Donald Segretti was not long back from Vietnam, after being drafted, when he got a call from an old friend from the University of Southern California asking if he wanted to work for the President of the United States.
It sounded like a great opportunity but, unfortunately, it led to him becoming a member of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CREEP) and his name ending up synonymous with Watergate.
Half a century on, aged 84, Segretti is as engaging as he was when 60 Minutes called him ‘the most unlikely of political saboteurs.’
Since then, he has remained studiously out of the spotlight, and is one of the few remaining players from the infamous scandal.
He has rebuilt his life, successfully, still practices as a bankruptcy lawyer in California, and is happy that he has led a productive life after being caught up in the maelstrom that was Watergate.
In a rare interview with the Daily Mail, Segretti described how he was ‘thrown to the wolves’ amid the drama that engulfed the Nixon administration.
Donald Segretti is surrounded by newsmen outside the U.S. District court in Washington, October 2, 1973, after pleading guilty to three charges of violating federal election laws during the 1972 Democratic presidential primary
On October 10, 1972 he was first named as an ‘undercover Nixon operative’ paid by the White House and CREEP to carry out dirty tricks against Democratic presidential candidates.
The youthful 5ft 4ins lawyer then found himself at the center of a media feeding frenzy, was tracked to his apartment in Marina Del Rey, Los Angeles by the Washington Post, testified to the Senate Watergate hearings, and served four months in prison.
The whirlwind began after he spent a year as a commissioned officer in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, conducting court martials in Vietnam.
He had previously been at USC where his acquaintances included members of the Trojans for Representative Government, who carried out college election dirty tricks, and went on to become Nixon White House staffers, where they were known as the ‘USC mafia.’ Segretti also had a brief spell at Cambridge University in the UK.
‘I ended up with that crowd in Washington DC. That was a nightmare. Those were not good years.’ he told the Daily Mail. ‘I was very young, comparatively, I was lured into working for the group in the White House. I was told something that turned out to be very different, and I got really maimed and beat up by much of the media at that time.
‘I mean, I didn’t call them up; they called me up. I was, you know, I ended up in the middle of something that I had no idea, or the background, or what the hell who these people were.
Richard Nixon announces his resignation from the White House on August 9, 1974
The scandal erupted after a burglary of the DNC headquarters at the Watergate building, in which Segretti had no involvement
‘I figured out what I was in the middle of, and I broke with them. The administration at that time really wasn’t happy with me and sort of just cut me off, so I was on my own. So I was sort of thrown to the wolves.’
‘Over time, through frankly grit, hard work, persistence, I got through it, and it came out fine. Over the years, I built a nice life for myself, a successful law practice. I’m still practicing a little bit, but it was an awful time for me.’
Segretti had nothing to do with the infamous burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate hotel in Washington DC.
Instead, he targeted Democratic presidential candidates in the 1972 primaries using agents who knew him as ‘Don Simmons.’
The dirty tricks were aimed particularly at derailing Democratic frontrunner Ed Muskie, who was leading Nixon in polls as the President sought reelection.
In the most famous incident, using stolen Muskie campaign stationery, letters were sent to voters saying that fellow Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey had previously been arrested for drunk driving and that another Muskie rival, Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson, had fathered a child with a 17-year-old girl.
The stories were false and designed to appear like a dirty tricks campaign by Muskie, therefore damaging his standing.
Other Segretti tactics were less serious, including booking unwanted guests and entertainers for Muskie events. He stood across the road and watched them turn up.
In a famous scene from the Hollywood movie ‘All the President’s Men,’ in which Segretti is played by Robert Walden, the Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein, played by Dustin Hoffman, turns up at his door in Marina Del Rey.
The Segretti character calls his dirty tricks ‘Nickel-and-dime stuff. Stuff with a little “wit” attached to it.’
He also introduces the term ‘ratf**king,’ which had been coined at USC to refer to political pranks.
Segretti told the Daily Mail he never watched the movie in full because his memories of that time were too painful.
‘The whole thing was so painful,’ he said. ‘I really never sat down and watched it.’
Donald Segretti later successfully rebuilt his life as a lawyer in California
Segretti in the 1970s amid the Watergate storm
‘That’s really what it was (pranks,)’ he added. ‘I knew nothing about Watergate, but they (the media) mixed that up. I had no knowledge of 99 percent of what the hell they (the Watergate conspirators) were doing.’
The media ‘just ran over me,’ he said. ‘I was nobody they really knew. It was awful.’
His opinion of the Washington Post journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, is that they were ‘opportunists, to put it nicely.’
When it came to the televised Senate Watergate Committee hearings in 1973. Segretti was honest about the acts of political sabotage he had carried out.
‘I was trying to survive, get through it, and I did,’ he said. ‘But it was not necessarily easy or pleasant because I’m generally a relatively shy person.
‘All of a sudden, I got in the middle of something that was way beyond my control. The dynamics of it were immense, and I was in the middle of it.
‘It was a show, a political show. I looked across the table and the senators were all in makeup, TV makeup. The questions were all framed in a certain way. It was a show. I was one of the puppets.’
The star witness of the hearings was Nixon’s White House Counsel John Dean.
‘He was for John Dean,’ said Segretti. ‘I’m sorry, my viewpoint may be different than a lot of people.’
In 1974, Segretti pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor counts of distributing illegal campaign literature, relating to the Muskie dirty tricks.
He served four months in prison, the second half of it in an unusual setting.
‘I walked in, and I was in like a witness protection program, and there were maybe 12 other people there, and they looked at me and they greeted me in Italian, because most of them were mafia, mafia from the east coast,’ he said. ‘Everybody was pleasant to me. They couldn’t figure out why I was there.’
His California law license was suspended for two years, with authorities taking into account his remorse and cooperation with Watergate investigators.
Donald Segretti in 1973 after appearing before the Watergate grand jury
A newspaper announces the resignation of President Richard Nixon
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the investigative journalists for the Washington Post who uncovered the Watergate scandal
Two decades later, in 1995, Segretti ran for a Superior Court judgeship in Orange County, California – but the specter of Watergate still loomed large.
‘At one point, I was told you’d make a wonderful judge, and I ran as a judge, but the press got all over it,’ Segretti said. ‘I said it’s not going to work, it’s just not, there’s no dignity to to doing this, inappropriate for that office, it’s not going to make sense.
‘They drug up a lot of nasty stuff, and a lot of it untrue.
‘But that’s the way they focused it and, you know, once they write something in a newspaper, whether it’s right or wrong, it’s in print, and if you’re an individual without something behind you, it becomes fact. Fiction becomes fact.’
By 2000, Segretti was an Orange County co-chair of John McCain’s presidential campaign. There were no dirty tricks.
‘Believe me, we didn’t do anything like this,’ he said. ‘I ran a very straightforward campaign. Unfortunately, we didn’t get the nomination at that time.
‘And that was my last involvement with politics. It can be very brutal and nasty.’
Donald Segretti is still working as a lawyer aged 84
He added: ‘I worked hard, through grit and perseverance I built a comfortable practice, got married, raised a family, have a wonderful daughter and grandchildren, and led a productive, quiet life.
‘I do business law, I still do some bankruptcy to help people that get into trouble, and help them get through difficult times in their lives. And I used my experience during that time to understand what people go through and try to help them out.’
These days he views goings-on in Washington ‘from the provinces’ and is shocked by some of what he sees.
‘I’m appalled,’ he said. ‘I have particular viewpoints on a lot of things, but number one, there’s too much money in politics. We get the wrong people in. The wrong people are running for office. Many of the wrong people have been elected to office.’
He is concerned by some Supreme Court decisions, including Citizens United, which allowed money to flood into political campaigning, and ‘decisions with regard to more power to the executive, decisions regarding immunity of the President to certain acts, I disagree with all of this.’
Segretti added: ‘We’ve gotten away from the country that used to be, and the way it was formed, and the thinking that went behind it.
‘So, it’s a very unnerving time for the country, and in some ways, although Watergate was a watershed, what’s happened now is profound and will last a lot longer than some of the lessons of Watergate.’
Asked to compare Nixon and President Trump, he said: ‘Well, they’re completely different. Nixon, in his heart, with all his flaws, and he had many, wanted to do the right thing for the country. I think Trump has different views. It’s all about Trump and his family. That’s a pretty dogmatic statement, I guess. Maybe not completely true. They’re both flawed but different ways.’
Segretti descibed himself as an ‘old-fashioned Republican – I liked Eisenhower.’
Segretti said he ‘broke’ with Nixon a long time ago, but is still a Republican.
‘I’m a old-fashioned Republican. I liked Eisenhower,’ he said.
‘We don’t have a strong two-party system. The Democrats are off on a tangent. They haven’t done much to have checks and balances, and it’s all about power between the two parties. They seem to sacrifice what’s good for the country.
‘I think we’re seeing problems going on with our government right now, right under our feet. I think in the long, longer medium term, I think hopefully America will rejuvenate itself, but in the short term, we’re going through a very rough time period. We’ve got some institutional flaws. I don’t think we’ve had good leadership in either party.’
Meanwhile, Watergate seems a very long time ago.
‘I closed the chapter on that,’ he said. ‘I tell clients, many times when they go through a trauma in their life, let’s close the chapter on that and look forward and go on. That’s what I did, and hopefully others will do the same.’
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