I just have time for a quick diary before heading to work, but I was surprised that no one has posted on this yet. Yesterday, a court directed the National Archives, thanks to the request from Project Democracy, to release the “Watergate Road Map.” This is exciting for history geeks, but it’s also a powerful document and arguably a road map for today. From Lawfare’s Jack Goldsmith and Benjamin Wittes (2 of the 3 petitioners whose request led to this moment, along with Stephen Bates):
The Jaworski “Road Map,” the last great still-secret Watergate document, became public Wednesday when the National Archives released it under Judge Howell’s ruling from earlier this month. It sees the light of day for the first time in four and a half decades at a remarkable moment, one in which a different special prosecutor is considering the conduct of a different president and reportedly contemplating—as Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski once did—writing a report on the subject.
Goldsmith and Wittes point out three notable features of this document:
The first striking thing about the “Road Map” is that it is not written in the voice of Jaworski at all. Unlike the Starr Report, which was a report by the prosecutors who investigated President Bill Clinton, this report is a court document, a “Report and Recommendation” from the grand jury itself combined with a document entitled “Material in the Grand Jury’s Possession Having a Material Bearing on Matters Within the Primary Jurisdiction of the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary Relating to Questions of Impeachment.” The report is signed not by Jaworski but by “Foreman, June 5, 1972 Grand Jury.”
The document, in other words, is crafted not as a prosecutor’s report on his findings but as an action by the same citizens who handed up an indictment against the Watergate conspirators. It is even, in its very first sentence, crafted as something akin to an extension of that indictment. The grand jury declares at the outset that it has “heard evidence that has led it to return the indictment being submitted herewith. It has also heard evidence that it regards as having a material bearing on matters that are within the primary jurisdiction of the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary in its present investigation to determine whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to exercise its constitutional power to impeach Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States.”
This harnessing of the moral and legal power of the grand jury is not a surprise. It has long been known that the Road Map was a grand jury document. It is nonetheless striking, partly because it is profoundly different from the Starr Report, which was very much the action of Starr and his team. It also appears to be not just a conceit, though the Road Map was certainly written by Jaworski’s staff. The grand jury in the Watergate case was extremely active, and some of its members wanted to proceed criminally against Nixon. Jaworski had to persuade the grand jurors to name the president as an unindicted co-conspirator instead. So the referral of the Road Map grew out of actions in which the grand jurors were active participants.
They also note the document’s “spareness” — a feature long rumored and now substantiated. The grand jury let the documents tell the story and left it to Congress to draw the obvious conclusions that President Nixon had engaged in criminal acts.
A related feature is that it is not a narrative argument: “It simply makes a series of factual claims, each written in a spare and clinical fashion, each supported with citations to material the special prosecutor’s office provided to Congress.”
As Goldsmith and Wittes conclude, the document proves that sometimes “less is more.”
Finally, the Road Map teaches an important lesson about restraint. There is a tendency in the age of Donald Trump to assume that excess is needed to combat excess, that the proper response to gross norm violations involve the scrapping of other norms. Yet faced with Richard Nixon, Leon Jaworski wrote a meticulous 55-page document that contains not a word of excess. He transmitted it to Congress, where it did not leak. It is powerful partly because it is so by-the-book.
It’s a fascinating piece of history, yes. Worth reading their analysis (even if we may disagree on some points), yes. And also worth reading the document itself which they have posted elsewhere on the site. But it strikes me as pretty darned relevant to today as well. Off to work!
[Update: thanks for the rec list folks. I had hoped to have a chance to join the discussion but it’s been a busy day at work I haven’t had a second until now!]