Last week, I stopped by the Hoover Institution to see their exhibit “Un-Presidented: Watergate and Power in America,” commemorating the 50th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation. The Hoover Institution archive includes the papers of former Nixon White House counsel John Ehrlichman; Jeb Stuart Magruder, who was John Mitchell’s deputy at the Committee to Re-Elect the President; and Nixon campaign counsel Robert Mardian.
The exhibit was terrific. It included an opposition research memorandum from 1972, about which I will write in the coming weeks, and a tape recording machine of the same make and model Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods used when she “accidentally” erased 18-and-a-half minutes of an Oval Office conversation.
But there was one glaring omission.
Over the past five decades, many political scandals have become “gates.” The exhibit named a few of them, including Beergate, in which Labour Party leaders joyfully consumed adult beverages while the rest of Great Britain struggled under COVID lockdowns; Slapgate, when Will Smith smacked Chris Rock at the Oscars; and Monkeygate, which refers either to an Indian cricket scandal or the testing of animals exposed to auto emissions — take your pick.
But Winegate - my favorite “gate” - was nowhere to be found.
I investigated that scandal for my book The Watergate: Inside America’s Most Infamous Address (William Morrow, 2018).
Pour yourself a glass of pinot noir and read on.
The Cruse family of winemakers had been at the center of Bordeaux’s commercial and social life since 1819. They had cellars on the Quai des Chartrons and a magnificent chateau in the Médoc. “The wine trade is to France what the automobile business is to the United States,” observed New York Times wine columnist Frank J. Prial, “and the Cruse concern is easily the General Motors of the French wine world.”
In June 1973, French tax inspectors, acting on a tip from an informant, entered the Cruse offices and demanded to review their records. The owners tossed the agents out onto the street, denouncing their “Gestapo methods.”
But the government would not be deterred.
French wine authorities kept digging and soon charged the the Cruse empire, as well as a number of smaller vintners and wine exporters, with the following: upgrading cheap “Midi” wines to expensive Bordeaux and disguising the fraud with false documents; mislabeling lower-quality wines and shipping them to the American market, where unsophisticated Yankee palates would fail to notice the difference; selling inexpensive 1970 vintage white Bordeaux to German consumers, passing the bottles off as the prized — and costly — 1969 white Graves; and using charcoal filters to “deodorize” 84,000 gallons of wine.
Lionel Cruse dismissed the charges against him as a “pseudo scandal” and defiantly proclaimed, “I will be the Nixon of Bordeaux.” In Cruse’s view, Nixon was the victim of “a campaign of calumny orchestrated by the leftist, Washington press.” The Paris newspaper Le Monde, however, suggested the vintner’s analogy was “an imprudent parallel,” considering the American president had recently resigned in disgrace.
In October 1974, in a courtroom in Bordeaux, prosecutors presented their opening arguments in the fraud trial of Lionel Cruse and seven other prominent wine figures. Ten days later, a jury convicted Cruse and his cousin Yvan of fraud; a judge fined them each 27,000 francs, about $74,000 today. A wine broker was sentenced to a year in jail. Five smaller wine merchants paid fines and back taxes, and received suspended sentences.
The New York Times dismissed the penalties as “little more than wrist-slapping,” considering the damage done to this essential part of the French economy and global brand. According to Benoît Lecat, head of the wine and viticulture department of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, the scandal resulted in a “loss of trust” between French vintners and drinkers worldwide. Although the Bordeaux region bounced back relatively quickly from the scandal and resumed exports, nearby Burgundy was not so lucky. Many wine merchants shut their doors. Local vintners were forced to bottle their own wines and sell directly to whatever customers they could find.
New York Times columnist and former Nixon speechwriter William Safire, in his New Political Dictionary, defined the “-gate construction” as “a device to provide a sinister label to a possible scandal.” According to Safire, Winegate was the first post-Nixon scandal to earn the “gate” suffix.
À votre santé!
Opposition Research in the News…
Law Street Media takes a look at the American Accountability Foundation, “a spoiler operation seeking to defeat Biden Administration nominees,” which has filed more than 100 FOIA requests.
McClatchy reporter David Lightman reports that a Utah-based company, Sisters in Christ LLC, has paid $119,203 in property taxes since 2017 on a Palm Desert property which GOP Senate candidate and former baseball star Steve Garvey as his home address.