Once upon a time, in 1972, five men were caught burglarizing the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington DC and arrested. No one knew they were paid, or by whom, until a resentful former FBI man surreptitiously tipped off a couple of young guys from The Washington Post who followed a trail of macho mischief that led them to All the President’s Men, and ultimately to the President himself. There were firings, betrayals, official Senate hearings, revelations, prison sentences and, ultimately, a Presidential resignation.
        This fascinating story unfolded from 1972 through 1974, alongside some of the most influential events in women’s contemporary history. During those years, the ERA was passed by Congress, Roe v. Wade made abortion legal, Eisenstadt v. Baird gave single women the right to use contraception, Title IX banned sex discrimination in schools, Ms. Magazine was launched, and the book Our Bodies, Ourselves was first published. Adolescent women of that time, of which I was one, knew that they were coming into adulthood on the cusp of a great shift in what it meant to be female in America.
        It is in that context that I fell in everlasting love with Watergate. It is a great story in U.S. history, full of good guys and bad guys, heroic actions and outrageous vindictiveness. It made great TV and hilarious comedy, influenced American language (the word Watergate itself is a fine example), remade the art of journalism, and forever changed U.S. politics and culture. What I love most about Watergate, though, are the many other Watergate stories: the ones that have been forgotten, the ones that have been deemed irrelevant, unseemly, or unimportant. Not surprisingly, many of these stories involve women.

• The Women of Watergate by Madeleine Edmondson and Alden Duer Cohen
A fascinating primer on the Watergate women. It is fair-minded and insightful with a bit of feminist perspective. I especially love the chapters on two women who have had no biographies published (and should have): Dorothy Hunt and Rose Mary Woods.
        Dorothy Hunt was the only female co-conspirator in the Watergate cover-up, and she paid for it with her life. She and her husband, E. Howard Hunt, had met and married when they were both agents for the CIA. Howard Hunt became a “special consultant” to President Nixon: he was the main engineer, along with G. Gordon Liddy, of the Watergate break-in and cover-up. It became Dorothy’s job to shuttle cash payoffs and deliver promises of clemency, on Nixon’s behalf, to the Watergate defendants in exchange for their silence on the matter of White House involvement. The facts are that Dorothy Hunt was killed in a plane crash while carrying $2 million worth of cash and negotiables. Also on the plane was Michele Clark, a CBS news reporter who was investigating Watergate, and several gas pipeline lobbyists who had a bone to pick with the Nixon administration and were also actively lobbying to tie Nixon to the Watergate case. They were all killed.
        It has been speculated that Dorothy Hunt was fed up and wanted to tell all to the press, implicating her husband (who was an egotistical, cheating SOB anyway), and leave the country. But the story of Dorothy Hunt’s life and death is almost impossible to entirely comprehend. Much is not known. Bits and pieces of her story can be gathered by reading others’ books where, if she is mentioned at all, it is briefly. However, those bits cover a lot of territory: Cuba, Castro, JFK, Johnson, Watergate, oil companies and, oddly, her liberal personal politics. Every detail of the plane crash, from the passenger list to the handling of the bodies of the deceased, is a fascinating and complex story of its own. I wish someone would write that book.
        Rose Mary Woods was Nixon’s longtime personal secretary. He trusted her completely; and Nixon trusted almost no one. It is said that she was privy to more classified information than was anyone else on staff. She and Bob Haldeman, White House Chief of Staff, despised one another. In fact, the day that Haldeman resigned, Rose Mary claimed his office and stayed there until the day Nixon left the White House. Woods is best known for the infamous “18-minute gap” in what became known as the Nixon tapes. During the Senate Watergate hearings, it was revealed that Nixon had a hidden audio taping system in the Oval Office and all conversations had been recorded. It was Rose Mary Woods’ job to transcribe them, and she had erased a portion of the tape that was widely believed to contain the first evidence of Nixon’s knowledge of the Watergate scandal and cover-up. She testified that she did it, but that it was an accident occurring when she leaned across her desk to answer the phone while her foot was on the pedal of the transcriber. The ridiculous position she reenacted for the press became jokingly known as the “Rose Mary Stretch.”
        The Women of Watergate is, sadly, out of print. It was written in 1975, the year after Nixon’s resignation. It holds up remarkably well against today’s perspectives on Watergate and on feminism. It is a fine and undervalued piece of work.

• Martha: The Life of Martha Mitchell by Winzola McLendon
Martha Beall Mitchell was the wife of John Mitchell, who stepped down from his post as Nixon’s attorney general to become the director of CREEP (the Committee to Reelect the President). Martha was intelligent, outspoken and a chronic eavesdropper. She liked her liquor and she loved the limelight. Bob Woodward of The Washington Post later described Martha as “a joyful woman who loved fun and truth-telling, two matters not normally associated with the Nixon presidency.”
        Martha was unhappy in Washington. She hated the obligatory stuffy Republican social life, and she was often hurt by those who were supposed to be her friends. First Lady Pat Nixon despised her, and took every opportunity to publicly snub her. She wanted her husband to quit his job and start a new life outside of politics. The day after the news of the break-in became public, Martha became enraged at what she knew immediately to be the truth about the involvement of CREEP. Not sure exactly how much she knew, her husband left her in a California hotel suite, where she was drugged, beaten and held prisoner by CREEP security for several days to keep her quiet while her husband and the rest of his cronies worked the press to try to distance themselves and the President from any connection to the break-in.
        At her first opportunity, and many times thereafter, Martha called Helen Thomas, the White House bureau chief for UPI. Martha did not hesitate to call reporters when she had a beef, and Helen Thomas knew better than to dismiss Martha out-of-hand. The Nixon administration was mostly successful at characterizing Martha as a delusional alcoholic, and managed to keep the press and public dismissive of her statements regarding White House involvement in Watergate and her treatment at the hands of CREEP security. Helen Thomas believed Martha Mitchell and reported on the corruption that Martha claimed ruled the White House. The newspapers, however, printed those stories only in what were then called the “Women’s Pages” as light entertainment; they were not taken seriously.
        Martha was popular material for comedians, and she made the most of it. She made a cameo appearance on Rowan and Martin’s “Laugh In,” which she enjoyed, but was dismayed and hurt that Lily Tomlin refused to speak with her or even acknowledge her presence on the set. Poor Martha was shunned from all sides. By 1976, Martha Mitchell was divorced, estranged from her daughter, and flat broke. She died in December of that year from cancer. At her graveside service, an enormous green and white spray of chrysanthemums spelled out “MARTHA WAS RIGHT” in block letters. No one knows who sent it. In her New York Magazine obituary, Mark Goodman wrote, “With a telephone receiver in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other, she first sounded the alarm ... we did not listen to Martha Mitchell, and we paid for it.”

• “Mo": A Woman’s View of Watergate by Maureen Dean with Hays Gorey
Now this is a Watergate wife of a different sort. Maureen Dean is mostly remembered as the attractive, fashionable, stoic wife with a Grace Kelly hairdo who sat for days behind her husband, White House Counsel John Dean, as he testified at the Senate Watergate hearings. (He testified against the Nixon administration, revealing the existence of the Watergate tapes and implicating himself and others in the cover-up.) “Mo,” as she preferred to be called, was 25 and newly married to Dean when Watergate hit the fan. She had been married and divorced twice before, had had (in her words) “a taste of college,” and became an “American Airlines stewardess.”
        The book is mercifully short, only 200 pages. She attempted to paint a picture of herself as a lovely woman, in a tasteful home, with a loving husband and a fabulous wardrobe. Mostly, she succeeded; it’s a snooze. I like the book, however, for its portrait of a certain kind of woman of the time, and the shallow tidbits that give the Watergate story ironic depth and color. She described in detail what she wore the first time she met Richard Nixon, right down to “Mother’s $20 gold piece on a chain.” She speculated that Rose Mary Woods was in love with Nixon because she never married, and she also informed us that Rose Mary was the only person who would have more than two cocktails while in Nixon’s presence. She revealed that she believed Pat Nixon was “… the only human in the entire [Nixon] family.” It’s definitely a book for the collection.

• Front Row at the White House: My Life and Times by Helen Thomas
Helen Thomas served as a UPI correspondent for 57 years and covered the White House as a bureau chief. She covered Watergate extensively, and her connection with Martha Mitchell gave her the real story before even she knew she had it. There is much Watergate to enjoy in Helen Thomas’ biography, but the book is really about the brilliant career of a smart, feisty woman and should not be missed.

• Personal History by Katharine Graham
Katharine Graham was at the helm of The Washington Post for more than twenty years, and she lead the paper’s charge into the Watergate investigation, encouraging editor Bill Bradlee and rookie reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to follow the mysterious trail and report what they found, keeping the investigation alive to the end. (Of course, Woodward and Bernstein are the authors of All the President’s Men, the definitive Watergate book.) Carl Bernstein once called John Mitchell in the middle of the night to get his reaction to a story that was being published in the Post claiming that Mitchell had controlled secret Watergate funds. Mitchell responded spontaneously, “Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published!” And people wondered why Martha Mitchell drank.

These are just some of the Watergate women. I did hope one day to add a particular other to my list, but it was not to be. I admit to being a little disappointed on the day in 2005 that the identity of the Watergate informant to The Washington Post was revealed. For more than 30 years, I had imagined that “Deep Throat” would turn out to be female. But he turned out to be Mark Felt, an old FBI man with a chip on his shoulder. However, I am fairly confident that his wife, Audrey Robinson Felt, put him up to it.