Writing an autobiography is a long project, particularly for someone who has been in the public eye for decades. The massive first volume of the “Autobiography of Mark Twain” was published in 2010, a full century after Twain’s death. Twain wrote, “The usual, conventional autobiographer seems to particularly hunt out those occasions in his career when he came into contact with celebrated persons, whereas his contacts with the uncelebrated were just as interesting to him, and would be to his reader, and were vastly more numerous than his collisions with the famous.”
In “The Watergate Girl: My Fight for Truth and Justice Against a Criminal President” Jill Wine-Banks follows Twain's path of the "conventional biographer" relating her encounters with celebrities. Famous personalities such as Dustin Hoffman, Dan Rather, Gerald Ford, Mary Travers and Philip Roth make cameo appearances, but it is also Wine-Banks who stars in the role as a young attorney prosecuting the intricacies of the Watergate scandal
of the Richard Nixon administration.
The autobiography largely focuses on her time working on the Watergate special prosecutor’s trial team. On her first day on the job as an assistant special prosecutor, she met Jeb Stuart Magruder, who arrived at her office with his lawyer to discuss a plea deal. Magruder, a former Nixon White House aide, was involved in the planning for the break-in of the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex and the subsequent coverup efforts. “No witness in my experience had affected me the way Magruder did,” she writes. She was appalled by his “utter amorality” and how he “had lied and lied and lied. To the FBI, to Justice Department investigators, to a federal grand jury, to Judge Sirica.” (Magruder, after serving time in prison, eventually became a Presbyterian Church minister in Columbus, Ohio and died in 2014.)
Wine-Banks was tasked with the cross-examination of Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s longtime secretary. “I was about to violate the first rule a prosecutor learns: Never ask a witness a question unless you already know the answer,” Wine-Banks writes. Her skillful interrogation led to one of the most famous photographs of the era: Woods demonstrating her awkward pose in order to explain how she inadvertently erased the 18.5-minute gap of a crucial White House recording. “Secretaries across America wrote me letters pointing out there was no way the tape could have been erased in the matter Rose described.” Subsequent testing of the tape showed deliberate erasures and the gap “remains the most enduring mystery of Watergate.”
One faction in the prosecutor’s office wanted to indict Nixon. “I fervently believed it was wrong to prosecute Nixon’s subordinates while letting Le Grand Fromage, as Rick [Ben-Veniste, her trial partner] called the president, go free.”
Her boss, Archibald Cox, who had argued scores of cases before the Supreme Court, admitted to a colleague, “But every time I had to go to the Supreme Court I’d wake up in the morning, go to the bathroom, and throw up.”
One common theme that surfaces is Wine-Banks recalling her experiences dealing with sexist attitudes in the legal profession after graduating from law school in 1968. She was one of 15 females in her Columbia Law School class of three hundred students. Despite her major role in the courtroom dramas of Watergate, “most journalists writing about me focused on my appearance.” A headline in the “Cincinnati Enquirer” reported she was “The Leggiest Watergate Lawyer” and she took offense at being referred to as a “lady lawyer” and the “miniskirted lawyer.”
Several years after the Watergate trials, while walking around Georgetown with Ben-Veniste, she admitted to him that she “often felt like a fraud.” He agreed that he also had the same sense of imposter syndrome. “At a very young age, we’d been thrown into a role with enormous responsibility, and though everyone around us assured us we were doing excellent work, we both wondered, am I good enough?”
Now retired from practicing law, Wine-Banks works as a MSNBC legal analyst. “Perhaps my most unlikely post-Watergate friendship is with John Dean.” She was impressed by the former White House counsel’s “astonishing memory for the smallest details” and “remarkable recall.”
The book is a quick and engaging read, told in a conversational manner and devoid of footnotes. Anyone with an interest in Watergate will find “The Watergate Girl” to be a fascinating, first-hand account. The parallels she makes between the Nixon and Trump administrations in the epilogue could be another book by itself.
