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People of Consequence are questioned on the issues of our time by Elizabeth Drew on 30 Minutes With.

It was September seventh, 1972, about seven months after President Richard Nixon had signed the Federal Election Campaign Act. 30 Minutes With was a weekly public affairs program that broadcast on a newfangled TV network called CBS.

Tonight, John D. Ehrlichman. Mr. Ehrlichman is the top assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs. I'd like to ask you some questions, beginning with what the Nixon administration might do if it's reelected and has four more years in office.

The host, Elizabeth Drew, was a Washington correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly. Her bouffant hairdo and bright green blouse created a stark contrast to the man in the dark suit sitting across from her. Like all political journalists, Drew had been closely following the various scandals and questionable activities cropping up around President Nixon in the months since he had signed the nation's first major anti-corruption legislation in decades.

You gave an interview to the Christian Science Monitor earlier this year, and you said that in his campaign, the President was going to be able to point with pride to having, quote, gotten Washington away from the Bobby Baker syndrome.

Bobby Baker was Lyndon Johnson's top senate who had to resign in 1963 in a bribery scandal. Drew is basically asking if Nixon kept his promise to drain the swamp.

There have been various controversies now around this administration, the break-in of the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate. Do these things keep the President from pointing with pride to this thing in the campaign? No, I don't think so. As far as the Watergate thing is concerned, I know just about as much about it as you do, probably less. Except I do know, very definitely, that people in the government, in the White House, particularly, are simply not involved in that.

Yeah, you heard that right. No involvement with Watergate, according to John Eerlichman. The Nixon aid who America would soon learn was literally the man who oversaw Watergate. But here we are just months before the 1972 election, and Eerlichman is appearing on television to portray the Nixon administration as good government reformers, an argument bolstered by Nixon having recently signed the Campaign Finance Reform Bill.

I think after the history of this first term is written and you look back, you're going to see that compared to other administrations or by any standard you'd want to apply, that it has been an extraordinarily clean, corruption-free administration because the President insists on that.

That's exactly what I think of when I think of the Nixon administration, clean and corruption-free. Eerlichman here is trying to whitewash the White House in a performance that goes way beyond spin. This is an early version of cover up. While Nixon may have publicly signed that campaign finance bill, behind the scenes, the administration was neck deep in corruption and was working hard to keep it under wraps. This series is about the master plan to legalize corruption in America, a plan that first emerged from the cauldron of Watergate. Pieces of that Watergate story will sound familiar, but in this episode, we're going to tell you things you've probably never heard before. Think of this moment in 1972 as the opening salvo in a long game that stretches to the moment we're living in right now, a game with wins and losses, where some of the players are trying to shore up protections against corruption, while others are seeking ways to remove those guardrails. I'm David Serota, and this is MasterPlan. What about the MasterPlan, huh?

How are you getting up on Master?

Money, money, money, money, money, If you've been listening to Master Plan and thought this stuff sounds familiar, it's because today we live in a world controlled by money, and it's corrupting everything from the food we eat to the movies we watch. And each week on Lever Time, we expose how they did it. I'm Arjun Saint, and every week, David Serona and I host Lever Time, the Lever's Weekly Business and Politics podcast. To listen, search for Lever Time wherever you get your podcast or go to levernews. Com. It's 1972, five months before Eerlichman's interview on 30 Minutes With, and just a few days before key parts of the Federal Election Campaign Act are set to take effect. The men began arriving at Dulles International Airport on the edge of Washington, DC. It was springtime in the nation's capital. Those guys arriving at the airport were carrying bags, briefcases, satchels, attaché cases were popular, and their bags were filled with money, literally stuffed with cash. Lots of cash. From the airport, they drive directly to the same place, 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue, just one block away from the White House, Where were they going? The Office of the Campaign to Reelect the President, C-R-E-E-P.

Yes, Richard Nixon's campaign was called CREEP. Pretty on brand. Inside of CREEP's office, workers were frantic. Political campaigns are used to dealing with large amounts of money, but this was very different.

Yeah, you really can't make this stuff up. One day, a top executive from Pensoil showed up at creep and handed over $150,000 in cash and $550,000 in checks and stock certificates.

This is master plan producer Laura Krantz.

There was a New Jersey financier that sent over a worn leather bag with $200,000 of neatly wrapped $100 bills. Howard Hughes's rep dropped off blank checks for the campaign to fill in themselves.

How do I get one of those?

I know, right? And get this, in just one two-day period, creep handled about $6 million. That's about $45 million in today's money.

No surprise that much of that money was coming from the kinds of donors who wanted political favors from the Nixon Whitehouse, from approval of mergers to get out of jail free cards to the dairy price supports that you heard about in episode one. Right.

But David, you just said that Nixon had already signed FECA. Wasn't it supposed to limit donations and make info about them public?

It was, but creep had found a way to get around the guardrails, and the mastermind of all this was G Gordon Liddie. If you're even remotely familiar with Watergate, you know who this guy is, the bald, crazy-eyed former FBI agent with the bristle brush mustache. The guy who would hold his hand over a candle to show his tolerance for pain. He's known for coming up with the Watergate burglary. But what most folks don't know is that he was also the architect of this incredibly bold plan to get around campaign finance laws. It actually was amazing, if highly sketchy.

Officially, Liddy was the general counsel for Creep, the guy whose job it was to make sure the committee followed the law. But we got a hold of this memo he wrote to the White House about using a loophole to get around the new law.

Here's how it worked. Nixon signed Fika into law on February seventh, but the campaigns still had 60 days before they had to follow the new disclosure requirements. Liddy suggested that Creepe used this gap between the end of the old disclosure laws and the beginning of the new ones as a magical window of no campaign finance disclosure requirements at all. A window that would make it legal for Nixon's donors to secretly dump completely anonymous bags of cash onto the campaign.

Liddy's scheme ended up not being as much of a secret as Nixon's team might have wanted. The New York Times ran a front page story about it with a line that said, President Nixon's chief campaign fundraiser has been urging contributors to make their gifts to Republicans before the law takes effect on April seventh. The story also mentioned a letter from the Nixon campaign that told donors how to get around reporting their contributions.

Once word got out about the Nixon campaign's free-for-all fundraising scheme, other campaigns began following suit, both Republican and Democrat. But no one was doing it at the scale of creep, and the legality of it was questionable. I mean, the strategy did come from G. Gordon Litty, not exactly the most upstanding guy. Then, of course, headlines like this one started hitting the airwaves.

The Democratic National Committee is housed in the fashionable Watergate complex. The break-in was apparently planned well in advance.

What you might not have known is that some of that anonymous money going into creep during the magical window funded the Watergate break-in and provided hush money for the burglars. At the time, no one outside of Nixon's inner circle knew what the money was being used for. This would be uncovered later during the Watergate investigations. The burglary and the subsequent cover-up were the sexy side of that scandal, the stuff Hollywood latched onto. So that's what we all remember today. But the secret campaign money was the real foundation of Watergate. It illustrated how deep the corruption problem still ran, even after Congress was shamed into passing FECA. And at least one set of people were aware of that corruption problem. The campaign finance watchdogs who had led the fight to pass FECA in the first place. Those watchdogs wanted to know who had donated all that money flowing into Nixon's campaign. Anonymous, remember? Only Nixon and his cronies actually knew the names. But a lawsuit was about to change that. Hey, everyone. It's David Serota. If you've been enjoying this show and want to learn more about why our government is the way it is, I want to recommend the podcast Civics 101, from our Friends at New Hampshire Public Radio.

Civics 101 is a podcast about the basics of how our democracy works, and sometimes how it doesn't. It's perfect for when you're trying to understand why a recent Supreme Court decision is so controversial, or when you're trying to explain to a family member at a party how their ballot is counted and the difference between misinformation and disinformation. Hosts Hannah McCarthy and nick Capadice explore our government, its history, and what it all means for us. With over 200 episodes on everything from whether the President actually controls the price of gas to why we've had so many government shutdowns, Civics 101 is sure to spark your curiosity and inspire conversation. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or check That's what you're hearing about civics101podcast. Com. It's Madelyne Baron from In the Dark. I've spent the past four years investigating a crime.

When you're driving down this road, I plan on killing somebody. A four-year investigation, hundreds of interviews, thousands of documents, all in an effort to see what the US military has kept from the public for years.

Did you think that a war had been committed?

I don't have any opinion on that. Season 3 of In the Dark is available now wherever you get your podcasts. That's it. I'll be right here right now. Enter that.

Okay, so anonymous money poured into Nixon's campaign, thanks to G. Gordon Liddies' scheme. And a few months later, Nixon's aide, John Erlichman, appeared on CBS in that interview you heard at the top of the episode, the one where he insisted the Nixon Whitehouse was a corruption-free zone. In preparation for that interview, Erlichman met with Nixon in the oval office, and Nixon seemed particularly interested in one guy.

One of the tell me, John Garner. He could file it for seven. For Christ's sake, it's the law.

This recording, like many of Nixon's White House tapes, is difficult to make out. But you can hear Nixon say the name John Garner. Garner. Who is John Garner? He'd been a cabinet official under Nixon's predecessor, Lyndon Johnson. But more recently, he'd founded a Citizens Advocacy Group known as Common Cause.

We want public officials to have literally millions of American citizens looking over their shoulders at every move that they make.

That's John Garner describing the mission of Common Cause. Side note, Nixon reportedly asked Garner to be his vice presidential running mate in 1968. Garner declined and then became one of Nixon's least favorite people. They probably wouldn't have been a good match anyway. Garner was committed to making political institutions more open and accountable, and Nixon was committed to, well, the opposite. Common Cause wanted to know who had donated to the Nixon re-election campaign during that disclosure-free window in the spring of 1972. Since no one in the White House was divulging any information, Common Cause filed a federal lawsuit. Garner spoke about it at a press conference on September sixth, the day before Eerlichman and Nixon met in the oval office.

In recent months, citizens have been treated to several highly questionable instances of huge sums flowing to the president's political campaign while government favors flowed in the opposite direction. Perhaps the instances were all coincidental. The way to dispel the aura of mystery and suspicion is to bring all the facts out into the open. That is the purpose of our suit.

Creep thought found a loophole that allowed them to temporarily raise millions of dollars anonymously. Common Cause discovered a loophole to their loophole and found a way to use an older campaign finance law against them. This might seem like boring legal police, but national news picked up the story because it was directly connected to Watergate.

The courts will have to say if such a suit under the old Corrupt Practices Act can be won, but the administration apparently takes it seriously enough to have asked that this suit be held off. If a suit like this were one, it would clear up a lot about the Watergate bugging, and more than that, expose just those Nixon contributors who made their contributions before April seventh in order not to be disclosed.

That was on September sixth. The next morning, Nixon and Ehrlichman planned out their response in the oval office. This clean, corruption-free administration, it opted to go with smear tactics. I think the line on that is, Common cause has not succeeded in raising money. They needed some high visibility with Ubirch, and this is obviously a last gas by John Gardner to try to keep common cost flow. He sure to ask. Yeah, Nixon just called John Gardner an ass. He really hated this guy. A few hours later in that CBS interview you heard at the top, journalist Elizabeth Drew asked John Erlichman about a brand new development having to do with donations to the Nixon campaign.

The Common Cause filed a suit yesterday, as you know, to force the revelation of who contributed the $10 million to the President before April seventh. Do you think that that might bring about before the election any revelation of who the contributors were? Well, I don't think it should, because I think the whole spirit of the law that the Congress adopted involved a freedom from disclosure of any contributor prior to a certain date.

Make note of that. Eerlichman is arguing that the lawless period wasn't a bug. It was a feature. He's arguing that the lawmakers who passed the new campaign finance disclosure law intentionally created a period to allow anonymous bags of cash to flow to the president's campaign. Now, these annoying campaign finance reformers want Nixon to tell America who his donors are? How dare they? Elizabeth Drew pressed Eerlichman about this.

The current lawsuit, they didn't have to report before April seventh. But what Common Cause suit said is that the Corrupt Practices Act was in effect until then, and that did require the publication of everybody who had contributed more than $100. So they say that the committee broke the law.

In response to this perfectly reasonable assertion, Eerlichman whips out the smear he'd rehearsed with the President that very morning.

I suspect maybe Common Cause is looking for a little rehabilitation. I understand that Mr. Garner and his organization are in a little difficulty in terms of being able to raise money and keep alive. Maybe this is their salvation. I don't know. But they're keeping their name in the paper anyway.

Bravo. Give that man an Oscar. What a performance. He delivered that line even more smoothly than he had during his practice run with Nixon that morning. But while Nixon officials were publicly brushing off common cause, behind the scenes, this was clearly a problem for the White House, and it was not going away. The issue of disclosure was central to all of FECA required candidates to disclose any expenditures or contributions that exceeded $100. It required disclosure reporting for candidates, political parties, and political action committees. It also required candidates to file spending reports periodically to administrative offices deep within the bowels of the Capitol.

We thought no one's going to look at them, and the public is not going to find out this information if reporters don't have it before them because it would take a hell of a lot of work to review these reports.

That's Fred Wurtheimer, who in 1972 was the young legislative director for Common Cause. He told us that to make sure the media and the public would get this information, he'd send volunteers up to Capitol Hill to buy photocopies of each report. Then they'd write up that information into press releases for each state and Congressional district, sharing what campaign had received how much money and from whom. Over the course of the 1972 campaign, Common Cause uncovered widespread violations of the new law and filed complaints against 128 Democrats and 98 Republicans in various Congressional races. It came as something of a shock to candidates to learn that someone was actually watching. But Common Cause also had its eyes at the top of the ticket on the presidential race. Following creep's lead, other presidential campaigns had also amassed piles of money, taking advantage of the window of lawlessness. Common Cause, urged all presidential candidates to reveal their pre-April seventh donations. Having brought in so much cash in such a corrupt fashion, creep needed to keep their donors anonymous, and they had a whole laundry list of reasons explaining why. The law didn't require it. It would be unfair to donors.

John Erlichman's argument on CBS. Other campaigns haven't done it. And even when the other campaigns did give up their donor info, creep still refused. Here's Fred Wurtheimer again.

They said, Nuts to you. They fought us. We sued Nixon, and within a few weeks, we got a letter from the IRS telling us they were investigating our tax status.

What a coincidence. Regardless, Common Cause pushed the lawsuit forward, even as election day drew closer. Facing a court order, Creepe suddenly agreed to a concession. They'd hand over information about donors who gave in the first two of 1972, January and February, conveniently leaving out donations from the 60-day window. Still, when news broke that even a partial list was being released, it caused quite a stir.

Abc's David Schumacher reports.

In this TV clip, Garner, with reporters in tow, is marching into creeps offices to get the first batch of information, and he's asking to see the director of press relations, Powell Moore.

Mr. Moore did not come right out, but a security Security Man did, and he tried to block photographers. We've been asking for the press people to get out here.

Just don't touch me.

Okay, we're waiting. We're waiting. All right. Don't touch me.

In the black and white footage, we see a grainy hand appear over the lens, pushing the camera down.

The security man finally gave up, and so did Garner. After waiting in vain for 25 minutes, he walked back to his office, leaving lawyers behind to pick up their list. Reporters elbowing lawyers for their own copies.

The news story picks up later that day at Common Cause office, where we see rooms of young volunteers. They're sporting some quintessential '70s outfits, along with handlebar mustaches, big collars, and big hair. Most of them look fresh-faced, barely out of college, as they begin to sort through the preliminary donor information they'd managed to extract from creep. They didn't get the Holy Grail, the anonymous donor list from the secret window, but they'd gotten something.

A quick total for Chairman Garner, just under $5 million. Heading the list, Chicago Insurance Man, Clements Stone. A million dollars reinforcing rumors he's about to be appointed ambassador to Great Britain. Next, $800,000 from Richard Scape of the wealthy Mellon family. Arthur Watson, former ambassador to France, gave $300,000. John Mulcahy of New York, host of the President on his trip to Ireland, 255,000.

And unearthing those numbers was just the start of a tremendous amount of work. Nowadays, if we get the name of some person, we just type it into an Internet search, and up pops the information we need. But these Common Cause volunteers in 1972 are having to search for donor identities by furiously flipping through giant phone books and reference periodicals.

They're calling operators in other states using rotary phones. Do you have any idea how long that takes?

I mean, they're tapping numbers into calculators the size of tosters.

They're cross-checking all of this data with pencil and paper. My hand hurts just thinking about it.

You can see why nobody else had bothered to do this before. This was just the tip of the iceberg. As the media pointed out, the biggest donors had yet to be unmasked.

The Republicans still have not identified their contributors for the month of March, the month the committee to reelect the President pushed Hardest for big money. The court suit on that is still to come, but there was enough information on hand for now to keep the lights at Common Cause burning through the night.

The disclosure came only a few days before the election, and it had almost zero effect on the outcome. Nixon was reelected, defeating George McGovern in a landslip. Cripe, though, still refused to turn over any information about the bags of cash from March and April during Liddy's magic window, so Common Cause continued to press their lawsuit. Their lawyers spent the early part of 1973 deposing Nixon's White House and campaign officials. All of them insisted that the records from the spring of 1972 had been destroyed, which was almost certainly true since creep officials basically Moonlighted as professional document shredders. But then a campaign official lets slip that one document hadn't been shredded, a list of Nixon's most important contributors of all, the guys with the biggest bags of money. This list was in a locked drawer in the desk of President Nixon's personal secretary, Rosemary Woods, right next to the oval office. This document could potentially unlock everything that Common Cause wanted to know. Obtaining it became an obsession. But secret donor list doesn't really roll off the tongue, so they gave it a catchy nickname. Fresh in the minds of Common Cause staff was a wildly popular psychological horror film that had come out a few years earlier about a young mother being secretly manipulated by an evil cult.

This is no dream. This is really happening.

The mother's name? Rosemary, just like Nixon's secretary. That's how this coveted secret list came to be known as Rosemary's Baby. It took nine months from when Common Cause filed its initial lawsuit, but Rosemary's Baby was finally delivered in June 1973. After all those court filings, motions, and countermotions, network television reported that a federal judge officially ordered the White House to turn the list over.

The White House confirmed today that it has a copy of the list of campaign donations received before the new April seventh reporting deadline. Assistant Press Secretary, Jerole Warren, insisted the President has never seen the list.

And what a list was, really more of a book. Coming in at a whopping one and a half inches thick, it showed contributions that added up to more than $19 million in undisclosed donations to Nixon's re-election fund. All in all, creep raised nearly $55 million. That's the equivalent of... Let me get my calculator here. $407 million in today's dollars, an eye-popping amount, and much of it had been kept a secret. Hey, master plan listeners, this is David Serota. I have something new to share with you from Tenderfoot TV and the team behind Atlanta Monster. It's a new podcast called Flash Point. Some of you may remember where you were on July 27, 1996, when a domestic terrorist bombed the Summer Olympic Games held in Atlanta, Georgia. The attack was on every news channel, and while the FBI and the media fixated on the wrong man, the real bomber was planning his next target. Targets, two abortion clinics and a gay nightclub. The bomber would later be identified as a dedicated soldier in the white supremacist Christian Identity Movement. Through the lens of these bombings and the victims left to pick up the pieces, flash Flash one of America's greatest threats, the political and religious radicalization of homegrown terrorists.

Flash Point is available now. Listen for free on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

You already We know that Secretary Richardson has asked me to prosecute the offenses growing out of the... Breaking into the Watergate and other related allegations.

That's Archibald Cox in May 1973, accepting the job of special prosecutor with the United States Department of Justice. He's tall, with a buzzcut, and looks better in a bow tie than Tucker Carlson ever did. Cox would oversee the federal criminal investigation into the failed Watergate burglary, which had happened just shy of a year earlier. His name is pretty familiar to anyone with even a passing knowledge of Watergate. Watergate was huge. Cox understood that one investigation would be insufficient and incredibly unwieldy. This was too big, and it went far beyond the Bungled Burglary that we're all so familiar with. So he divided the investigation into task forces.

Yeah, so a few of them investigated Watergate itself, the break-in, the political dirty tricks, and the infamous White House plumber's efforts to stop leaks.

But two other task forces focused on the part of Watergate that's often forgotten, the corruption.

One looked at a scandal in which one of the country's largest telephone companies pledged $400,000 to the Republican Party in exchange for a favorable Nixon administration settlement in an antitrust lawsuit.

The final task force, the one that's most important to our story, focused on campaign contributions. The mission of these prosecutors was straightforward.

Follow the money. Just follow the money.

The Campaign Contribution Task Force honed in on that dairy scandal that we talked about in the first episode, the $2 million that the Associated Milk Producers gave to Nixon's campaign in 1971. But it was that window in the spring of 1972 before FECA came into effect, where the task force focused much of its attention. Who had contributed to the mountains of cash that came rolling into Nixon's re-election war chest? Were any of those donors promised government favors or threatened with government retribution if they failed to pay up? Just how legal or illegal was all of that money? Thanks to John Garner and Common Cause, the question of who had been partially answered. Those names were now in the hands of Watergate prosecutors, including a young lawyer named Roger Whitten, who spoke to us about his work during this period.

I didn't know anything about any subject we were confronting when I walked in in the door. For a young lawyer at the beginning of his career without any prosecutorial experience, it was exciting and it was scary. The spotlight was shining brightly on us, and we wanted to do it right and fairly.

Whitten had been Archibald Cox's student at Harvard Law School, and in 1973, he joined the Watergate Special Prosecution Force. He'd be working to find any evidence of a legal campaign finance activity.

It was clear fairly early on that the hush money paid to the Watergate burglars came directly or indirectly from illegal campaign contributions.

But the Campaign Contributions Task Force wanted to know more about the contributions themselves. As we've heard throughout this episode, the Nixon campaign had made a big push to get as much money as possible before FECA went into effect. The reason for that push was because FECA's disclosure requirements went way beyond those of the older law the Federal Corrupt Practices Act.

We wondered, why were they so interested in making secret contributions? What were they trying to hide? That's the question we tried to answer. In a number of cases, we were able to show that they were seeking influence by making large contributions secretly to the President's re-election campaign.

The information on who had donated to Nixon's campaign came from a variety of sources. Members of CREEP, the President's personal lawyer, reporting from the press corps, hat tip to Woodward and Bernstein, and of course, the Rosemary's Baby List obtained by Common Cause.

Somehow this great mass of information got sorted into charges or not charges against companies and people.

Who were those companies and people?

I made a little list. There was the milk investigation, which had its own subteam. I thought milk was healthy and clean. But it wasn't. There were a number of well-known large companies, Gulf Oil, Ashtland Oil, Northrop, Phillips Petroleum, Goodyear, Occidental.

Since FECA hadn't yet gone into effect when this money made its way into Nixon's offers, the Watergate Corruption Task Force had to rely on older criminal statutes in order to press charges. Up until this point, those laws went almost unenforced. But amid the Watergate scandal, prosecutors were now going to aggressively enforce their prohibition against corporate money flowing directly into campaigns. As the prosecution began charging companies and officials, Whitten says they offered leniency to corporations that came in voluntarily to self-disclose and cooperate with the investigation.

We were quite open to plea bargains because, frankly, we didn't have the resources to try 20 cases. We thought also that we could accomplish a lot by holding closing these companies and these senior executives up to public scrutiny.

We live in an era where corporate executives almost never get prosecuted for anything, where bankers can rip off millions of homeowners and oil CEOs can light the climate on fire with no consequences. But notice how Whitten said that back in 1973, government prosecutors looking at corruption were going after both huge blue-chip companies and their individual corporate executives. This is a big deal and almost unimaginable today. Watergate prosecutors were trying to send a very specific message.

We were not going to just let the corporation dig into its pocket and pay. The guilty pleas and the plea organs were a deterrent to others not to engage in this misconduct. Because even though you're pleading guilty to a misdemeanor, it's not a high priority of a CEO of a name brand company to go to court and confess guilt. In connection with a crime.

On October 17, 1973, Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox issued a statement indicating that both the corporations and their primary responsible corporate officers would be charged. That same day, news outlets eagerly reported on the fallout.

Three big US corporations pleaded guilty today to making each more than $125,000 in illegal contributions to President Nixon's 1972 campaign. The firms are good Year, Tire & Rubber, Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing, and American Airlines. In court, attorney Herbert Miller said the airline pleaded guilty. Reportedly, its $55,000 donation was laundered through accounts in Lebanon. Prosecutor Thomas McBride warned that he will seek tougher penalties, which could mean jail for corporation executives who do not come forward as American Airlines did.

By the way, I remember being a teenager and first learning about Watergate from a TV miniseries in the 1990s that included this commercial. This presentation of Watergate is sponsored in part by American Airlines. I guess I didn't realize how on the nose that really was. In essence, Watergate was the first campaign finance scandal of the modern era, and it exposed incredible corporate corruption. Ultimately, the Campaign Contribution Task Force obtained convictions of 19 companies and 21 executives for making illegal corporate contributions to President Nixon's campaign, which then used of that money to fund activities like the Watergate break-in. Remember John Eerlichman's claim?

By any standard you'd want to apply, there's been an extraordinarily clean, corruption-free administration.

Yeah, not so much. Then, Nixon decided to make things worse for himself. Just three days after Cox's press conference and the guilty pleas of those big companies, Nixon ordered Archibald Cox to be fired. The two top men at the Justice Department refused to do it, so it fell to the third in line, Robert Bork, a name we'll hear again and again in this series. The firing of Cox was part of what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. The public was outraged. In an effort to contain the fallout, Nixon gave a televised press conference.

I made my mistakes, but in all of my years of public life, I have never profited from public service. I've earned every cent.

Side note, he gave this speech at Disney World, which is worth mentioning because we'll be back to the Magic Kingdom in the not-too-distant future. Bookmark Disney World. A lot of weird shit happens there.

I have never obstructed justice. I welcome this examination because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got.

Obviously, the best way to assure people you're not a criminal is to desperately insist that you're not a criminal.

Obviously. But by the time Nixon had delivered that now famous line, the damage was done. Millions of Americans had been watching the nationally televised Senate Watergate hearings unfold under the leadership of Senator Sam Ervin, who honed in on the link between corruption, campaign the finance and the burglary.

Didn't you suspect that when you raised this money and distributed in this so reputious manner to the lawyers and families of the parties that had been indicted in the Watergate, that you were aiding the Nixon campaign for re-election?

Americans, glued to their televisions, heard the dramatic stories about bags of cash, political intrig, and straight-up corruption. Even before the Saturday Night Massacre, A Gallup poll confirmed that Americans considered government graft one of the most important problems facing the nation. Campaign finance and political corruption would be key issues in the upcoming 1974 midterm elections. And thanks to Nixon, the Democrats, along with a coalition of reformers and organizations like Common Cause, saw both a political opportunity and a chance to fix the system. They began pushing a package of amendments that would strengthen the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act. I think this is the single most important issue that can be resolved by this Congress. Hey, Laura, does that voice sound vaguely familiar?

No, not ringing a bell. Who is it?

That's Joe Biden in a televised debate Back when he was a fresh-face 31-year-old senator, he was one of the lawmakers involved in passing amendments to strengthen FECA. Now, it would have been delicious to see super villain Richard Nixon shamed into signing new, even tougher anti-corruption bills into law, but he'd already thrown in the towel by the time they passed.

I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office.

That left Gerald Ford holding the pen. He'd been a long-time Republican leader in the US House, and Ford probably didn't like the new, tougher campaign finance legislation any more than Nixon would have. We'll hear more about old Jerry in a future episode. But the political climate meant Ford had no choice but to grit his teeth and sign the bill during a televised ceremony.

A major legislative outgrowth of the Watergate scandal was the campaign financing reform bill. President Ford signed that into law in a ceremony today. The President invited Congress in to watch, and about 100 members showed up for the East Room ceremony. Among other things, the bill limits the amount individuals can contribute to candidates, puts a $20 million spending limit on presidential races, and provides some public financing of the presidential campaigns through voluntary $1 deductions, which voters can take on income tax.

When signing the bill, President Ford explicitly acknowledged how angry the public was at the corruption that had taken over Washington.

I can assure you from what I've heard from the American people in writing and other communications, they want this legislation, so it'll soon be law. We do recognize that this legislation seeks to eliminate, to a maximum degree some of the influences that have created some of the problems in recent years. And if that is the end result, certainly it's worth all the labor and all the compromises that were necessary in the process.

Wow, what a wild trip it's been. Without the original FECA and that magical window of lawlessness, those bags of secret money may never have been dumped into Nixon's campaign. Without that money and all the corruption and scandal that came out of Watergate, these reforms may never have happened. If, as the old saying goes, every crisis is an opportunity, then the work of reformers and organizations like Common Cause made sure that when something If nothing as bad as Watergate happened, it could become a moment for progress. Fred Wurtheimer, again.

Watergate was the trigger because the public would not have engaged. People would not have been outraged. The stories would not have been there. Look, I've worked on this since 1971. We passed the Watergate reforms in '74 because we had enormous public support and demand.

And so here we are once more, dear listener. The forces of corruption have been repelled. The man who had come to personify corruption had been ejected from the White House in what seemed like a national referendum for a cleaner government, free of big money influence. But of course, we have several episodes to go, and we now live in a kleptocracy that makes Watergate seem quaint, which means this is not where the story ends. This is where the story story really begins. Because even though he was forced into an early California retirement, Richard Nixon had left the American people a present, a time bomb back in Washington, one that was ticking away.

You will raise you right-hand and repeat after me. I, Louis F. Powell Jr. I, Louis F. Powell Jr. Do solamente swear. Do solamente swear. That I will administer justice. That I will administer justice. As associate justice. As associate justice. Of the Supreme Court of the United States. Supreme Court of the United States. So help me God. So help me God.

That's next time on Master Plan. Thinking of a master plan.

I learned everything I got.

Thinking of Master Plan. Well, I'm not a crux. I've earned everything I've got. Thinking of a master plan. Well, I'm not a cru. I've earned everything I've got. Master Plan is a production of The Lever. This episode was written and produced by Jared Jekang Mair, Laura Krantz, and me, David Serota. Our production team includes Ula Culpa, Arjun Sing, and Roni Riccabene. Our editor is Ron Doyle. Fact-checking of this episode by Chris Walker. Original music is by nick Byron Campbell. Mixing by Louis Weeks. Special thanks to Fred Wertheimer, Roger Whitten, and Stephen Hamilton at the National Archives. You can listen and subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, YouTube Music, and wherever you get your podcasts. For ad-free episodes, exclusive bonus content, transcripts with links to our sources, and access to the Lever's entire archive of investigative journalism, please visit levernews. Com to become a subscriber. I'm not a crow.

I've earned everything I've got, got, got, got, got.