Watergate: S & D

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...

hard to imagine two more vicious bastards than Nixon and LBJ trying to kneecap each other

man throw Walt Rostow on the fucking dung heap too and set it on fire.

anyone see the Robert Redford-narrated doc All the President’s Men Revisited?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OttPE1PCQA

Jeb Magruder dead

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeb-stuart-magruder-jailed-for-watergate-role-dies-at-79/

I saw 'Bud' Krogh on a panel at the National Archives this morning.

One by one, our old friends are gone. Death--natural or not--prison, deported.

Who's left?

shocked to find Big Bob Haldeman died 21 years back at 67.

Kissinger, Dean, and Liddy come to mind (as being alive), although beyond telling Nixon whatever he wanted to hear, I don't think Kissinger had direct Watergate involvement. Maybe I'm forgetting something. Alexander Butterfield's still alive too.

I'm surprised Kissinger didn't show up at Baba Wawa's farewell so she could fellate him AGAIN

Pat and Bob died within six months of each other. After that, Nixon wasn't long for this world.

Did a bit of reading on Magruder yesterday, found out he got his start in '62 working for Rumsfeld, and then he worked for Goldwater in '63. Would love to have seen Pete Frame take on the two American political parties.

http://blog.familyofrock.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/clip2.jpg

anniversary party album

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxfZt4vbg4I

Beat me to it. Not just a regular anniversary; 40th.

love that album

lasting legacy from Watergate is in Dick:

"no president will ever lie to us again"

Probably a little blurry:

http://i1059.photobucket.com/albums/t427/sayhey1/august91974_zpsdca30fbf.jpg

Oops, wrong chart--that's for the week ending August 3, 1974. The correct chart would be towards the end of this issue.

None of (his war crimes) brought down Nixon. However weary the country was with Vietnam, it was regarded as standard policy, however misguided. Only when Nixon attacked a powerful target did his political career collapse.

Unlike antiwar dissidents, the Democratic Party had serious mainstream pull. It was one thing to spy on the Black Panthers and the Yippies; it was quite another to wiretap people connected to corporate and private wealth....

Still, imagine how Nixon would enjoy Obama's NSA and drone wars.

He'd be right at home, along with the rest of us.

http://dennisperrin.blogspot.com/2014/08/downfall-ii-oval-delirium.html

what brought him down were the tapes

...about ratfucking the Dems

(and covering up)

Perlstein on the 40th anniversary of The Pardon:

First Woodward, then Bernstein, came to conclude there had been no deal, and that this was instead an extraordinarily noble act: Ford “realized intuitively that the country had to get beyond Nixon.” After Ford died in 2006, Peggy Noonan went even further. She said Ford “threw himself on a grenade to protect the country from shame.”

They’re wrong. For political elites took away a dangerous lesson from the Ford pardon — our true shame: All it takes is the incantation of magic words like “stability” and “confidence” and “consensus” in order to inure yourself from accountability for just about any malfeasance.

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/08/watergates_most_lasting_sin_gerald_ford_richard_nixon_and_the_pardon_that_made_us_all_cynics/

I can't remember if it was Mad Magazine or Nixon enemy Paul Conrad who had the best cartoon about the pardoning: President Huntz Hall Ford cheerfully staring into the "things to do your first day as president" list: 1. Pardon Nixon. 2. Don't bomb the Russians

Swear to god, about half the time I vent to someone at work about something, my principal will make casual reference to what I was venting about within a day or two. I need to get a team of plumbers up and running.

That pardon was probably one of the five or ten most important events of the last 1/2 century (in America). Incalculable, nation-altering effect when a criminal President is let off the hook like that.

Since moving back to OC I've bee re-reading Nixonland irregularly. The creation of the silent majority is some evil genius masterminding.

Anybody remember the way Bill Clinton would reference, in a croaky voice, people "who work hard and play by the rules"? Pretty sure I got to hear that more than once, and Hillary brought the phrase back for an encore last year in a speech in Iowa I believe.

His way of trying to re-define the Silent Majority to include those messed over by corporate ruthlessness, without necessarily letting in the P O O R (except for the "deserving" poor, who have to be saints to qualify). So, a slightly progressive redefinition, but probably too compromised to matter.

Is there a recommended bio on Roger Ailes that's heavy on his Nixon years? He's like the villain out of Tomorrow Never Dies.

It's not a biography at all, but I think Joe McGinniss's The Selling of the President 1968 is primarily about Ailes.