The man who stayed late: The Watergate story you’ve never heard

The burglars waited for the signal before breaking into the Watergate Hotel.

The signal would come from the lookout, who was poised across the street, at the Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge. The lookout was in room 723, watching the sixth floor of the Watergate, waiting for the last person in the office turn out the lights and go home.

Once that office was empty, the plan would be afoot. Five men would sneak into the offices of the Democratic National Committee to steal secrets that their bosses hoped would sway the 1972 presidential election in favor of Richard Nixon.

It was a Friday night in Georgetown. June 16, 1972.

The burglary was set for 9 p.m.

Then 10. Then 11. Then…

The Watergate break-in was postponed until after midnight. And after that, from the burglars’ point of view, everything went wrong. Everybody got caught. Good triumphed over evil. “Gate” became code for “scandal.”

All because a guy sitting in the Democratic Committee office refused to turn out the light and go home.

G. Gordon Liddy, the dirty trickster in charge of the Watergate burglary, once told ABC News how they got caught:

“There was a man working in the back, very, very late. I mean, he stayed and he stayed and he stayed. It’s a Friday night. This was some dedicated Democrat.”

Later, Jim Shaw, a reporter from Columbia Law School News, wrote an article about the guy who stayed late. The headline was “But For Him, Nixon Might Still Be President.”

So who was that man, that “dedicated Democrat” whose stubborn presence in the Watergate 50 years ago lit the fuse to the end of Nixon’s presidency?

His name is Bruce.

Place in history

Bruce Givner lives in Bel Air. He has written a book called “My Watergate Scandal Tell-All: How I Unwittingly Caused This Historic Event.” He recently returned to the Watergate with two of the police officers who made the arrest.

“The office didn’t look like it looks now,” he said.

Givner, who wrote the book with public relations consultant Cherie Kerr, is a giant-sized footnote in the Watergate scandal. He describes his role a bit differently.

“I was poop on the wall of American history.”

Givner grew up in Lorain, Ohio, about 30 miles west of Cleveland. And he was still there, in the late 1960s, when he was in high school.

But Givner’s father was sickly at the time, and his family decided to move to a warmer, drier climate. They knew people who lived in Encino, so they headed west.

That didn’t bother Givner one bit. He was a basketball fan and, at the time, UCLA, about 10 miles south of Encino, was the talk of the college basketball world. UCLA had just won the NCAA Championship with a center named Lew Alcindor. The kid from Lorain wanted to go to UCLA.

So, in the fall of 1969, the Givners moved from Ohio into a wheelchair-access home next to the Ventura Freeway, and Bruce Givner started college.

He thought he would study psychology, but that didn’t last. Neither did Political Science nor English. Eventually, Givner said, he found an intellectual calling he could work with.

“I followed a good looking girl,” he said, “into the history department.”

Studying history, Givner says now, left him with enough free time to pursue his other interests. Namely, politics.

He was appointed by UCLA’s Student Body President to chair of the student government finance committee.

The UCLA campus of the early 1970s was, in Givner’s words, “a very liberal place.” He remembers watching a student takeover of the chancellor’s headquarters in which dozens of police officers stormed in and re-took the building. He recalls campus walkways lined with tables filled with literature written from every conceivable political point of view.

One avocation in particular caught Givner’s eye: the Government Internship Program. Once you were in you could be sent to Washington D.C. The big prize was to spend a summer working for a U.S. senator or congressman.

Givner didn’t win the big prize, but he was sent to Washington D.C. anyway; to work for the Democratic National Committee.

“It wasn’t a plum assignment,” Givner said. “But they were nominating someone for president.”

The Democrats of ’72 were choosing between Minn. Sen. Hubert Humphrey (Givner’s favorite) and South Dakota Sen. George McGovern. The winner would become the party’s nominee for president, starting at the convention in Miami that summer.

The leak

In the weeks leading up to break-in night, a time when Givner was buying a Honda 160 motorcycle and moving into his cousin’s house in the northwest section of D.C., Republican operatives were working behind the scenes to get Nixon elected.

On May 28, 1972, burglars broke into the Watergate Hotel. That night, they planted listening devices inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters on the sixth floor.

The Plumbers, as they would later become known, were interested in listening to and stealing secrets from the Democrats. They planned a second break-in for June 16, 1972. The goal was to plant more listening devices and to snap some photographs of important DNC paperwork.

That day also happened to be Givner’s third on the job.

He was assigned to work the phones, calling cities around the country to make sure Democratic committees were prepping for the upcoming convention.

Here’s the thing about Givner: He was very proud of his position with the DNC. That Friday night, in 1972, he stayed in the office after everyone left because he wanted to call his family and friends to tell them where he was and what he was doing.

“The place was empty,” he said. “I kicked my feet up on the metal desk.”

At the time, the DNC used a phone system called W.A.T.S. (Wide Area Telephone Service) that allowed for free phone calls. Givner was happy to use that access.

Sometime between 7 and 9 p.m. he finished up his official work and took out his personal phone book. He called old girlfriends (two of them). He called friends from Lorain. He called professors from UCLA. He called his parents.

In all, he gabbed for more than three hours.

And as he gabbed, the burglars waited.

“I didn’t know I was screwing up their timing,” he said.

Sometime after 10 p.m., Givner had to go to the bathroom. He knew he couldn’t leave the DNC office because the door would lock behind him. So he walked out on the balcony and peed into a planter.

He didn’t know he was being watched.

Richard Ben-Veniste, a Watergate prosecutor, later said of the fateful urination: “A Watergate leak to rival Deep Throat.”

That’s the quote on Givner’s book jacket.

Busted

How would history have been different if, in 1972, Bruce Givner had more friends? Or fewer?

Nobody can say. What is known is that just before midnight Givner ran out of people to call. So he hung up the phone, turned off the lights, and walked downstairs.

He was leaving the building at 12:05 a.m. on June 17, 1972, when he was stopped by security guard Frank Wills.

If you recognize Wills’ name, you’re a Watergate junkie.

In the minutes before he stopped Givner, Wills had discovered tape over the latches on some of the doors leading into the Watergate’s stairwell. He pulled off the tape and made a note in his log book. He also called his supervisor, but couldn’t reach him.

Wills asked Givner to enter his name on a sign-out sheet.

“You don’t need to sign me out,” Givner explained. “I didn’t sign in.”

The two men struck up a conversation. They agreed they were hungry and decided to head across the street to get burgers in the Howard Johnson’s restaurant. It was a to-go order.

Givner rode off on his motorcycle and Wills went back to his post inside the Watergate.

Then history unfolded.

On a routine check of the stairwell, Wills found that the door latches had been taped again. He called the police and three undercover cops came out to the hotel.

The lookout in the hotel across the street, who by this time was watching “Attack of the Puppet People,” missed the cops’ arrival. He didn’t alert the burglars.

During the pre-dawn hours, five men were arrested in the DNC office. Eventually, because of events that followed those arrests, President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace.

Alternate universe?

What if Bruce Givner had gone home with everyone else? What if the burglars had been able to pull of the crime at 9 p.m.?

It is not a huge leap to suggest that without the delay the burglars would have been long gone before anyone noticed. They might have taken the tape off the doors on their way out of the building.

They might never have been arrested; their ties to Nixon never discovered.

“Frank Wills foiled the burglary,” Givner said. “But for him, they wouldn’t have been caught.”

Wills died in 2000.

All these years later, Givner is a tax attorney in Los Angeles. He works in a high-rise office on Wilshire Boulevard and serves a high-end list of clientele. He won’t talk about his cases.

But ask him about Watergate, and get ready for a good story. He compares himself to a character from a Woody Allen movie, a guy who showed up in the background of myriad historic events.

“I was Zelig,” Givner said.

The difference is Givner is real.

“I’ve got a Wikipedia page.”