that his collaborators and relatives repeated it over and over again.

This is not the only parallel established 50 years later in Washington between Nixon, the only US president who has resigned in history (to avoid the disgrace of being expelled by

and Trump, the only one who has survived not one , but to two appeal processes of this type.

Woodward and Bernstein have also pointed out those similarities.

“We have been firmly convinced for almost half a century that the United States would never again see a president trample on the national interest and undermine democracy through the audacious pursuit of personal and political self-interest.

Until Trump came,” they half-write, as in the old days, in a foreword to a new edition of

a book they wrote in the throes of the Nixon era, and which continues to be, 48 years later, an enigma for two reasons: it is written by its protagonists in the third person, which gives it a fake literary style, somewhat forensic, and it has a typo on the first page that no one has corrected since then: that's when they claim that the "giant newsroom of the newspaper measures 150 square feet" (about 14 square meters).

That book inaugurated one of the most gigantic libraries, yes, on a recent event in the recent history of the United States, made up of thirty memoirs of characters directly involved, dozens of academic and journalistic volumes, thousands of oral history interviews, dozens thousands of articles and hundreds of thousands of documents housed in archives across the country.

That set has grown only in these months with about 10 new titles.

And on the payroll there is everything, even some early memories of Bernstein in which he manages not to mention the case that catapulted him to fame.

Those involved in the scandal, in a montage with their police records, in an exhibition that is currently in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, on the occasion of the half century of Watergate.WILL OLIVER (EFE)

Among them, perhaps the most focused on the events of June 17, 1972 is

, by the Irish filmmaker and writer Shane O'Sullivan, who decided to write it, as he explained this Wednesday in a telephone conversation, after Eugenio Martínez, one of the five who were caught red-

that day (he died in 2021), told him that he believed that James McCord, a former CIA agent hired to secure Nixon's re-election, which would come five months later, "had deliberately made several mistakes that led to the arrest of the gang, because he secretly wasn't comfortable with Nixon making peace with the Soviet Union and China, and he may have used the operation to undermine the president."

“That part of the story hadn't been thoroughly investigated, and I think it's suspicious that he, who was a professional, made so many mistakes.

FBI case agent Angelo Lano also believes to this day that McCord set up the thieves,” he added.

Broader in its approach is

by Garrett M. Graff, which, although it does not contain great revelations, succeeds in offering a total portrait of what is known about that scandal, which it actually presents as a sum of “a dozen scandals”, from the

Chennault

(the famous

they were precisely in charge of stopping leaks like that), going through the wiretaps ordered by Kissinger, the illegal bombing of Cambodia or the bribery case of Vice President Spiro Agnew.

So it didn't really start on June 17, 1972, but rather a "dark, paranoid and corrupt" state of mind, according to Graff, that Nixon plunged the country into between 1968 and 1974.

audiovisual fertility

The anniversary has also been especially fruitful in the audiovisual field.

Documentaries have been released such as

(Watergate

the draft of a scandal), which has the testimony of John Dean, adviser to that White House;

fiction films such as

, which, with a Fellinian nod included, deduces from the famous 18 and a half minutes of a telephone conversation erased from the Nixon tapes;

or series like

, which focuses on Martha Mitchell (played by Julia Roberts), who was the wife of Attorney General John Mitchell (Sean Penn), the first Watergate scapegoat.

the

He has pointed this week to him, after the analysis of a recording of HR Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, as the person ultimately responsible for the assignment to the thieves.

She has also published that Woodward received a call, of which nothing was known until now, in which she invited him to her apartment, spiteful after being abandoned by her husband, to rummage through his papers. .

Sean Penn and Julia Roberts, in 'Gaslit'.Hilary Bronwyn Gayle

Alcoholic, foul-mouthed and harassed by Washington power (there is even a psychiatric malpractice that bears her name, which defines when the patient is gaslighted), Martha Mitchell is surely the secondary character who is coming out of the celebration the most reinforced.

"Her up until now she had been undervalued in American culture," she explained this week in the cafeteria of the scandal hotel Joseph Rodotta, author of the book

, a “biography of the ensemble of buildings”.

“At that time she was one of the most famous people in the United States, she was on all the shows and magazines.

People adored her, she was a simple woman from Arkansas, and she was unimpressed by all those guys from Washington.

They didn't believe her when she said that her husband left her in Los Angeles when he found out about the break-in and had to run.

A bodyguard of hers held her hostage and slapped her in her hotel room to keep her from speaking to the press.

Later it was shown that this was the case, "said Rodotta.

The Mitchells lived in a two-story apartment in the East building of the complex (there's a West and South Watergate, but they never built, no one quite knows why, the North).

Rodotta, who has been in the apartment, says that “in the series they have made it broader, and more similar to the idea that one has of the style of the seventies”.

They were not the only ones involved in the scandal who were among the residents of the buildings: Senator Bob Dole;

Chinese lobbyist Anna Chennault;

Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchannan;

or Rose Mary Woods, the secretary who erased the 18-odd minutes also lived there.

“It was a nest of posh Republicans;

the rare thing is that the Democrats had an office,” says Rodotta, who worked as a consultant for the campaigns of Ronald Reagan or Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Designed by Italian Luigi Moretti,

it was built between 1963 and 1971. “It was a time when modernity was synonymous with living in the suburbs,” continues the writer.

"People moved here because it was a distinguished and very comfortable place, with its shops downstairs, its swimming pool and its services, bank, dentist, psychiatrists... They also wanted privacy, but that disappeared with the scandal."

Today it remains an unmistakably Washingtonian pole of attraction, still drawing an admittedly older neighborhood to its winding apartments, but with the same affluent and sophisticated air.

From the round-walled dwellings, if they are well situated, one overlooks the city of Washington on one side or the Potomac River on the other.

That is why they were called that, because they were projected as a kind of "door to the water".

Impossible then to imagine that the suffix

would end up losing its meaning one day 50 years ago to acquire a completely new one: attached to any word (

, nipple, FIFA, sofa...) it immediately becomes synonymous with a major scandal of unforeseeable consequences.

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