Among the specials marking the 40th anniversary of the resignation of Richard Nixon, you might have heard that it took a long while for Watergate as a crime to make any traction. As difficult as it was for the Washington Post’s investigations to be picked up by other newspapers, it was even less likely to be mentioned in the popular culture.
The exception seemed to be late night’s erudite talk fest “The Dick Cavett Show,” where, we see in a new special, it was a topic almost immediately after it happened. And as “Dick Cavett’s Watergate” (PBS, 9 p.m., check local listings) shows, it was followed by a steady dedication to interviewing many of its principals from Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who broke the story, to John Dean, who broke open the Congressional hearing. Plus a number of others, some of whom you may not remember no matter what kind of Watergate buff you are.
Cavett so owned the event that he somehow managed to tape one show inside the Congressional hearing room where the riveting testimony was going on — something unthinkable now. He was also mentioned unflatteringly by Nixon dozens of times in the White House, according to recently released tape transcripts.
Last month, I asked Cavett whether he was the only late night host so interested in the scandal.
“Apparently I was,” he said. “It seems almost obvious now to me that I did a lot more than I even was aware of.
“At the time, when I first heard the idea of doing a special on it, I thought: Do we have enough? Do we have enough for another hour and a half? So it’s just that made it really tough and took great skill on the part of people putting it together, because there was just so much juicy stuff to choose from.”
It’s not because he was so insistent on covering it, he said. “Maybe when the opportunity came along, to my total disbelief, to do it in the hearing room, which I had been watching so vehemently, I thought they’re kidding now. They won’t let me. They did. Some protested it. What’s a cheesy little television show doing in this August chamber with so important an event and so on. That kind of tickled me.
“But I never thought let’s drop everything and do Watergate. I once famously said to a guest, Jerry Rubin … ‘Politics bores my ass off.’ And that pretty much still true. But not Watergate.”
John Scheinfeld, producer of the special, which airs 40 years to the hour that Nixon gave his announcement, said, “Dick’s being a little modest, though. What I will say in his defense here is that he did spend more air time on it than any other late night show. We were joking in the editing room one night that the night that Dick’s Watergate Committee room show aired, where he did the whole show from the committee room, Johnny had on the latest big breasted singer and Merv had somebody else.
“What Dick did and what you see in all the clips in his show,” Scheinfeld said, “is he had conversations, and this is why people enjoyed coming on his show. You could talk about these things. It wasn’t just to flog your book or your album or whatever. You could talk about things.
“And Dick had said to me at one time that after a couple of these shows where people would come on and talk about Watergate, suddenly everybody wanted to come on and talk. I want to talk about that. Let me come on and do that. So we really had an embarrassment of riches here trying to put together the show.”
It seemed odd that Watergate didn’t make its way into the monologues, according to the special. “We had the best of the monologue jokes. Dick sort of separated out his monologue from the rest of the show.”
He did have a couple of Nixon jokes in pocket, though.
“Once on a stage with his wife behind him, he said, ‘This country cannot stand pat,'” Cavett said of Nixon. “And the poor woman is sitting right there.”