the most defeatable candidate, George McGovern, would win his
party’s nomination. A Republican victory seemed assured.- The break-in plan itself was a highly risky operation requiring the
participation and discretion of ten men. - The Democratic National Committee and its chairman, Lawrence
O’Brien, whose Watergate office was to be burglarized and bugged,
had no information damaging enough to defeat the incumbent Pres-
ident. Nor were they likely to get any, unless the administration did
something very, very foolish.
Despite the obvious counsel of the above reasons, the expensive,
chancy, pointless, and potentially calamitous proposal of a man whose
judgment was known to be questionable was approved. How could it
be that intelligent men of the attainment of Mitchell and Magruder
would do something so very, very foolish? Perhaps the answer lies in a
little-discussed fact: The $250,000 plan they approved was not Liddy’s
first proposal. In fact, it represented a significant concession on his part
from two earlier proposals, of immense proportions. The first of these
plans, made two months earlier in a meeting with Mitchell, Magruder,
and John Dean, described a $I million program that included (in addition
to the bugging of the Watergate) a specially equipped communications
“chase plane,” break-ins, kidnapping and mugging squads, and a yacht
featuring “high-class call girls” to blackmail Democratic politicians. A
second Liddy plan, presented a week later to the same group of Mitchell,
Magruder, and Dean, eliminated some of the program and reduced the
cost to $500,000. It was only after these initial proposals had been rejec-
ted by Mitchell that Liddy submitted his “bare-bones” $250,000 plan,
in this instance to Mitchell, Magruder, and Frederick LaRue. This time
the plan, still stupid but less so than the previous ones, was approved.
Could it be that I, a longtime patsy, and John Mitchell, a hardened
and canny politician, might both have been so easily maneuvered into
bad deals by the same compliance tactic—I by a Boy Scout selling candy,
and he by a man selling political disaster?
If we examine the testimony of Jeb Magruder, considered by most
Watergate investigators to provide the most faithful account of the
crucial meeting at which Liddy’s plan was finally accepted, there are
some instructive clues. First, Magruder reports that “no one was partic-
ularly overwhelmed with the project”; but “after starting at the grandi-
ose sum of $1 million, we thought that probably $250,000 would be an
acceptable figure.... We were reluctant to send him away with nothing.”
Mitchell, caught up in the “feeling that we should leave Liddy a little
something...signed off on it in the sense of saying, ‘Okay, let’s give him
a quarter of a million dollars and let’s see what he can come up with.’”
Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 33