A Watergate Reflection
When the Watergate break-ins occurred fifty years ago, I was just graduating high school. Towards the end of my freshman year in college, the Senate Watergate Committee hearings began. I remember watching portions of them on the television in the student lounge in my freshman dorm. It was the same college that President Richard Nixon’s former White House Counsel, John Dean, had attended in the early 1960s. The college is known for its Independent Study (“IS”) program, in which every senior is required to complete an extensive senior research project. Rumor had it that the FBI had been on campus and took Dean’s IS. I’ve never determined whether the rumor was true.
I watched and read much of the Watergate story as it unfolded. After Dean’s testimony and the testimony of other key witnesses, it became increasingly apparent that President Nixon was directly involved in a criminal cover up, a crime that would warrant impeachment and removal from office.
The nation was in a grave constitutional crisis, with the head of the Executive Branch taking an extraordinarily broad view of his powers and challenging the authority of the Legislative and Judicial Branches. There was a realistic fear that Nixon would order tanks into the streets of Washington, DC, using the military to keep himself in office. Thanks to the integrity of bipartisan members of Congress, he was persuaded to resign and left office in disgrace. I remember reading the large newspaper headlines of his resignation, and watching the television coverage of his departure from the White House during a lunch break while working in my summer job.
A few years later, I graduated from Cornell Law School, moved to Boston for a one-year federal court clerkship, and took a job with one of Boston’s most prestigious law firms after the clerkship ended. One of the first cases to which I was assigned was a large, complex case filed in Upstate New York. I was brought into it by a rising star within the firm, Bill Lee, who graduated from Cornell Law School three years before I did and who recruited me to the firm after trying a case before my judge. The senior lawyer on the New York case was James D. St. Clair. Years later, Lee would become chairman of the firm. Several years earlier, St. Clair had served as Nixon’s special Watergate counsel.
I’ve always assumed that St. Clair’s engagement to represent Nixon had to do with his work for firm attorney Joseph Welch during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. Welch was brought into the matter that pitted the Army against Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was, as Welch would famously point out, recklessly accusing innocent people within the Army, and even one of Welch’s innocent young associates, of being members of the communist party, intent on destroying the U.S. from within.
St. Clair was the young lawyer not accused of communist affiliation who went to Washington with Welch and assisted him in bringing McCarthy and his reckless accusations down. He would, much later, provide live commentary to us firm lawyers to go along with an in-house showing of a documentary film about the televised Army-McCarthy hearings.
The doctrine of Executive Privilege was an issue in those hearings, and it was front and center in the Watergate hearings nearly two decades later. In 1954, President Eisenhower invoked it when he refused to turn over notes of his meetings with Army officials to Senator McCarthy. Twenty years later, St. Clair asserted it on behalf of Nixon, formerly Eisenhower’s Vice President, as a defense to producing the secret White House tapes on which Nixon recorded every oval office conversation.
Nixon’s case quickly reached the Supreme Court, where St. Clair argued that the assertion of Executive Privilege by the President meant that Congress and the courts could not compel the tapes’ production. The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 against Nixon. Nixon was forced to produce the highly incriminating tapes, and the rest is history.
In the New York case to which I was assigned a few years later, I helped draft a motion to dismiss on behalf of the two co-defendants. I traveled to the hearing in Syracuse, New York with St. Clair, Lee, and attorneys from another Boston firm that was representing the other defendant. The night before the hearing, St. Clair isolated himself to review the briefs and prepare for the oral argument. I stayed in my hotel room and watched a made-for-t.v. movie premiering that night, called “Blind Ambition.” It was based on John Dean’s book of the same name, presenting Dean’s account of the Watergate affair.
Those of us who worked with St. Clair somehow understood not to ask him about Watergate, and he did not talk with us about it. The lawyers for the other law firm had no such understanding. After the New York hearing (in which St. Clair was truly impressive, a lawyer with gravitas whose very presence commanded the room), we all returned to the airport for the return flight to Boston. While boarding the plane, one of the attorneys from the other firm told him that she had watched “Blind Ambition” the night before and asked him a question about John Dean. His only response was in the form of a question. He asked, with a subtle grin, “How would you like to have him as your lawyer?”
Perhaps the better question would have been, “How would you like to have Nixon as your client?” Although I didn’t know him well, I believe Jim St. Clair was a decent, ethical, and patriotic man. I believe the same about John Dean. I’m pretty sure I know Dean’s answer to the unasked question. To this day, I wonder what St. Clair’s would have been.