Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [17]
In his autobiography, Magruder describes his first meeting with Bob Haldeman at San Clemente. Haldeman flattered and charmed him. “Here you’re working for something more than just to make money for your company,” Haldeman told him. “You’re working to solve the problems of the country and the world. Jeb, I sat with the President on the night the first astronauts stepped onto the moon … I’m part of history being made.” At the end of a day of meetings, Haldeman and Magruder left the compound to go to the president’s house. Haldeman was enraged that his golf cart was not right there awaiting him, and he gave his assistant a “brutal chewing out,” threatening to fire the guy if he couldn’t do his job. Magruder couldn’t believe what he was hearing, especially since it was a beautiful evening and a short walk to their destination. At first Magruder thought Haldeman’s tirade was rude and excessive. But before long, wanting the job as much as he did, Magruder was justifying Haldeman’s behavior: “In just a few hours at San Clemente I had been struck by the sheer perfection of life there … After you have been spoiled like that for a while, something as minor as a missing golf cart can seem a major affront.”25
And so, before dinner and even before having been offered a job, Magruder is hooked. It is a tiny first step, but he is on the road to Watergate. Once in the White House, he went along with all of the small ethical compromises that just about all politicians justify in the goal of serving their party. Then, when Magruder and others were working to reelect Nixon, G. Gordon Liddy entered the picture, hired by Attorney General John Mitchell to be Magruder’s general counsel. Liddy was a wild card, a James Bond wannabe. His first plan to ensure Nixon’s reelection was to spend one million dollars to hire “mugging squads” that would rough up demonstrators; kidnap activists who might disrupt the Republican convention; sabotage the Democratic convention; use “high-class” prostitutes to entice and then blackmail leading Democrats; break into Democratic offices; and use electronic surveillance and wiretapping on their perceived enemies.
Mitchell disapproved of the more extreme aspects of this plan; besides, he said, it was too expensive. So Liddy returned with a proposal merely to break into the DNC offices at the Watergate complex and install wiretaps. This time Mitchell approved, and everyone went along. How did they justify breaking the law? “If [Liddy] had come to us at the outset and said, ‘I have a plan to burglarize and wiretap Larry O’Brien’s office,’ we might have rejected the idea out of hand,” wrote Magruder. “Instead, he came to us with his elaborate call girl/kidnapping/mugging/sabotage/wiretapping scheme, and we began to tone it down, always with a feeling that we should leave Liddy a little something—we felt we needed him, and we were reluctant to send him away with nothing.” Finally, Magruder added, Liddy’s plan was approved because of the paranoid climate in the White House: “Decisions that now seem insane seemed at the time to be rational….We were past the point of halfway measures or gentlemanly tactics.” 26
When Magruder first entered the White House, he was a decent man. But, one small step at a time, he went along with dishonest actions, justifying each one as he did. He was entrapped in pretty much the same way as were the 3,000 people who took part in the famous experiment created by social psychologist Stanley Milgram.27 In Milgram’s original version, two-thirds of the participants administered what they thought were life-threatening levels of electric shock to another person, simply because the experimenter kept saying, “The experiment requires that you continue.” This experiment is almost always described as a study of obedience