Soon, Democrats were encountering solid stonewalls when they tried to crack the Watergate mystery through discovery in the wiretap case. "Our guys couldn't get anybody's deposition; everybody was stalling," Oliver said. "It was clear to me that what's going on was that the Justice Department was fixed, the FBI was fixed, and the only way we were going to get to the bottom of this was to have an independent investigation."
In October 1972, Oliver wrote a memo to Senator Sam Ervin, a moderate Democrat from North Carolina, recommending an independent congressional investigation as the only way to get to the bottom of Watergate, a task Ervin couldn't undertake until the next year.
In the meantime, Nixon's Watergate cover-up held. The White House successfully tagged the incident as a "third-rate burglary" that didn't implicate the President or his top aides. On Election Day, Nixon rolled to a record victory over his preferred Democratic opponent, George McGovern, who only won one state, Massachusetts.
Covering Up Watergate
The McGovern debacle had immediate repercussions inside the Democratic National Committee, where the party regulars moved to purge McGovern's people in early December.
"Labor, conservatives, party establishment and others wanted to get rid of the McGovernites and they wanted Jean Westwood to resign," Oliver said. "We had a bruising battle for the chairmanship. It ended up being between George Mitchell [of Maine] and Bob Strauss."
The Strauss candidacy was strange to some Democrats, given his close ties to John Connally, who had led Nixon's drive to get Democrats to cross party lines and vote Republican. Two Texas labor leaders, Roy Evans and Roy Bullock, urged the DNC to reject Strauss because "his most consistent use of his talents has been to advance the political fortune and career of his life-long friend, John B. Connally."[14]
