Senator Sam Ervin's Watergate committee has promised to expose all the secrets of the scandal, but while the various accusations and defenses reverberated through the top levels of Washington last week, the Ervin committee lumbered along in pursuit of lesser men.
In the long, slow process of building their case, the committee members were paternally patient, indulgent even, as they questioned, one after another, the fixers and followers and bearers of messages. As the witnesses testified, they soon revealed that they had been drawn into the affair without quite realizing what they were doing, that they were more adept at taking orders than understanding them. John J. Caulfield, an ex-cop who had carried an offer of Executive clemency to convicted Watergate Raider James W. McCord Jr., described how he had been "injected into this scandal," how he had been forced to choose between obeying the law and obeying the White House, and Sam Ervin remarked: "The greatest conflicts in this world are when we try to choose between two loyalties."
McCord, the star witness to date, finally explained his motives for becoming involved. As an old CIA hand, he said, "I had been working in an environment where, if there was ever any question of the legality of a matter or an activity, it would always be sent to high legal officials for a decision on the matter, where, if they sanctioned it, that was sufficient." He added that "left alone, I would not have undertaken the operation."
But his fellow conspirator, G. Gordon Liddy, sought his help, saying that Attorney General John N. Mitchell and Presidential Counsel John W. Dean III had approved the Watergate breakin.
The objective, as McCord understood it, was to anticipate the plans of any groups planning violence during the presidential campaign. "Uppermost in everyone's mind at that point in time, and certainly in mine," said McCord, "was the bloodshed which had occurred at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago."
McCord ticked off other acts of violence that had filled him—and his superiors in the White House—with foreboding: a bomb blast at the U.S. Capitol Building in 1969; the destruction of the offices of Senator John Tower in Austin, Texas, in 1972; the alleged threats by the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War to bomb the G.O.P. Convention; the continued threats against the lives of John and Martha Mitchell. Though he was "completely convinced" that Senator George McGovern and Democratic Party Chairman Lawrence O'Brien had no knowledge of the conspirators, McCord believed that Democratic offices in Washington and California were being used by plotters.
Thus he agreed to participate in raids on both places, though the burglary of McGovern headquarters was never carried out.