Watergate: S & D

Don't think I watched any of this, although I have vague memories of it airing:

http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTg2MjYzNzI4MV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNTc1MjA2Nw@@._V1._SY317_CR6,0,214,317_.jpg

It's just out on DVD. Twelve hours long--Berlin Alexanderplatz for wild gossipy political horserace fiends like me. Pricey, though, so I'll wait it out a bit.

Strange, the image seems to come and go.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075597/

it's pretty soapy, tho Robards is great.

40th anniv of break-in imminent!

There and back, and back again.

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/103940/watergate-richard-nixon

Both sides agree!

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/302288/blast-past-michael-potemra?toggle=y#comment-bar

It was the NRO thing that alerted me to its re-release.

The movie ends with a Watergate-style major turning point, and the final shot is of an American flag briskly waving: as if to assure the 1977 TV audience that America is a great country that will always prevail over its evil Nixons, and that everything’s going to be just fine now that a really decent guy like Jimmy Carter is president.

I can think of one or two (or more) people on the political thread who'd be fine substituting Bush and Obama into that formulation.

not a particularly close parallel.

The WaPo had a party at the Watergate the other night, I kid you not. Oh, the irony of 2012 vs 1972 Bob Woodward.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/11/watergate-remembered-four-decades-later-at-washington-post-party.html

except that bush was worse than nixon and obama worse than carter! xpost

don't make me go to who might be worse than Nixon....

I think W:BCD might play a lot worse for me today after exposure to all the years of Oval Office tapes. There's no topping 'em, especially with broadcast-friendly dialogue.

i'm sure this must have been in American papers but The Independent in the UK is doing an 'Untold Story' thing by WoodStein just in time for the 40th anniversary

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/special-report-watergate--the-untold-story-7844900.html

anyone ever rifle through the online Nixon tapes? i had no idea there was so much of it on the net
http://whitehousetapes.net/transcript/nixon/i-want-brookings-institute-safe-cleaned-out

Nixon's whole bit on those about how everyone is too much of a 'nice guy' and needs to be more of a 'son of a bitch like me for a change' really is pretty vomit inducing.

Woodstein were on Face the Nation on the weekend, talking about a shared byline they had in the Post last week (first in 30+ years). Haven't read the piece, but I gather the gist of it is that Watergate was much worse than anything that's ever been reported; that virtually from day one, a full-scale criminal operation was being conducted inside the White House. (Please resist dragging Obama into this.)

None of the info was new; what made it notable was Woodstein cobbling the info into a chronological narrative. I was surprised Woodward had it in him.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/woodward-and-bernstein-40-years-after-watergate-nixon-was-far-worse-than-we-thought/2012/06/08/gJQAlsi0NV_story.html

It's a measure of the enormity of the fallout from Watergate that the suffix "-gate" is by now well-understood to denote a scandal, not only in the USA, but almost worldwide, even in several different languages.

I did kind of suspect that, Alfred--even in the movie, they make it pretty clear that bad stuff started very early.

i remember in school being surprised that it was the name of an actual building. i thought it was a metaphor from the beginning! as in some kind of dam or lock that had finally broken open.

It occurs to me that even before I get to Wrigley or Fenway (if I ever do), I ought to spend a night in the Watergate...Guessing it ain't cheap.

is it a hotel? i thought it was an apt/office bldg

All three, I believe.

http://www.thewatergatehotel.com/

Correct. I think the five buildings each have different owners by now. Residental units mostly condos, but some are for rent.

In what may be the most ironic coincidence ever, the first burglary ever reported to police in the Watergate complex, in 1969, was of the residential unit owned by, of all people, Rose Mary Woods

(Nixon's secretary, who would later claim to have accidentally erased that infamous 18 1/2 minutes of a tape crucial to the investigation. Recent forensic examination of the tape shows it was erased in several sections separately.)

I can't think of anyone else whose most famous photo (by far) is in this pose:

http://mysite.verizon.net/vzesz4a6/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/RoseMaryWoodsStretch.jpg

clemenza, I suggest that rather than reserve a room you park across the street in a Gordon Liddy mustache and sit there for hours.

Those Plumbers were a sleazy bunch all right, former College Republican leaders. The ratfuckers hit all the Democrat campaigns in '72 except McGovern's, bcz they wanted him to get the nomination.

Here's where I recommend Thomas Mallon's new novel.

recommendation accepted. ding!

Happy 40th to the gang!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsx7TZ-r4b4

Psyched!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/arts/television/robert-redford-to-produce-a-documentary-about-watergate.html

Afaics, the major legacy of this scandal was a determination on the part of the power elite never to allow the media to be independent enough to pursue a story like this, if the elite prefer the story should not be pursued. An independent press is far too much of a danger to those who hold power to allow it to flourish for any reason.

backing up to the Nixon pardon i recommend Barry Werth's short book 31 Days about the Ford transition. anyone reading this thread will eat it up

hell yes Nixon should have gone to jail; the next 25 years might've turned out differently but hey that's water(gate) under the bridge

Yes -- great book.

31 Days sounds great.

i'm no nixon apologist but i gotta say, this is the most devastating end of a long wikipedia article i've ever come across:

Nixon believed that putting distance between himself and other people was necessary for him as he advanced in his political career and became president. Even Bebe Rebozo, by some accounts his closest friend, did not call him by his first name. Nixon stated of this, "Even with close friends. I don't believe in letting your hair down, confiding this and that and the other thing—saying, 'Gee, I couldn't sleep' ... I believe you should keep your troubles to yourself. That's just the way I am. Some people are different. Some people think it's good therapy to sit with a close friend and, you know, just spill your guts ... (and) reveal their inner psyche—whether they were breast-fed or bottle-fed. Not me. No way."(263) When told that most Americans, even at the end of his career, did not feel they knew him, Nixon replied, "Yeah, it's true. And it's not necessary for them to know."(263)

After Richardson and Ruckelshaus refused to carry out Nixon’s order, the White House sent a car to the Justice Department to fetch Bork.

He met the car outside the department and found Nixon lawyers Leonard Garment and Fred Buzhardt in the passenger seats. Bork says he joked that he felt like he was being taken for a ride, as in a scene from a gangster movie, but that no one else laughed.

Shortly after he sent Cox a two-paragraph letter, he was taken in to see Nixon. Bork says the resignation and firings should have been called “The Saturday Night Involuntary Manslaughter” because Nixon didn’t plan the episode, but blundered into it.

It was in that conversation that Bork says Nixon for the first and only time offered up the next Supreme Court seat.

More excerpts from the Bork memoir.

The War Powers Resolution, passed by Congress over the veto of Nixon in November 1973, expanded congressional control over the limits of presidential authority in the use of force abroad. Had the president asked for my advice, I would have suggested that instead of vetoing the Resolution, and thus giving it the dignity of a statute, Nixon should have returned the bill to Congress with a note saying he thanked them for their essay on his constitutional powers and, when he found time in his busy schedule, he would send them an essay of his own on his understanding of his constitutional powers. This would have treated the War Powers Resolution with the frivolous gesture it deserved.

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ltvvfjiYw71qdbxx9.gif

More goodies, freshly unconvered.

The disruption of Johnson’s peace talks then enabled Nixon to hang on for a narrow victory over Democrat Hubert Humphrey. However, as the new President was taking steps in 1969 to extend the war another four-plus years, he sensed the threat from the wiretap file and ordered two of his top aides, chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, to locate it. But they couldn’t find the file.

We now know that was because President Johnson, who privately had called Nixon’s Vietnam actions “treason,” had ordered the file removed from the White House by his national security aide Walt Rostow.

Rostow labeled the file “The ‘X’ Envelope” and kept it in his possession, although having left government, he had no legal right to possess the highly classified documents, many of which were stamped “Top Secret.” Johnson had instructed Rostow to retain the papers as long as he, Johnson, was alive and then afterwards to decide what to do with them.

Nixon, however, had no idea that Johnson and Rostow had taken the missing file or, indeed, who might possess it. Normally, national security documents are passed from the outgoing President to the incoming President to maintain continuity in government.

But Haldeman and Kissinger had come up empty in their search. They were only able to recreate the file’s contents, which included incriminating conversations between Nixon’s emissaries and South Vietnamese officials regarding Nixon’s promise to get them a better deal if they helped him torpedo Johnson’s peace talks.

Man.

What Rostow didn’t know was that there was a third – and more direct – connection between the missing file and Watergate. Nixon’s fear about the file surfacing as a follow-up to the Pentagon Papers was Nixon’s motive for creating Hunt’s burglary team in the first place.

Rostow apparently struggled with what to do with the file for the next month as the Watergate scandal expanded. On June 25, 1973, fired White House counsel John Dean delivered his blockbuster Senate testimony, claiming that Nixon got involved in the cover-up within days of the June 1972 burglary at the Democratic National Committee. Dean also asserted that Watergate was just part of a years-long program of political espionage directed by Nixon’s White House.

The very next day, as headlines of Dean’s testimony filled the nation’s newspapers, Rostow reached his conclusion about what to do with “The ‘X’ Envelope.” In longhand, he wrote a “Top Secret” note which read, “To be opened by the Director, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, not earlier than fifty (50) years from this date June 26, 1973.”

In other words, Rostow intended this missing link of American history to stay missing for another half century.

holy crap

I have been thinking about this all morning

Nixon’s fear about the file surfacing as a follow-up to the Pentagon Papers was Nixon’s motive for creating Hunt’s burglary team in the first place.

crazy that this turned out to be true, I remember this being speculated upon in Arrogance of Power, I think...?

I checked out one of Parry's books.

Most reporters have given short shrift to the Chennault material. The recent book by those TIME suckups on the ex-presidents inadvertently did more to raise the specter of those signals sent from Texas to the White House during the Nixon years.

which book, Alfred?

I'm thinking Lost History looks like my kinda wheelhouse

http://www.amazon.com/Fooling-America-Washington-Manufacture-Conventional/dp/0688109276

It reminds me of Mark Hertsgaard's On Bended Knee, a superb account of press genuflection before St. Ronnie.

oh that's the new one, right?

hmm

OKAY FINE I'LL GET IT

The BBC picks up the story. Nothing from US newspapers?

I haven't seen a peep from anyone. I want to say 'unbelievable' but it's so totally, depressingly believable.

Yeah, totally. It's like Robert Parry pointed out in the Alternet link Alfred posted, no major US news organization has any interest in embarrassing itself further at this point.

think i first read about this in hitchens' kissinger book. as usual, history turns out to be more sordid and disgusting than any conspiracy theory.

kinda can't help regretting that LBJ didn't follow through with his 'surprise! i'm running again!' plan; four more years of LBJ at his worst couldn't have been worse than four years of nixon.

Hersh's Kissinger book first advanced it but to see it confirmed...