NEW YORK (AP) – Never a TV story, Watergate was broken and propelled by Woodward and Bernstein of The Washington Post.

“Once more, the inadequacies of the electronic press in investigative journalism became glaringly apparent,” harrumphed a New York Times critic in May 1973.

Even so, 30 years ago this summer, television jumped in and carried the hearings that helped bring down the Nixon presidency.

Hour after hour, PBS (sometimes joined by the three commercial networks) carried gavel-to-gavel proceedings of the Senate Watergate Committee as members of President Nixon’s staff along with Republican campaign officials faced a probe of political subterfuge and sabotage operating out of the White House.

It was “the most dramatic inquiry in the history of the nation,” declares a new PBS special, “Watergate Plus 30: Shadow of History,” airing 8 p.m. EDT Wednesday (check local listings). And thanks to TV’s coverage of it, “Americans saw for themselves the extent of the White House crimes.”

Rapt viewers beheld committee member Howard Baker pose the instant-classic question: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”

With fascination, the audience watched folksy, eyebrow-bobbing Chairman Sam Ervin stop fast-talking pols in their tracks – as when witness John Erlichman, Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, challenged him on a point by asking, “How do you know that, Mr. Chairman?”

“Because I can understand the English language!” Ervin fired back. “It’s my mother tongue!”

And Nixon deputy assistant Alexander Butterfield caused a stir in the chambers and in every viewing home when, under questioning on July 16, 1973, he gulped, blinked, then testified, “I was aware of listening devices, yes, sir.”

Thus did the world learn that President Nixon, in effect, had bugged himself and his Oval Office. The so-called White House tapes would serve as crucial evidence leading to his resignation Aug. 8, 1974, as he faced almost certain impeachment.

Step by step, “Watergate Plus 30” retraces the stranger-than-fiction saga that first came to light with a June 1972 break-in planned, paid for and bungled by Nixon’s re-election committee.

But exactly what did Nixon himself know, and when did he know it?

Although evidence would prove he ordered a cover-up after the fact, until his death in 1994, he denied any prior knowledge of the plot to break into Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate office building and bug the telephone of the party chairman, Larry O’Brien.

But in the documentary for the first time, a former top aide argues that it was none other than Nixon who ordered the break-in.

Jeb Stuart Magruder, then Nixon’s deputy campaign director, recounts a telephone conversation he says he witnessed on March 30, 1972, between Attorney General John Mitchell and, at the other end of the line, Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman and Nixon, whom he overheard authorizing a $250,000 payment to the Watergate burglars with the explanation, “We need to get information on Larry O’Brien.”

The documentary acknowledges that, with Magruder (now a retired Presbyterian minister) the only surviving party to this alleged incident, “we only have his word.”

But the overwhelming menace of Watergate is beyond dispute.

“It was a period in our time when we became very close to losing our democracy,” says Sam Dash, the Senate Watergate Committee counsel who led the investigation, “when we had a president who really did believe he was imperial.”

Besides Dash, the film includes contemporary interviews with retired Baker; Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein; former White House counsel John Dean; and Butterfield.

Also heard from is Fred Thompson, who, now a co-star of NBC’s “Law & Order” after retiring from the U.S. Senate last year, was then minority counsel. It was Thompson who asked Butterfield about the tapes, and was as startled as anyone by his reply.

“My initial reaction was, ‘My goodness!”‘ Thompson recalls.

Looming largest of all in the documentary is Nixon, including his voice on scratchy excerpts from the White House tapes such as this rant about the Watergate committee, which he vows to take apart “like it’s never been taken apart … I’m gonna hit them and destroy them.”

That wasn’t Nixon’s sole miscalculation. Examining the many that did him in, “Watergate Plus 30” is a timely refresher.

—

On the Net:

www.pbs.org/previews/WatergatePlus30

—

EDITOR’S NOTE – Frazier Moore can be reached at fmoore(at)ap.org

AP-ES-07-29-03 1637EDT