encountered in Chapter 1. That principle accounted for, among other
things, the tendency of a man to spend more money on a sweater fol-
lowing his purchase of a suit than before: After being exposed to the
price of the large item, the price of the less expensive one appears smaller
by comparison. In the same way, the larger-then-smaller-request pro-
cedure makes use of the contrast principle by making the smaller request
look even smaller by comparison with the larger one. If I want you to
lend me five dollars, I can make it seem like a smaller request by first
asking you to lend me ten dollars. One of the beauties of this tactic is
that by first requesting ten dollars and then retreating to five dollars, I
will have simultaneously engaged the force of the reciprocity rule and
the contrast principle. Not only will my five-dollar request be viewed
as a concession to be reciprocated, it will also look to you like a smaller
request than if I had just asked for it straightaway.
In combination, the influences of reciprocity and perceptual contrast
can present a fearsomely powerful force. Embodied in the rejection-
then-retreat sequence, their conjoined energies are capable of genuinely
astonishing effects. It is my feeling that they provide the only really
plausible explanation of one of the most baffling political actions of our
time: the decision to break into the Watergate offices of the Democratic
National Committee that led to the ruin of Richard Nixon’s presidency.
One of the participants in that decision, Jeb Stuart Magruder, upon first
hearing that the Watergate burglars had been caught, responded with
appropriate bewilderment, “How could we have been so stupid?” In-
deed, how?
To understand how enormously ill conceived an idea it was for the
Nixon administration to undertake the break-in, it is necessary to review
a few facts:
- The idea was that of G. Gordon Liddy, who was in charge of intelli-
gence-gathering operations for the Committee to Re-elect the Presid-
ent (CRP). Liddy had gained a reputation among administration
higher-ups as something of a flake, and there were questions about
his stability and judgment. - Liddy’s proposal was extremely costly, requiring a budget of $250,000
in untraceable cash. - In late March, when the proposal was approved in a meeting of the
CRP director, John Mitchell, and his assistants Magruder and Freder-
ick LaRue, the outlook for a Nixon victory in the November election
could not have been brighter. Edmund Muskie, the only announced
candidate the early polls had given a chance of unseating the Presid-
ent, had done poorly in the primaries. It looked very much as though
32 / Influence