What Were The Watergate Burglars Looking For?

I was always fascinated by everything connected to the Watergate scandal, and I eagerly read books about it for decades afterward. One, Silent Coup by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin (1991), raised a question nobody else I'm aware of ever bothered to ask: what were the Watergate burglars looking for? The book itself was wildly speculative and flat-out wrong in several areas, but the question it posed is still intriguing. According to Wikipedia,

Colodny and Gettlin contend that former White House counsel John Dean orchestrated the 1972 Watergate burglary. His motive was argued to have been to protect his future wife Maureen Biner by removing information linking her to a call-girl ring that worked for the DNC.

A big problem is that they go on to argue that Alexander Haig was Deep Throat, when former FBI deputy director Mark Felt outed himself as Deep Throat in 2005, and beyond that,

In 1992 John and Maureen Dean sued Nixon "plumber" G. Gordon Liddy for libel, after Liddy sought to support the core claims in Silent Coup. Liddy's testimony was the first time he spoke publicly in detail about the Watergate break-in, as he had refused to cooperate with investigators during the Watergate scandal.

A series of lawsuits stemming from the case were eventually settled. Regardless of the truth or falsity of the original claim, the key question remains unanswered, why the burglars went in to start with. Oddly, this question is beginning to come up over the Mar-a-Lago raid. As of Wednesday,

According to a report from The Washington Post, citing information leaked to them by the government (which says a lot on its own), the boxes taken were full of what would mostly be considered personal effects and mundane presidential records. . . . There were rumors many months ago that this is all that the National Archives was after. Not really important things related to national security or some such, which even still wouldn’t justify the raid, but scribblings on napkins and letters from heads of state. If this report is correct, that’s what the FBI carried out an unprecedented raid on a president for.

But by Friday, the story had evolved, just as what once had been a water buffalo evolved into a whale. According to the same Washington Post:

Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation. Experts in classified information said the unusual search underscores deep concern among government officials about the types of information they thought could be located at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and potentially in danger of falling into the wrong hands.

So at least some people are starting off asking the right questions, but the answers keep wiggling away. As of yesterday,

[I]t just makes no sense that the government was so super-concerned about Trump having classified documents that they waited 18 months to go get them. Instead, it sure looks like the floundering January 6th committee has found nothing (as I’ve said many times) and is now using the DOJ to try to fish for more “evidence” of an organized coup.

Well, it's early days, but the puzzling thing is that the Watergate burglars were basically a bunch of marginal guys who'd been tested and found wanting in professional espionage and law enforcement and had been enlisted by overzealous lower-level Nixonistas in a comic-opera spy operation basically because they were available. On the other hand, the whole Mar-a-Lago episode seems to have been executed by experienced, full-time law enforcement and national security professionals who'd spent years rising within the world's premier law enforcement organization.

Only to come up with the same result. Or so it would seem. Anyhow, it's early days.