Democratic Party

The Democratic Party is the principal political opposition around which the early Watergate story takes shape: first a party in electoral disarray, then a target of reported espionage and sabotage, and finally a public force demanding accountability. The evidence distinguishes the party from the Democratic National Committee and from individual campaigns, but shows how attacks on candidates and their organizations raised a wider question about the integrity of the political process.

Electoral Position and Internal Divisions

On June 17, 1972, less than a month before the Democratic convention, Richard Nixon stood at least nineteen points ahead of every announced Democratic candidate in the polls. The party’s primary season was nearing its end after what the account calls a brutal contest, and the party was described as being in disarray. George McGovern, a senator from South Dakota, was emerging as the clear favorite for the presidential nomination. White House officials and Democratic Party professionals alike regarded him as Nixon’s weakest opponent. This imbalance helped make a Republican role in the Watergate break-in seem implausible to observers at the time: Nixon appeared electorally strong, while the opposition was still struggling to settle on its nominee.

That early political judgment is important because it captures the gap between the apparent state of the race and the later account of a systematic campaign against Democratic contenders. The break-in was initially reported without a clear explanation of why the suspects would want to bug the Democratic National Committee’s offices, or whether they were working for anyone else. The identity of the targets was known; the political purpose and the chain of responsibility were not.

Public Challenge to the Nixon Campaign

The Democratic Party’s chairman, Lawrence F. O’Brien, rejected the idea that a denial by John Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign manager, could settle questions raised by the break-in. O’Brien said it raised an ugly question about the integrity of the political process, drawing on his quarter-century of political activity. His response placed the incident beyond the narrow question of whether the arrested men had acted with authorization: the public issue, he argued, was whether the campaign’s statement of innocence was enough to resolve the matter.

The next day, O’Brien filed a one-million-dollar civil damage suit against the Committee for the Re-election of the President. He cited Charles Colson’s potential involvement and said that the developing facts pointed toward the White House. He also argued that the attempted bugging had become known only because it had been bungled, raising the possibility of other attempts and asking who had been involved. His suit and public statements turned the party’s objection into both a legal action and a political demand for a broader accounting.

Candidates and Campaigns as Targets

As reporting and investigation widened, the Democratic Party’s electoral contest appeared within a larger pattern of political operations. A Washington Post story based on information in Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice files reported that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of Nixon’s re-election and directed by White House and Committee for the Re-election of the President officials. The reported effort had been aimed at all the major Democratic presidential contenders and, since 1971, had formed a basic strategy of Nixon’s re-election effort.

The reported tactics went beyond listening devices. They included following members of candidates’ families, assembling dossiers on their private lives, forging letters and distributing them under candidates’ letterheads, leaking false or manufactured material to the press, disrupting campaign schedules, taking confidential campaign files, and investigating dozens of campaign workers. Investigators also said that provocateurs had been placed in organizations expected to demonstrate at the Republican and Democratic conventions. The range of alleged activity connected the party’s national contest to the practical vulnerabilities of separate campaigns: their staff, information, schedules, supporters, and public reputations.

The secret fund supplied another part of the reported mechanism. Sources told the Post that funds for the Watergate espionage operation were controlled by principal assistants to John Mitchell and kept in a special account at the Committee for the Re-election of the President. The account contained more than $300,000 earmarked for sensitive political projects, and Gordon Liddy was among those who received money from it. The reporting said records relating to the account had been destroyed and that the fund’s primary purpose was to finance widespread intelligence-gathering operations against Democrats. It also preserved an important limit: the Watergate grand jury had not established that the fund directly financed the illegal eavesdropping. The disclosed financial chain strengthened the case that political intelligence work was organized and funded, without itself proving every connection between the fund and the break-in.

Disputed Accounts and Political Counterattack

The claims were contested. In a response to the Post’s reporting, Clark MacGregor accused the newspaper of giving unproven claims about disruptions of Democratic campaigns the prominence of declarations of war while burying what he called proven disruptions of the President’s campaign. He singled out McGovern headquarters in California, alleging that it had been used as a boiler room to rally anti-war militants against the President. His attack also mocked the Post’s attention to a report that two hundred pizzas had been sent to a Muskie rally. The journalists had considered leaving the pizza incident out because it might seem trivial, but included it among items sent cash on delivery and timed to disrupt a Muskie fund-raising dinner.

The exchange exposed a struggle over how to define political interference as well as over the facts themselves. MacGregor’s response disputed the newspaper’s allocation of attention and recast the question as unequal treatment of campaign disruptions. The Post’s account, by contrast, placed the reported incidents against a broader pattern of spying and sabotage directed at Democratic contenders. The allegations about California and the Muskie dinner therefore appeared not as a settled account of responsibility, but as contested examples within a widening argument about political tactics and the press’s role in investigating them.

McGovern and the Stakes of the Investigation

George McGovern made the investigation an explicit issue of public morality. After the Post reported on the secret fund, he called the investigation a whitewash and said he would pursue the case across the country. His intervention joined the party’s electoral opposition to a demand that the Watergate inquiry reach beyond the immediate arrests and address the conduct of those directing or financing political operations.

The Democratic Party’s role in this account is consequently both institutional and exposed. O’Brien spoke for the national party and pursued a civil suit; McGovern used his position as the emerging nominee to press the case publicly; and Democratic candidates and campaign workers were described as targets of operations that sought information, disruption, and reputational damage. The episode’s central reversal is that a party initially portrayed as electorally weak and divided became the object through which the scale of the opposing campaign was investigated. The growing record did not resolve every allegation at once, but it transformed the question from who had entered the Democratic National Committee offices into whether political espionage against Democratic opponents had been organized as a sustained feature of the Nixon re-election effort.