“The divine right of kings did not extend to overturning the laws of nature and common sense”

“The divine right of kings did not extend to overturning the laws of nature and common sense” is a sentence Bob Woodward remembered from a freshman history lesson and later applied while listening to the prosecution’s account of the Watergate operation. Its force lies in a blunt limit: authority, or the appearance of an airtight case, cannot make an implausible explanation reasonable.

The Lesson at Yale

As a Yale freshman, Woodward read conflicting medieval accounts of Henry IV’s 1077 visit to Canossa to seek Pope Gregory’s forgiveness. The accounts agreed that the king had waited barefoot in the snow for days. Woodward based his paper on that consensus, but his instructor failed it for ignoring common sense: no person could remain barefoot in snow for days without his feet freezing. The instructor’s maxim, “The divine right of kings did not extend to overturning the laws of nature and common sense,” gave Woodward a standard for assessing evidence beyond counting how many accounts supported it.

Applying the Maxim to Watergate

At the first day of the Watergate trial, Woodward listened as chief prosecutor Earl Silbert presented a two-hour opening statement. Silbert said he could account for only $50,000 of the $235,000 in presidential campaign funds handed to G. Gordon Liddy in $100 bills. Relying primarily on statements by Jeb Magruder and Herbert L. Porter, Silbert described the money as intended for legitimate intelligence gathering and portrayed Liddy as having independently planned and carried out the illegal operation—a version Woodward recognized as the CRP cover story reporters had heard months earlier.

Woodward saw a mismatch between that explanation and the amount of money involved. CRP would not, he reasoned, have paid $235,000 for inconsequential intelligence readily available from the FBI and local police; its managers would have wanted to know the precise purposes and results of the expenditures. Silbert’s evidence and witnesses might make the case appear airtight, but, to Woodward, the account still failed the test of common sense. His remembered maxim thus connected the medieval example to his scrutiny of the trial: agreement among accounts could not substitute for an explanation that made practical sense.