SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ BD B5
Spiro Agnew, “plus a little bit of presidential
tax fraud.” It makes for a challenging read at
nearly 700 pages of text, detailing fast-paced,
interlocking events over six years.
Yet Graff succeeds in his stated mission to
tell “a more human story, one not filled with
giants, villains, and heroes, but with flawed
everyday people worried about their families,
their careers, and their legacies.” The book is
filled with apt sketches of its many characters,
major and minor, from all the president’s men,
and some of their spouses, to journalists,
investigators, lawyers and members of Con-
gress. It vividly re-creates all the key events,
from Nixon’s overreaction to the revelation of
the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War in
June 1971 to his resignation in August 1974.
Graff surprisingly focuses often in the book
on Mark Felt, the FBI’s No. 2 official at the
time, who became a key unnamed source of
information for several reporters, especially
The Post’s Bob Woodward, who identified him
only as Deep Throat until Felt was unmasked
by his own family decades later. Graff appears
to identify as Felt’s motivation his loss in a
rather unseemly competition to succeed J.
Edgar Hoover as FBI director.
Graff sprinkles his book with readable anec-
dotes and asides, some of them in the many
footnotes dotting the bottoms of pages. For
example, when Nixon wanted someone to
break into the Brookings Institution to find
possibly embarrassing information about
himself, Tony Ulasewicz, a former New York
cop hired as a White House staff gumshoe, was
assigned to the job. But he had to go to a public
library to find what and where Brookings was.
Eventually, that burglary plot was abandoned.
Graff writes that the $100 bills the burglars
were carrying when they were arrested inside
the Watergate were intended to bribe any
building guards who might find and confront
them. Instead, the guard on duty, Frank Wills,
famously called the police when he twice
found tape keeping a garage door open.
Each morning during the Senate Watergate
hearings, chaired by Democrat Sam Ervin, the
avuncular senator could be seen briefly study-
ing a book held open in front of him by an aide.
Graff notes that Ervin was perusing a Senate
cafeteria menu placed inside the book, before
he pointed to the sandwich he wanted to order
for lunch.
Graff also seeks to correct conflicts, errors
WATERGATE FROM B1
An extraordinary time,
brought to new life
WATERGATE
A New History
By Garrett M.
Graff
Avid Reader.
793 pp. $35Leonard Downie Jr., a former executive editor of
The Washington Post, is a journalism professor in
D.C. at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite
School. His most recent book is “A ll About the
Story: News, Power, Politics and The Washington
Post.”members’ spouses and lets lawmakers keep
stocks they owned before taking office. Pass-
ing a bill with any of these deficiencies would
be worse than doing nothing at all, because it
would once again let Congress hide behind the
illusion of reform.
In contrast, Sens. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) and
Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) introduced a stronger
proposal, the Ban Congressional Stock Trad-
ing Act. It improves on the Trust In Congress
Act, previously introduced by Rep. Abigail
Spanberger (D-Va.), who was the first and
most vigorous champion of a stock trading
ban, and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.). These plans
would require members and their spouses to
divest several types of assets or put them in
blind trusts they don’t control, which would
foreclose opportunities for insider trading.
Ossoff’s bill has a strong enforcement
mechanism, applies to spouses and dependent
children, and contains a crucial disclosure
requirement. It would empower each ethics
committee to assess a fine equal to a month’s
salary and to keep assessing successive fines in
that amount for each month the member
remains in noncompliance. A member would
have no right to demand the full chamber vote
on whether to dismiss the fine.
It would close an existing loophole, too:
Under an existing law, members can put
assets, rather than just cash, into blind trusts.
Lawmakers are notified when the trustee sells
an asset, but the public is not, giving members
more insight into their conflicts of interest
than the public has. Ossoff would address that
problem by requiring all sale notices to be
released publicly. The public would finallyknow which members have truly eliminated
their conflicts of interest and which are only
pretending not to know what they own. The
disclosure is important, because it would give
the public a tool in pressuring members to sell
off conflicting assets instead of just concealing
them in blind trusts.
Last week, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-
Mass.) and Steve Daines (R-Mont.) introduced
another bill, the Bipartisan Ban on Congres-
sional Stock Ownership Act, which would bar
members and their spouses not only from
trading but also from owning stock in large
corporations (unless as part of a diversified
mutual fund). This approach would meaning-
fully improve the situation, too. Although it
goes further than the Ban Congressional Stock
Trading Act by prescribing the strong medi-
cine of divestiture for stocks, rather than the
creation of a blind trust, it doesn’t cover as
many types of assets as Ossoff and Kelly’s bill
would. The two bills are therefore comple-
mentary and could be combined to magnify
their effect on government ethics.
Some opponents have objected that it’s
unfair to apply these proposed restrictions to
spouses or children. If this resistance to gov-
ernment ethics weren’t so sinister, it would be
laughable. While working at the Office of
Government Ethics, one of us (Shaub) spent
over a decade forcing presidential nominees
for Senate-confirmed posts to comply with a
conflict of interest law that applied to them,
their spouses and their minor children. In all
those years, no senator picked up the phone
after reading a nominee’s ethics agreement to
complain that making the nominee’s spouseSen. Jon Ossoff (D-
Ga.), outside the
U.S. Capitol on Feb.
9, s peaks to
members of the
media on the
proposal to ban
congressional stock
trading.divest assets was unfair. Not once. Only now
that similar requirements may apply to their
own spouses and children do members of
Congress suddenly care. And if they really see
these restrictions as onerous, they could easily
opt out of them by simply going back to private
life.
In truth, we’d like to see an even stricter ban
— one that applies not only to members of
Congress, their spouses and their minor chil-
dren but also to their senior staffers, the
president and vice president, political appoin-
tees and judges, and which limits the holdings
they can own to diversified mutual funds and
U.S. Treasury bonds (with narrow exceptions
applicable only in unusual circumstances).
But some of the proposals before lawmakers
now are a strong first step in the right direc-
tion. After passing these bills, or an amalgam
of them, Congress could use the momentum to
establish the stricter ban we propose. The
public has entrusted government leaders with
great power; it’s time those leaders realized
that they must put the public above all else.
Ours is not the radical position. The radical
position is asking Americans to continue ac-
cepting the low ethical standard to which
Congress has held itself.
Twitter: @waltshaub
l izhempowiczWalter M. Shaub Jr., is a former director of the
U.S. Office of Government Ethics. He currently
serves as senior ethics fellow with the Project On
Government Oversight. Liz Hempowicz is the
director of public policy at the Project On
Government Oversight.reshaped in the digital age. Graff recognizes
the change, but he also appears to disparage it
and to minimize the importance of today’s
investigative reporting as Watergate’s legacy.
“After a generation of journalists that had
probably trusted government too much,” he
writes near the end of his book, “came a
generation of journalists who seemed to be-
lieve that Watergates existed inside every
government office and corporate headquar-
ters.”
I’ve read a couple dozen books about Water-
gate, and I’ve written chapters about The
Post’s Watergate investigation in two of my
own books. I found “Watergate: A New His-
tory” to be engaging, informative and thought-
provoking, more than earning its place on
bookshelves alongside the old histories.prodigious research and analysis, Graff con-
cludes that “we’ll never really know the full
truth of Watergate” because its “remaining
mysteries are spread among too many people,
many of whom are now dead, their secrets
buried alongside them.” Who ultimately or-
dered the Watergate break-in and why? Just to
bug the offices or phones of the Democratic
National Committee? Or to find something
embarrassing that could be used against the
Democrats during the 1972 election? Or to
discover whether the Democrats had dirt on
the Nixon campaign? Graff finds multiple
theories in the memoirs of the president’s
men.
His book is weakest on the long-term im-
pact of Watergate. Much of the ensuing cam-
paign finance reforms and elections of “Water-
gate baby” reformers to Congress have gradu-
ally washed away over the last half-century.
Perhaps the most lasting impact has been in
the news media, where investigative reporting
that holds power accountable in all walks of
American life emerged from Watergate and
has endured, even as the media is beingand evasions that he found in previous books,
including many of “the more than thirty
memoirs by key participants” in the scandals
and the investigations of them. He credits Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein and their edi-
tors at The Post for their investigative work on
Watergate, but he also dwells on a few mis-
takes they made and discrepancies he believes
he has found in their descriptions of their
work. Graff also rightly credits significant
Watergate scoops by a few of their competi-
tors. And he expresses skepticism about some
of the “cinematic drama” of the “All the Presi-
dent’s Men” movie, which frames much of
people’s knowledge of Watergate today.
Interestingly, in his day-by-day narrative of
the final week of Nixon’s presidency, Graff
notes that “accounts and recollections get
muddy; across the half-dozen central mem-
oirs, including Nixon’s and [White House chief
of staff Alexander] Haig’s, and the books that
record this moment, like Woodward and Bern-
stein’s ‘The Final Days,’ there are conflicting
accounts of who said what in which meeting.”
More important, after presenting all hisASSOCIATED PRESSThe Senate Caucus
Room, site of the
Senate Watergate
Committee
hearings, on May
23, 1973.A
mericans can hardly agree on anything
anymore, but people across the political
spectrum have had it with Capitol Hill’s
stock trading scandals. Last month, a Fox
News poll found that 70 percent of registered
voters were in favor of a ban on current
members of Congress and their immediate
family and staff trading stocks. The public is
fed up.
Our otherwise divided Congress, mean-
while, has long been united by its willingness
to dodge ethics rules and avoid enacting
meaningful ethical restrictions. When Con-
gress created the federal conflict of interest
law, it conveniently exempted its own mem-
bers and staffers. There’s nothing stopping a
member such as Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.
Va.) from voting to block an environmental bill
that would affect his own investment in waste
coal. There’s little stopping other members
from making suspiciously timed stock trades
after they receive confidential government
briefings on market-moving information.
That could change: Congress is poised to
ban stock trading by lawmakers, with biparti-
san support. But the details are everything.
Depending on which of several competing
bills prevails, Congress either will take a first
step toward creating a real ethics program —
or it will give us more window dressing for
legalized corruption.
The last time the public similarly demand-
ed a change, Congress pulled a fast one by
passing the nearly useless Stop Trading on
Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012 (Stock
Act). That law did not bar members from
owning or trading stocks, which would re-
move opportunities for insider trading. All it
did was shorten the deadline for disclosure. So
it’s no surprise this toothless law failed to
prevent suspicious trades. In fact, former
congressman Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) pleaded
guilty to insider trading in 2019. During the
pandemic, the Justice Department investigat-
ed four senators on suspicion of insider trad-
ing related to the coronavirus. Those probes
were closed without action, but the appear-
ance of impropriety left a stain. To make
matters worse, some in Congress have shown
they can’t even be bothered to meet the
disclosure deadline. Insider and other news
outlets identified 57 members of Congress
who failed to fully comply with the disclosure
requirements.
Now, a decade after Congress conned the
public with the Stock Act, there’s a danger that
its members could pass another ineffectual
law to make it look as though they’re address-
ing the public’s concern without having to
change their disgraceful behavior. Several pro-
posals on the table fall short.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has introduced a
bill with a cumbersome enforcement mecha-
nism that seems designed to fail. His bill
would entitle a member to a vote by the full
Senate or House before any fine is collected —
a process bound to end in partisan side-taking.
And even if their colleagues vote to punish
members, the proposal is toothless: While
Hawley’s bill authorizes a fine, it doesn’t
specify how much to collect, so the ethics
committees may lack authority (or, at least, the
nerve) to levy a significant sum. The bill does
require members to forfeit profits or tax
deductions from unauthorized transactions,
but only sales generate profits or deductible
losses, so it wouldn’t prevent suspicious pur-
chases. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) has intro-
duced his own weak ban that doesn’t apply to
Here’s how to ban congressional stock trading so politicians can’t cheat
SARAH SILBIGER/BLOOMBERG NEWSLawmakers
face a choice
between real
reforms and
pretend ones,
say Walter M.
Shaub Jr.
and Liz
Hempowicz