‘Watergate: Secrets and Betrayals’ is an unconvincing piece of Nixon revisionism

Tricky Dick’s onetime lawyer — and Peterman from Seinfeld — try and fail to clear the 37th president’s name

The Watergate scandal has quite a cinematic legacy. There’s All the President’s Men, The Post, Dick, Frost/Nixon, Oliver Stone’s Nixon, and a seemingly endless series of documentaries. 

Now, just in time for the 50th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation in August of 1974, comes a new one: Watergate: Secrets and Betrayals, a new documentary that argues that Nixon got a bum rap all those years ago. 

Directed by George Bugatti, the documentary is based on the work of Geoff Shepard, a one-time Nixon White House aide who later served as deputy to Nixon’s White House counsel during the Watergate scandal. The other big face of the doc is John O’Hurley, the guy who played J. Peterman on Seinfeld. 

I’ve been a Watergate buff since a pretty young age. While the political conclusions of this project were unlikely to match mine, a right-wing revisionist take on Watergate, arguing that Richard Nixon did nothing wrong and narrated by J. Peterman, did have a certain surrealistic appeal. 

Unfortunately, the film isn’t especially convincing. It’s boring, flows poorly, and is way too reliant on melodramatic “reenactments.” And beyond that, it leaves the majority of the traditional narrative of the Watergate scandal untouched. 

John O’Hurley only appears briefly at the beginning and end. But it’s appropriate that a Seinfeld perennial is in the film because it yadda-yaddas quite a lot. 

After starting with some fluff in which tourists in Washington are asked what they know about Watergate, the film goes into its new revelations, most of which come from some documents that came to light back in 2018 due to FOIA requests from Shepard himself. 

The big revelation is the meetings in 1974 between special prosecutor Leon Jaworski and Judge John J. Sirica, which the documentary treats as a major scandal. This was reported on back in 2018, when the Washington Post described it as revealing “one of the last great secrets of the Watergate investigation” and treated it not as a crime, but as a possible roadmap of how Robert Mueller might treat the question of whether to share information about his investigation to Congress. 

A Fox News report from 2018 wrote about the release of that “Road Map” document, mostly because of its implications for the then-current Mueller investigation. 

As presented in the film, it seems shady, especially when recreated with “re-enactments,” featuring actors giving such meetings the most nefarious sheen and interpretation imaginable. 

But beyond that, the documentary doesn’t even address most of the major pillars of Watergate. It does not quarrel with the facts of the Watergate break-in, the existence of the Plumbers and their numerous crimes, and all of the hundreds of damning things Nixon said on tape. 

“There really was a break-in, and there really was a cover-up,” Sheppard says at one point. 

It makes a half-assed defense of the “smoking gun” tape — the one that caused all of Nixon’s Republican allies to immediately abandon him and led to his resignation — while taking the tack that Nixon apologia has taken for as long as I can remember: Placing everything at John Dean’s feet. I remember the antisemitic scum Pat Buchanan going on TV and doing just that in the early ‘90s. 

Among those interviewed is Dwight Chapin, one of the last living Watergate conspirators; there’s also a lot of (former) Fox News fixture Andrew Napolitano.

John Dean was a guy who did some bad things and then flipped on his co-conspirators, and I, too, find his current gig of constantly going on TV to say whatever today’s Republicans are doing is worse than Nixon a bit tiresome. But come on- Watergate wasn’t all him. 

I was expecting the film to call all of Watergate a deep state coup, which seems to be the going argument from the right these days, but the film doesn’t assert that the CIA orchestrated everything, or full the thread of Mark Felt. One talking head notes that much of Woodward and Bernstein’s sourcing came from the FBI, but we’ve known that ever since “All the President’s Men” was published. 

The documentary arrived earlier this month and doesn’t seem to have made much of a splash, even in the conservative media. John O’Hurley has given a few interviews, while Fox News wrote a story about the film in June. Shepard sat for an interview a couple of weeks ago with Tucker Carlson, but Tucker’s reach isn’t what it used to be. I’m fairly sure I’m the first critic to review the film.

There are a few good reasons for that. For one thing, I’m still not sure if the title is “Watergate: Secrets and Betrayals” or “Watergate’s Secrets and Betrayals.” The poster says one thing, while IMDB says another. For another, the film isn’t even available on standard VOD channels; the only way to rent or buy it is through the film’s website. 

The biggest reason, though, is that the conservative establishment is certainly heavily invested in defending a past Republican president who has been accused of voluminous crimes. But that president is Donald Trump, not Richard Nixon. Wanting to defend the honor of Richard Nixon at this late date is a bizarre, niche cause consisting almost entirely of people who are either 70 or older, who worked for Nixon personally, or both.

When you rent the film, you’re asked to sign a petition to “urge the Department of Justice to reopen the Watergate prosecution case and set the record straight after fifty years.” I don't think a future Trump Administration would be interested in moving past relitigating Trump’s crimes and instead reaching back to Nixon’s. Roger Stone, after all, doesn’t have that much influence.