Emery begins his book by telling about how Nixon and his campaign managers were going to do whatever it took to win the presidential election for his second term. The bugging and the telephone tapes were all part of this. Nixon was a very paranoid person thinking that everyone was plotting to take him down and vote him out of office. He was very worried about losing his job to someone else. During the campaign of his second term, Nixon became very disturbed with the fact that someone could be taking his position and that he would not be in control any longer. He wanted someone outside of the government to get him some dirt on his opponents as well.
The break-in was not a very easy task for the group. It took them three times before they could break into the building which was the location of the Democratic headquarters. Nixon's men finally got in and took some pictures of some documents and put bugs on the phones. There were eight men involved in the break-in. One of them was caught but was only asked to leave by the security guard. George McGovern was the opponent that Nixon really wanted because he figured he could beat him pretty easy. Having both Houses of Congress being controlled by the opposite party, Nixon became very fearful of being a one-term President.
John Edgar Hoover was the leader of the F.B.I. at the time of the affair. Hoover was a legend in his own time and was very feared by many. Nixon said that he had a very close relationship with Hoover and that he supported him a lot. Hoover was said to be a man who you can really trust. Nixon knew that Hoover was very important because he would not let anything leak out that should not have. Nixon had several meetings with all of his intelligence officers to see what exactly was going on and what was being investigated. Nixon even began to make some changes in his senior staff. One example was when he decided to make John Ehrlichman his new domestic policy chief.
Emery describes the cover up very well. It started as soon as they were caught. Nixon returned to Washington on that Monday, delayed because of a storm. This may have hurt him a lot considering so much happened between Sunday and Monday. They began to have a few presidential meetings a day to come up with a good way to cover it up. Nixon became even more nervous when the Supreme Court said that it was not in the President's power to use bugging without the consent of the authorities. On Tuesday morning at about 9 o'clock, the first White House meeting had taken place. Steps were also taken to fix the officials in charge of the prosecution of the burglary. Many of the people involved in these meetings denied completely that anything about was discussed in these meetings.
Nixon was always saying that if someone could steal the Pentagon Papers, then what was the big deal with doing what he did. Nixon was very worried about his office being bugged as well. He thought that everyone was plotting to get him out. O'Brien filed the Democrats' suit of one million dollars in damage to the CRP. This really worried Nixon because now the entire CRP could be witnesses to the case. On that Wednesday, Nixon's cover up was to get to the F.B.I. They were advised not to go to the F.B.I., but Mitchell suggested that they did because the F.B.I. already knew about it anyway. They wanted to do something instead of just sitting there watching it go by. The F.B.I. was really not too sure if they even wanted to talk to the guys because they felt that it could really hurt their reputation. By the time Thursday came around, news of the Watergate break-in was starting to get out to the media. Nixon stated that the White House had nothing to do with the break-in and that ...