James D. Robenalt is the author of January 1973, Watergate, Roe v. Wade, Vietnam, and the Month That Changed America Forever. He is also a contributing author of The Presidents and the Constitution, A Living History. He lectures nationally with John Dean on Watergate and legal ethics. www.watergatecle.com

In the Oval Office, the names have changed and nearly half a century may have passed, but some tactics perhaps remain the same. What might history tell us about President Donald Trump’s stubborn charge that his predecessor wiretapped him?

Of course, the first thought is of Richard Nixon. As FBI Director James Comey faces questions about what the FBI knows of Trump’s charge that former President Barack Obama ordered the wiretapping of Trump Tower—an allegation no credible figure has corroborated—it does feel like déjà vu all over again.


Let us recognize at the outset that Nixon and Trump are in some ways fantastically different men. Nixon, unlike Trump, understood the government before he was elected president and was one of the country’s foremost experts in foreign policy. Nixon was from an underprivileged background and knew nothing of the luxury that has accompanied Trump his entire life. In his famous “Checkers speech,” Nixon melodramatically said this about his wife, Pat: “Pat doesn’t own a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat. And I always tell her that she’d look good in anything.”

But Nixon and Trump share a common personality characteristic: a hatred of losing. Nixon bitterly quipped at a press conference after losing the California governor’s race in 1962: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”

This dominant emotion—fear and loathing of losing—has been studied by social scientists like Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman. He found in a study that won the Nobel Prize in 2002 that people facing losses act irrationally because all humans hate to lose much more than they like to win—by a factor of almost three times. It is a deep, ingrained aversion. Imagine what the factor is for people like Nixon and Trump.

So when people are faced with a sure loss, they are predisposed to do irrational things like cover up mistakes or crimes rather than admit to wrongdoing. And the stronger the feeling about the loss, the more irrational the behavior. Think of Bill Clinton in his affair with Monica Lewinski: He could have taken the sure loss and admitted to the relationship or act irrationally and lie under oath when the odds were long that he could keep a lid on things. He chose to argue in a deposition about the meaning of the verb “is,” much like Trump’s press secretary argues about the meaning of “wiretapping.”

With Nixon, we saw loss aversion play out in spades during the Watergate scandal. One manifestation of this behavior took place the week of January 8, 1973. The actions of that week seem to have remarkable resonance to current events.

To put the week in context, recall that the Watergate break-in occurred during the campaign, in June 1972, yet Nixon won in a landslide in November. No one seemed to care about Watergate, save some in the media like Woodward and Bernstein.

But January 1973 brought two new threats that the White House coverup of the burglary might be exposed. The Senate was on the verge of voting for an investigation into the abuses of the 1972 campaign. Worse, the Watergate burglars started their trial that week before Judge John Sirica.

One of the burglars, Howard Hunt, wanted to plead guilty to avoid a trial (his wife had died mysteriously in a plane crash in December) and Nixon, through adviser Chuck Colson, passed word to Hunt that he could expect a presidential pardon if he went to jail. Judge Sirica smelled something rotten and the judge leaned on Hunt to plead guilty to all charges against him and face up to 40 years in prison.

With the threat of the trial seemingly under control, Nixon was looking for a way to close down any congressional investigation so he could get on with his aggressive plan to reorganize the executive branch.

He met with his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, and his principal domestic adviser, John Ehrlichman, around noon on Monday, January 8, 1973, in the Oval Office—and a Sony tape recording machine in the Secret Service locker room in the basement picked up the entire exchange.

Partway into a rambling conversation, Haldeman asked Nixon if he wanted an update on Watergate. Nixon did. Haldeman told the president that Hunt was going to plead guilty but that he would say “no higher-ups” were involved if asked at sentencing. The other defendants, Haldeman reported, would go to trial but would “sit mute—they don’t have to testify.”

But there was risk. If they were convicted, Judge Sirica was threatening to send the defendants back before the grand jury, give them immunity and insist on their testimony. But even here, Haldeman assured Nixon, the men would take contempt rather than testify—“at least that’s their present position.”

So how to divert attention from these twin threats?

“The one thing [White House Counsel John] Dean raises in this congressional thing,” Haldeman offered, “is whether we have, in any way, any hard evidence that the plane was bugged.” This referred to Nixon’s often stated belief that LBJ had wiretapped his campaign plane in 1968. Nixon said he was told so by J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, right after he won in 1968, as was his campaign manager, John Mitchell.

Now, the president’s men wanted to know if real proof existed that the plane was bugged, so they could strategically use the information to knock down the investigation into 1972 campaign improprieties. It would force Congress, they reasoned, to decide whether to open the can of worms by investigating “hanky-panky in both ‘68 and ’72, rather than an investigation into just ‘72.”

“Johnson admitted it, as I understand,” Nixon said. “Well, sort of,” Haldeman replied. Hoover was dead, but one of his top subordinates, Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, was alive, and he might provide “hard evidence.”

“Jesus,” Nixon says, “it’s a helluva thing, it’s a helluva reflection on Johnson—it’s a messy business.” But smearing his predecessor didn’t seem to particularly trouble Nixon. “Incidentally,” he quickly added, “you don’t really have to have hard evidence, Bob; you’re not going to take this to court. All you have to do is put it out and the press will write the goddamn story.”

Ehrlichman suggested it would be better to have hard evidence to take to someone like Senator Hubert Humphrey to persuade him to kill the Watergate investigation, saying, as Ehrlichman played it out: “Senator, there are very good reasons why this whole inquiry is not a good idea, and here’s a statement I’ll show you from a fellow who was in the bureau at the time, and I think you will see the implications.”

Nixon was convinced the idea was a good one and asked that John Mitchell, his former attorney general, contact DeLoach, as they had a friendly relationship, to see what the former senior FBI official could provide. “DeLoach has got to come clean on this one,” Nixon said. He directed that someone “put the arm” on DeLoach.

Nixon then speculated as to why Johnson would have bugged his plane. One reason, he submitted, was Vietnam—Nixon knew that Johnson suspected him of interfering with the peace negotiations in Paris in October 1968 through back channels (a new book by John Farrell, Richard Nixon, The Life, provides corroborating proof from recently unearthed Haldeman notes that Nixon did in fact direct his campaign to “monkey wrench” the talks). This was a very dark charge that Nixon knew could destroy his presidency. “On the other hand,” Nixon guessed, “he may have just been doing this as a matter of trying to affect the election—let’s face it—see what we were going to say.”

Ehrlichman ventured that “it isn’t commonly understood about running the country, that this [wiretapping] is done and has been done in former years.”

Nixon concluded, “Well, let me just say that we have to use the material on the Johnson thing, and if Mitchell doesn’t have the hard evidence, we just put it out, float it out there.”

Ehrlichman left the Oval Office to call John Mitchell at 1:28 p.m.

A few days later, on Thursday, January 11, Haldeman reported on Mitchell’s talk with DeLoach. “DeLoach says it’s true,” Haldeman said, “and that he has hard evidence, or some specifics that will lock the thing up.” Nixon asked if DeLoach would go on the record. Haldeman was unsure. Nixon didn’t like that. “Bob, I want it from DeLoach,” he said. “We know he knows, he was in charge of that, you know. Probably still is in the bureau—[he’s] a bugger.”

Nixon wanted to turn up the heat on DeLoach. He proposed instructing L. Patrick Gray, Hoover’s acting successor at the FBI, to administer a lie detector test to DeLoach. “I’d like to do it so it is nailed down in terms of evidence,” he said to Haldeman, “rather than that DeLoach told Mitchell, or that Hoover, now dead, told Mitchell, because Johnson will lie about this if necessary.”

Another idea emerged: What if they quietly approached LBJ himself so that he would feel constrained to put pressure on Democrats to stand down in the Watergate investigation? “Why doesn’t someone go down [to Texas] and tell Johnson?” Nixon asked.

In typical Nixon/Haldeman form, they kept churning the idea. Maybe they could ask a friendly newspaper to write about the story and then approach Johnson. “That’ll stir Johnson up,” Haldeman said, “and that gives us a little way to get back to Johnson on that basis that, you know, we’ve got to get this [Watergate investigation] turned off, because it is going to bounce back to the other story [the plane bugging], and we can’t hold them.”

By the end of the week, though, Nixon was getting cold feet. He worried about a counteroffensive from Johnson. “Could he come after me?” he asked. Haldeman wrote in his diary that DeLoach called Mitchell to tell him that LBJ had gotten word that the charge he wiretapped Nixon was circulating and he grew quite angry. “LBJ got very hot,” Haldeman wrote and he suggested that the former president threatened to release information about Nixon that to this day is still redacted for national security reasons.

This was enough. Nixon decided to abandon the idea of using the story to divert attention—he was smart enough to realize that bringing up the potential bugging by LBJ might boomerang, bringing the spotlight back on his activities in 1968.

For his part, DeLoach publicly asserted that while a request was made to wiretap Nixon’s plane, it had never been carried out. From Johnson’s tapes of phone calls in November 1968, released years later, it seems clear that the surveillance, if any, was of Spiro Agnew’s campaign plane. After the election, the Johnson administration did obtain records from the Albuquerque phone company when Agnew’s plane stopped there on November 2, 1968. They knew who Agnew called but did not have recordings of the phone conversations.

So now we turn to Trump, and his claim that Obama was bugging his phones. So far, the heads of the House and Senate intelligence committees have said it didn’t happen, and Comey has reportedly denied it privately. Yet Trump has stubbornly doubled down, recently adding a new dubious claim—that Obama used the Brits to do the snooping—rather than simply apologizing for his error.

It’s enough to make this history buff wonder: Was Trump’s March 4 tweetstorm simply the impetuous act of man who reacted to the latest news he read, fake or not, or was Trump acting like Nixon in a deliberate way to distract attention from the growing concern about ties between his campaign and the election-tampering Russians?

Maybe there is no fire behind this smoke, but Professor Kahneman would tell us that people, especially those who really hate losing, tend to act in predictable ways when faced with scandal. Is that what’s happening here?