A Tropical Storm! A Smoking Gun! A Porn Film with a Plot?
- William Romanowski
- Jun 20, 2024
- 8 min read
Updated: Jun 21, 2024
(9-minute read)
Keywords: Tropical Storm Agnes, Agnes Flood 1972, Richard Nixon, Watergate, Deep Throat, Authoritarianism
When I began my research to write a historical fiction novel, I came across two stories in a Time magazine, on pages back-to-back, like two sides of the same coin: “The Violent, Deadly Swath of Agnes” and “The Bugs at the Watergate.” It struck me that the connection between the Agnes Flood and Watergate had a little Shakespearean flair. A tempestuous storm – as if drunk – staggered up the Eastern Seaboard wreaking havoc, while a bungled burglary (and secret FBI informant) toppled a U.S. president. The seemingly unrelated events unfolded like a comedy of errors ending, unfortunately, in two national tragedies.
Shakespeare used storms to signal a disruption, an upheaval in social or political affairs and raise the question: Is there such a thing as divine justice? Whether fate, providence, or just blind-ass bad luck, entwining the stories of Agnes and Watergate makes for one amazing (and somewhat amusing) coincidence.
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On June 12, 1972, the (New and Mature) World Theater in Times Square premiered a new and improved porn film – one with a plot. If nothing else, a New York Times writer remarked, the concept was “an undeniable improvement over the genre’s ordinary offering.”
While word of mouth (you just have to see it!) was turning Deep Throat into a bizarre event in the Big Apple, a weak tropical depression formed over Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula and started moving slowly eastward over the warm waters in the Caribbean Sea. Agnes, the first tropical storm of the season, dumped huge amounts of rain while brushing the western tip of Cuba before turning northward, tracing age-old path.
The Watergate Break-in
As Agnes churned predictably across the Gulf of Mexico, in the wee hours of the morning on Saturday, June 17, a security guard was making his late-night rounds at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. Spotting a strip of masking tape jamming the bolt on a stairwell door, he alerted the metropolitan police. Three plainclothes officers who worked undercover busting drug dealers arrived in an unmarked car. Dressed as hippies! they surprised five burglars at gunpoint in the sixth-floor offices of Democratic National Committee (DNC).
“Don’t shoot,” one of the suspects shouted, jumping up from behind a desk and putting his hands in the air. By the looks of it, they’d been caught in the act of photographing the contents of two open file drawers and installing listening devices in telephones (actually replacing a malfunctioning bug they’d planted earlier). Wearing business suits and blue surgical gloves, these were no ordinary burglars. And armed with cameras, lockpicks, door jimmies, 35-millimeter cameras, forty rolls of unexposed film, high-tech listening devices, and pen-sized tear gas guns?! this was no ordinary robbery.
While the shady intruders were being taken into custody and criminally charged, Agnes reached the status of a Category 1 hurricane.
The story of the break-in at the DNC headquarters was on the front page of The Washington Post’s Sunday edition. White House Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler refused to comment on “a third-rate burglary attempt” and put reporters on notice that “certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it is.” Katherine Graham, owner and publisher of the Post, said, “None of us, of course, had any idea how far the story would stretch; the beginning – once the laughter died down – all seemed so farcical.”
President Richard Nixon was out of town that weekend. After relaxing for two days on Grand Cay Island in the Bahamas, he flew by helicopter to his Florida home at Key Biscayne, where his Chief of Staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, was spending the weekend – enveloped in the fringe of Agnes’ heavy rains and cloud cover. It’s likely that’s where Nixon learned of the arrests from a Sunday-morning newspaper.
Nixon and the Tropical Storm
Delayed by Agnes, Nixon returned on Monday night to a political scandal brewing Washington. A Washington Post cover story (the beginning of the famed collaboration of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein) revealed that one of the Watergate burglars, James W. McCord, Jr., a former CIA employee, was a security consultant on the payroll of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (insiders joked about the acronym, CREEP). Inquiring minds, of course, wanted to know why the suspects attempted to bug the DNC headquarters.
“We’re baffled at this point,” an anonymous member of the Democratic party said. “The mystery deepens.”
Agnes’ stint as a hurricane didn’t last long. After making landfall in the Florida Panhandle, the cyclone weakened to a tropical depression while plodding over southern Georgia and the Carolinas. Just when it looked like the storm was petering out, Agnes reenergized into a strong tropical storm again over the Atlantic and headed north, lashing parts of Virginia and Maryland with torrential rains and heavy winds.
Each day, as Agnes neared Washington, disclosures about the Watergate break-in dropped like breadcrumbs on a shadowy trail leading closer to the Oval Office. Howard Hunt, a consultant to Nixon’s Special Counsel Charles W. Colson, was listed in the address books of two of the burglars (codenamed “The Plumbers”). Four of the suspects were connected to the anti-Castro movement in Florida, and at least two of them had past CIA links to the bungled Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. They had in their possession some $2,300 in crisp sequentially numbered $100 bills.
In the meantime, Agnes was battering the nation’s capital with eight inches of rain falling in one day. The Potomac River crested eighteen feet above its flood stage and swelled to twice its usual width. Water from nearby streams overflowing their banks rose from hubcap to windowsill in minutes, forcing motorists to abandon their cars. Sixteen deaths resulting from the flood were reported in the Washington area.
The Porn Film with a Plot
After running roughshod over the Eastern Seaboard, Agnes again turned out to sea and as was typical of tropical storms, was expected to disappear into the Atlantic Ocean. But the “big mushy thing,” a National Weather Service official called it, was recharged by a high-pressure system off the New Jersey coast. Becoming a tropical storm again, Agnes reversed course, making landfall near New York City where celebrity patronage – Johnny Carson, Truman Capote, Jack Nicholson, and Jackie Kennedy Onassis – was boosting box-office tallies and whipping Deep Throat into a phenomenon labeled “porno chic.”
That film critics, elected officials, and judges were debating whether this absurd sexual romp was obscene or social redeeming didn’t matter much. One little old lady said, “Nobody is going to tell me I can’t see a dirty picture if I want to.” (You go, grandma.) A group of the New York Times news staff went together over lunch. Some French diplomats in town for a United Nations meeting stood in line and paid the hefty $5.00 ticket price with traveler’s checks. And when Bob Woodward told his managing editor, Howard Simons, that he was having “deep background” conversations with an anonymous government source, Simons famously codenamed the informant, “Deep Throat.”
Instead of cruising north across New England, Agnes was absorbed into a non-tropical cold front that had been pounding the northeast with heavy rainstorms. The two systems stalled and unleashed an incessant downpour over the Susquehanna River Basin in northern Pennsylvania and southwestern New York.
White House officials demurred, deplored, and denounced the DNC headquarters break-in, culminating in Nixon’s denial of any White House involvement at a news conference on Thursday June 22. That night, the Susquehanna topped flood stage – twenty-two feet – and was still rising in Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania.
The Smoking Gun
After a disastrous flood in 1936, the Wyoming Valley levee system was upgraded to contain a water level of 37 feet. The Susquehanna reached that mark at 10:00 a.m. on Friday morning when Nixon and Bob Halderman began their meeting in the Oval Office. Regarding “the Democratic break-in thing,” Halderman told the president the money found on the burglars was traceable and “goes in some directions we don’t want it to go,” namely, Nixon’s re-election committee. They strategized a way to put a stop to the investigation. “Play it tough,” Nixon said, giving Halderman the go-ahead to get the message to the FBI not to pursue this case any further, adding good measure, “period!”
Meanwhile, a sandbagging effort to contain the Susquehanna River in Wyoming Valley proved futile. At 11:14 a.m. (to be exact), the civil defense sirens wailed like a biblical trumpet blast, and while some 10,000 volunteers raced off, the meeting between Nixon and Halderman officially ended at 11:39 a.m. The recording of that conversation became known as the “Smoking Gun,” documented proof that Nixon was involved right from the start in a criminal coverup involving conspiracy and obstruction of justice.
The Susquehanna began spilling over the dikes protecting Wilkes-Barre, a mid-sized city on the river’s east bank, and the riverfront boroughs on the west side: Forty Fort, Kingston, and Edwardsville. Typically, about one hundred and fifty yards wide, the river stretched two miles across, and by nightfall turned Wyoming Valley’s lowlands into a coffee-colored lake nine to twelve feet deep covering nearly twenty square miles. The river crested at 40.91 feet on Saturday at 7:00 p.m. (to be exact), nineteen feet above flood stage and four feet above the official height of the levees.
Who’s Got Troubles?
On Sunday, June 25, Nixon spoke with a group of evacuees in Harrisburg. “We might think we all have troubles,” he said, “but when we see people like you, the way you’re dealing with such hardship, it makes us realize we don’t have any troubles at all.” And that fall, during an impromptu visit to Wyoming Valley (hit hardest by Agnes), he said something the same.
Sometimes when something terrible happens in your life, your home is washed away or something like that, you tend to just think about your own problems and you lose sight of the bigger picture. . . . The most important thing as far as Wilkes-Barre, Kingston, all these areas are concerned, is what you feel in your hearts about your future and the future of your town and the future of your State and the future of your country.
Nixon’s sentiment about keeping “problems” in perspective amidst tragedy, however fitting, proved sadly ironic. Soon enough, the president’s own “troubles” stemming from “the Democratic break-in thing” would be revealed, and the tragic legacy of Watergate (and the Pentagon Papers) would have an enduring impact on the country’s future. The corrosion of public trust, not only in government, but established institutions, within the framework of our “post-truth” age and rampant, unbridled social media is threatening to tear apart the fabric of American democracy.
Oh, I almost forgot.
By the end of the year, Deep Throat had grossed over $3.2 million and played in more 70 theaters across the country, including Cinema 309 in Wilkes-Barre.
References
Blumenthal, Ralph. “‘Hard‐core” grows fashionable—and very profitable,” New York Times, January 21, 1973, https://www.nytimes.com/1973/01/21/archives/pornochic-hardcore-grows-fashionableand-very-profitable.html.
Graham, Katharine. “The Watergate Watershed: A Turning Point for a Nation and a Newspaper,” Washington Post, January 28, 1997, D01, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/watergate/stories/graham.htm.
“Remarks in Kingston, Pennsylvania, Following Inspection of Damage Caused by Tropical Storm Agnes,” The American Presidency Project, September 9, 1972, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-kingston-pennsylvania-following-inspection-damage-caused-tropical-storm-agnes.
Schumach, Murray. “Rescue Work Stepped Up as Tropical Storm Fades,” New York Times, June 25, 1972, 1, 44, https://www.nytimes.com/1972/06/25/archives/rescue-work-stepped-up-as-tropical-storm-fades-rescue-work-stepped.html.
Woodward, Bob, and Carl Bernstein, “GOP Security Aide Among 5 Arrested in Bugging Affair,” Washington Post, June 19, 1972, A1, A6.
Woodward, Bob, and E. J. Bachinski, “White House Consultant Tied to Bugging Figure,” Washington Post, June 20, 1972, A1, A4.
“The Bugs at the Watergate,” Time, July 3, 1972, 10-11, https://time.com/archive/6815512/politics-the-bugs-at-the-watergate/.
“The Smoking Gun Tape,” Watergate.info, June 2, 2024, http://watergate.info/1972/06/23/the-smoking-gun-tape.html/.
“The Violent, Deadly Swath of Agnes,” Time, July 3, 1972, 9, https://time.com/archive/6815511/disasters-the-violent-deadly-swath-of-agnes/.
Wolensky, Robert P. Better Than Ever!: The Flood Recovery Task Force and the 1972 Agnes Disaster (Stevens Point, WI: Foundation Press, University of Wisconsin, 1993).
Resources
“Dealing with Disaster: 50 Years After Hurricane Agnes,” The Nixon Foundation, September 8, 2022, https://www.nixonfoundation.org/2022/09/50-years-hurricane-agnes/
Farrell, John A. Richard Nixon: The Life. New York: Doubleday, 2017.
Moran, Jordan. “Nixon and the Pentagon Papers,” Miller Center, University of Virginia, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/educational-resources/first-domino-nixon-and-the-pentagon-papers.
Rossi, Nico. “Agnes at Fifty: A look back at the flood of 1972,” PA Homepage, June 20, 2022, https://www.pahomepage.com/agnes-at-fifty/agnes-at-fifty-a-look-back-at-the-flood-of-1972/.
“50th Anniversary of Hurricane Agnes June 1972,” Silver Jackets, https://agnes50-noaa.hub.arcgis.com/.
 | William D. Romanowski is an award-winning commentator on the intersection of religion and popular culture and author of a number of books, including Reforming Hollywood: How Protestants Fought for Freedom at the Movies and Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Popular Culture. With his continuing commentary, he is trading footnotes for fiction, writing novels under the pen name (or nom de plume, as the French put it), Patmos Rhodes. |
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