​A Summer in Lawrence: Remembering Watergate

By Barry Baddock

In the early 1970s, I was a British visiting student in Lawrence, Kansas. Having graduated, I was preparing to return home when, suddenly, along came the hearings of the Senate Watergate Committee. Broadcast live on nationwide TV and radio, they promised thrilling drama of the highest order. 

For me, it was drama not to be missed. It promised a spectacular Finale to my three years in America. I had to stay. Now, almost five decades on, I have to confess my memories of those Watergate committee hearings have grown hazy. But I’d like to share with you the impressions which survive. 

In hindsight, I feel that many of the characters in that long-ago Washington stage show – interrogators and defendants alike – seemed to have been custom-made for the parts they played. It was as if they had been auditioned and recruited for their roles. 

Take John Dean. He played the part of the President’s former legal advisor. John had the clean-cut ways and appearance of a young man working his diligent way to the heights of his profession. It was he who earnestly claimed to have warned the nation’s leader of “a cancer on the Presidency.” (The phrase vaguely disturbed me. I was a pedantic English teacher, keen to correct shaky prepositions.). Who would doubt that angel-faced, clean-shaven John, in his tailored suit, had played no part in the cover-up?

I can see him now, deferentially stooping to the microphone to correct someone’s tiny error over locations or dates. He was the model of an attentive, dedicated lawyer.

Remember John Dean’s wife? As an observer of the proceedings, she didn’t have to speak a word. But, for me, Maureen (“Mo”) was one of the big stars of the drama. Watchful, poised, she maintained her serene presence, attracting as much camera as John. Mo was smooth of skin, with fair hair pulled into a polished bun. Her clear pearl earrings matched the perfection of her rose-petal lips. In short, Mo Dean provided the vital ingredient of sex appeal. 

Gordon Liddy refused to testify at the hearings. Consequently, he brought -- offstage as it were – a dark ominous threat to the proceedings. For didn’t we all expect – didn’t we all know? – that the day would dawn when Liddy would talk? So, a silent menacing presence, he seemed to foreshadow a distant Final Act to come.  

Weighing heavily in the scales of vice and virtue were “Bob” Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. For me, they were perfect in their roles as stock evildoers in an American drama: tough, unsmiling wheeler-dealers lying, twisting, ducking and weaving to survive. Between them, they possessed not a particle of glamour. Doomed they were, ripe for slaughter in a staged contest where good must inevitably triumph over evil. Poor Haldeman! Poor Ehrlichman! One resembled a rock-faced mafia boss, the other a pale, callous hitman. Devoid of warmth, sympathy, humour or anything approaching good looks, they were baddies, schemers, guys who wore black hats in Westerns, symbols of corruption that Superman and Batman had to fight. 

Whatever happened to the interrogators – that handful of senators who were given their brief hour on the stage? Wasn’t this an opportunity for them? A chance for each to win recognition and greater fame?

Not 76-year-old Sam Ervin, of course. The Chairman played his role with relish, tossing out humorous quips and fragments of wisdom from the Good Book. To use a cricket idiom, he played the innings of his life at the Watergate hearings. I remember John Ehrlichman once challenging Chairman Sam on a point of interpretation. 

“How do you know that, Mr. Chairman?” 

“Because I can understand the English language,” roared country-lawyer Sam. “It’s my mother tongue!”

Yes, for my money, Sam the showman deserved an Oscar. 

I remember Howard ("What did the President know, and when did he know it?") Baker. He was tipped as a future President, was Baker. And, running for U.S. President in 1980 and serving as America’s Ambassador in Japan, he did not sink entirely without trace. 

Generally, though, the committee men were supporting players: attendant princes in a courtly drama. Colourless from the start, they made no mark. History passed them by. Given their purely investigative roles, this was right and proper. 

Throughout the whole thrilling affair, there hovered, offstage, the looming shadow of the man at the top. When the time came for the dramatis personae to gather their props and effects and quit the stage, events continued to creep forward. And, month by month, the national leader was drawn deeper, ever deeper, into Watergate’s dark web. 

I was living in Germany in August 1974, when Richard Nixon quit. As I watched the man’s resignation speech, his frontal head-and-shoulders image, those pleading eyes, I felt that suddenly, at a stroke, the show was over. My last months in Lawrence had brought the drama of a lifetime, never to be forgotten.