New Book On Media Myths

April 11, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, News media, Presidents, Richard Nixon, TV News Personalities, U.S. History, Watergate | 1 Comment 

W. Joseph Campbell is a professor at American University School of Communications. Before he entered academia he spent 20 years as a journalist, often traveling and working abroad (in the days when major American newspapers and magazines could afford to send a fair number of reporters overseas).

He has a new book coming out in July, Getting It Wrong, published by the University of California Press. It focuses on ten major myths about the Fourth Estate that have arisen in the last century or so. The Washington Post website’s “Political Bookworm” discusses three of these: that the Spanish-American War was mainly the creation of William Randolph Hearst; that Edward R. Murrow, when he criticized Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy on his TV show See It Now, was the first major journalist to criticize McCarthy’s tactics (when several reporters and columnists were already doing so regularly); and that the thirty-seventh President was removed from office entirely through the efforts of Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman and the late Jason Robards Jr:

Katharine Graham, The Post’s publisher during the Watergate period, said in 1997: “Sometimes people accuse us of bringing down a president, which of course we didn’t do. The processes that caused [Nixon's] resignation were constitutional.” She was right, but the complexities of Watergate are not readily recalled these days. What does stand out is a media-centric interpretation that the dogged reporting of Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought Nixon down.

But Where’s The Silent E?

March 20, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Humor, Watergate | 1 Comment 

“Behind every Watergate there’s a Milhous.”

- Words on a button, manufactured sixteen years before The Simpsons premiered, seen at the Watergate exhibit at the Newseum in Washington, DC.

Al Haig In Conversation

February 27, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Cold War, International Affairs, Middle East, Military, News media, Nixon Administration figures, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Vietnam, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

In 2000, James Rosen of Fox News interviewed Gen. Alexander Haig for his biography of John Mitchell. That book, The Strong Man, was published eight years later. But it turns out that, in the course of the three-hour conversation, the General talked of many other things besides Watergate, with his customary verve and forcefulness, and in tomorrow’s Washington Post, there’s an article by Rosen in which Gen. Haig ranges from Vietnam to America’s policy toward Lebanon to the first Gulf War. Also worth reading is the comment on the article by Ken Hughes of the Miller Presidential Center at the University of Virginia.

The Third Paragraph

February 20, 2010 by admin | Filed Under Barack Obama, In Memoriam, Military, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

In 2003, Gerald S. Strober and Deborah Hart Strober published an oral history of the Ronald Reagan presidency, the third in a series of such books. (The others concerned the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, and the reign of Elizabeth II.) One section of the book concerned John Hinckley’s attempted assassination of the fortieth President in 1981, and the press briefing held shortly after it in which Gen. Alexander M. Haig, the Secretary of State, said: “I am in control here at the White House, pending the return of the vice-president.”

Referring to Gen. Haig’s briefing, veteran Republican strategist Lyn Nofziger told the Strobers: “That will be the third paragraph of his obituary.”

Nofziger died in 2006, so this morning, when Gen. Haig passed away, he was not around to see his prediction be fulfilled on a number of websites. The New York Times was first – or tried to be first. The initial version of Tim Weiner’s obituary there mentioned Nofziger’s statement and said he had predicted the third graf (to use the old-time newspaper lingo) “would detail” the briefing – which he doesn’t say, at least in the Strober book. The obit’s third paragraph then mentioned the briefing, and the fourth described it in detail. Some wag at the paper pointed out this discrepancy and within an hour or so the article was reformatted so that the details were given in the third paragraph.

During the rest of the day, one obit after another told the story of the 1981 briefing in the third paragraph. Some of these, like the obits at Politics Daily, the BBC website and the Associated Press, didn’t refer to Nofziger’s prediction. Others, such as the one in the Times of London, did.

But several newspapers bucked the trend. The London Telegraph devoted the third paragraph of its obit to Gen. Haig’s effort to mediate the dispute between the UK and Argentina over the Falkland Islands – probably a lesser chapter of his career, but obviously of interest to British readers.

And James Hohmann’s obit at the Washington Post also did not get on the briefing bandwagon. Instead, the third paragraph in the first online version discussed Gen. Haig’s efforts to keep the Nixon Administration on an even keel in the darkest days of Watergate. And, happily, this was replaced by what I think Gen. Haig would truly have been delighted to read as the third paragraph of his obituary:

In a statement, President Obama said Gen. Haig “exemplified our finest warrior-diplomat tradition of those who dedicate their lives to public service.”

That said, the General had a prodigious sense of humor – it was no accident that he counted iconoclastic comedian Mort Sahl among his friends – so he probably would have been amused at the striving of so many media outlets to fulfil Nofziger’s prophecy.

(Another article worth reading is the AP’s account of reactions to Gen. Haig’s death, including a quote from the Post’s Bob Woodward in which he points out that the General was almost the only individual whom he made a point of ruling out as being “Deep Throat” before he identified Mark Felt as DT in 2005.)

Thomas Mallon Looks At “The Pink Lady”

January 9, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Presidents, Richard Nixon, Senate, U.S. History, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

In November, TNN’s Frank Gannon wrote about the appearance in Tina Brown’s Daily Beast of an excerpt from The Pink Lady, the new biography by Sally Denton of Helen Gahagan Douglas, the actress-turned-Congressperson who was defeated by then-Rep. Richard Nixon for the U.S. Senate in 1950.

Denton’s book is now in the stores, and is reviewed in the current issue of the New York Times Book Review by Thomas Mallon, the eminent historical novelist and critic. He criticizes the biography for many of the same faults (sketchy research, questionable assumptions) that Frank found in the excerpt.

What really grabbed my attention, however, is the notice at the review’s conclusion that Mallon is now at work on a novel about Watergate. His 2007 novel Fellow Travelers is an expert study of Washington during the McCarthy era, with RN as a supporting character, so I am very keen to see how he’ll write about the days of ‘72 and ‘73.

(Here, it’s worth mentioning that longtime Washington journalist Roy Hoopes died a few weeks ago at the age of 87. His best-known books are Our Man In Washington, a mystery story starring H. L. Mencken, and the definitive biography of novelist James M. Cain, but his last book, A Watergate Tape, is also the most recent novel that I know of about that affair.)

The Watergate Hotel Back In The News

December 20, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under U.S. History, Watergate | 2 Comments 

In July I wrote here about the uncertain status of the Watergate Hotel, best remembered, of course, for the break-in that ultimately brought about the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency. At that time, the hotel had been put up for auction by Deutsche Bank, after Monument Realty, the company that had owned the hotel and planned to convert it to condominiums (until tenants of the Watergate apartment complex challenged the move), had lost the property as a result of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which had been the primary financial backer of the project.

The auction in July produced no buyers, and the hotel has remained in limbo since. But recent weeks have seen a change in this status. Monument, with new backing, put in a bid this fall to reacquire the Watergate. It was outbid by the Jumeirah Group of Dubai, a leader in the luxury hotel field. But thanks to Dubai’s financial crisis in recent weeks, the Jumeirah bid fell apart. Now, the Washington Post reports that Monument’s bid has been accepted and the deal is expected to close next month. The company’s plans are to reopen the structure as a luxury hotel.

I stayed at the Watergate for Thanksgiving weekend in 2001, when it was part of the Swissotel group, and well remember the excellent Continental-themed cuisine of the restaurant. I’m keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that, although “Watergate” for most of America will always bring to mind wiretaps and taped doors, the reopened hotel will again be a fine place to visit.

From Bat To Amos To….Richard?

December 10, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, In Memoriam, Pat Nixon, Presidents, Richard Nixon, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

Word came from Los Angeles this evening of the death yesterday of actor Gene Barry at the age of 90. Barry’s career was a very long one – he made his Broadway debut in 1942 – and highly varied. In 1944, he performed opposite Mae West in her show Catherine Was Great. A decade later, he was starring in what probably still is, despite the best efforts of Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise, the most loved film adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War Of The Worlds. By the end of the 1950s he was starring as the dapper Bat Masterson on television, and a few years after that was a hit as the wealthy policeman Amos Burke on Burke’s Law. Another popular series, The Name Of The Game, followed.

The next decade proved rather more low-key, as Barry shuttled between TV guest spots and that vanished institution which is an even more cherished memory of the 1970s than pet rocks or Pong, the dinner-theater circuit. Then, in 1983, he came back to Broadway for the first time in 21 years as Georges, the gay nightclub owner in the blockbuster musical La Cage Aux Folles, a role which earned him a Tony nomination and ultimately helped win him a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

But it came as quite a surprise, reading Barry’s obituaries this evening, to find out that the previous year, he had starred in a show that seemed destined for Broadway but (according to this interview with the actor) opened and closed in Atlanta in July 1982, proving so expensive to produce in its three-week run that plans to bring it to New York were set aside.

The show was co-written by Tommy Oliver and Edward J. Lakso, and its title was simple yet quite descriptive – Watergate: The Musical – with Gene Barry starring as Richard Nixon. His wife, Betty Clair Barry, played Pat Nixon. Ed Herlihy, the instantly recognizable narrator of countless ’40s and ’50s newsreels, played Sen. Sam Ervin.

I imagine many readers of TNN are trying to visualize TV’s Bat Masterson trading in his embroidered vest for a dark blue suit and wingtips, so here’s a photo of Barry as RN – before the offer to play Georges came and he went back to his finery.

Herbert J. Miller Jr., 1924-2009

November 21, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under In Memoriam, National Archives, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | 3 Comments 

Last Saturday, Herbert J. Miller Jr., known as “Jack” to his friends and colleagues, died at age 85 in Rockville, Maryland. Miller, a native of Minnesota, came to Washington after service in WWII, graduated from George Washington University’s law school in 1949, and went to work at Kirkland & Ellis, one of the city’s best firms. Thus began one of the most varied and impressive legal careers in a city that hardly lacks great lawyers.

In 1961, Miller was persuaded by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to leave private practice and join the Justice Department as head of its criminal division. For the next four years, he was the leading figure in the successful prosecutions of Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa; political fixer Bobby Baker; and many of the biggest names in organized crime. On several occasions his opponent in the courtroom was that legendary advocate, the late Edward Bennett Williams.

In 1965, Miller went into private practice and founded Miller, Cassidy, Larocca & Lewin, which, until its dissolution in 2001, was among the handful of Washington’s most high-powered firms. In his years with the firm, Miller represented organizations as diverse as National Public Radio and NASCAR. He kept in touch with Robert Kennedy and was a pallbearer at the latter’s funeral in 1968; the following year he was retained by Sen. Edward Kennedy for a time after the Chappaquiddick accident. (However, Miller’s own views were those of a liberal Republican; he ran for lieutenant governor of Maryland on the GOP ticket in 1970, his only venture into the political fray, but was defeated.)

But as famed as some of Miller’s clients were, all of them pale in prominence compared to the man whom the attorney represented for nearly two decades: Richard Nixon. Miller was first engaged by the former President just after his resignation in 1974, and from then until RN’s death (and for a number of years afterwards, representing his estate) Miller diligently labored on behalf of his client’s legal interests.

In the first weeks of this work, his task was to deal with Gerald Ford’s White House regarding the pardon which the thirty-eighth President gave his predecessor in September 1974. Then, through the years, Miller carefully worked on the litigation over the ownership and accessibility of the White House tapes, which culminated in the agreement which made them accessible to the public. Among the other Nixon-related cases in which he was involved was the one which led to the 1982 decision by the Supreme Court that the former President could not be sued in civil court for his actions during his time in office – a decision whose ramifications are felt every time a Chief Executive returns to private life.

But to say all this still does not indicate how versatile Miller was. He could argue the profoundest constitutional issues before the Supreme Court and then – as he did once – defend his mother-in-law on a speeding charge in traffic court. His bulldog tenacity in a courtroom was offset by amiability and good humor outside it. Truly, he was an exemplary figure in his profession.

Troublesome Facts About John Dean

November 11, 2009 by Geoff Shepard | Filed Under Watergate | 6 Comments 

Editor’s note: John Dean will be giving a lecture entitled Watergate: The Final Chapter from 7pm to 9pm (pst) at Chapman University in Orange, California.

Original caption from Bettman/Corbis: John W. Dean III, the fired White House Counsel, is sworn in 6/25 as the Senate Watergate Committee resumes its investigation of the Watergate affair. Senator Sam Ervin, Democrat-North Carolina, chairman of the committee administers the oath.

[*Footnote:  John Dean’s early career is well documented by letters, interviews and other materials compiled in connection with his sentencing—and are publicly available from the Library of Congress as a part of the papers of Judge John Sirica.  Dean’s role in Watergate and the subsequent trial is derived in the main from documentation in the files of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, which is publicly available at the National Archives.  The author’s views are more fully laid out—and documented—in his book about the politics behind the Watergate scandal, entitled The Secret Plot to Make Ted Kennedy President, Inside the Real Watergate Conspiracy, published in 2008 by Penguin Sentinel.]

I.   Introduction

Blind Ambition, John Dean’s 1976 book about Watergate, is being released in a paperback version —with a new After word by the author.  The book launch is planned for June 17^th at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda.  No doubt Dean will be described as the former Counsel to President Nixon who got caught up in all the wrongdoing, but repented in time to become the lead government witness against his former colleagues in the Watergate Cover-up trial.

The actual story, however, is not nearly so benevolent to Dean or his actions:  He is the arch-villain of Watergate—playing central roles in bringing the problem about, making it far worse through an inept cover-up, and then changing sides and his story in an effort to avoid punishment for his misdeeds.

II.  John Dean’s Murky Background

You will read his books and search the Internet in vain if you are looking for any detail in John Dean’s rise to power.  One might believe that his story was one of a natural progression from Wooster College to Georgetown Law School to the House Judiciary Committee, the Department of Justice and then to the Nixon White House—but this would overlook the astonishing number of fits and restarts in his early career:

• Dean grew up in Marion, Ohio and first attended Eber Baker High School—switching to Staunton Military Academy in Virginia early in his Sophomore year.  It is not clear what happened at Baker High, but in that era you got sent away to military school only if you came from a military family or there was trouble on the home front.
• He graduated from Staunton in 1957, but did not go into the military.  Instead, he enrolled at Colgate University in New York, intending to major in English.  Things did not go well for him at Colgate and he again switched schools in the middle of his Sophomore Year—returning to Ohio to attend tiny Wooster College, where his activities centered on the Pre-Law Club.
• In his Senior Year, Dean married Karla Hennings, daughter of Senator Thomas Hennings of Missouri.  He graduated in the lower third of his class in 1961 (144/204), but did not go to law school.  Instead, he enrolled in American University in Washington, DC, doing graduate work in political science.
• In 1962, he dropped out of American University to enroll in Georgetown Law School, from which he graduated in 1965.
• His first (and only) experience in private practice was with the small communications law firm of Welsh & Morgan, who specialized in obtaining very lucrative FCC broadcast licenses.  Dean was fired in six months ‘for unethical conduct’:  Apparently, while working on a license application for a firm client, he also prepared an application on behalf of his mother-in-law in St. Louis.  It is not clear from the record whether the Dean application was in direct competition with the one he was working on for the firm or just one that would have reduced the scarce number of such licenses.  What is clear is that Dean quickly ascertained the lucrative nature of what he was working on for the firm and sought to take advantage of that knowledge for his own family.
• Dean quickly became Minority Counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, courtesy of Rep. Bill McCullough of Ohio—and Wooster College alum.  For reasons that remain unclear, Dean ‘was terminated effective August 13, 1967’ and remained unemployed for the next six months.
• In February of 1968, Dean became Associate Director of the Commission to Reform the Federal Criminal Laws, named the Brown Commission after its chairman, Edmund G (Pat) Brown ( who had defeated Richard Nixon in 1962 to become California’s Governor).  Dean described his duties as administrative in nature, but also dealing with conflict of laws and death penalty statutes.  While on the Commission staff, Dean obtained a letter from his previous law firm that qualified his termination, saying it  ‘resulted from a basic disagreement over law firm policies regarding the nature and scope of an associate’s activities’—but the letter notably did not rescind the prior characterization of being terminated for unethical conduct.

It is from this highly questionable base of experience and expertise that Dean became Associate Deputy Attorney General shortly after Nixon was inaugurated in January of 1969.  It was there that he supervised the work of the Legislative and Legal Section of the Department of Justice.  Six months into his new job, Dean separated from his wife, leaving her with their two year old son.

Dean moved to the White House in July of 1970, replacing John D Ehrlichman as Nixon’s Counsel.  How could someone who started and then dropped out of his first high school, college and graduate school, and who was terminated from his first two jobs end up on the White House staff?  It is as story of a classic bureaucratic move gone bad:  Ehrlichman had roomed at UCLA with Bob Haldeman before joining to Stanford Law School and practicing law in Seattle.  He had been a senior member of Nixon’s 1968 campaign staff that was run by Haldeman.  With Haldeman as Nixon’s Chief of Staff and Ehrlichman as his lawyer, they soon became known as the Berlin Wall.  After eighteen months, Ehrlichman become Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, taking all his top staff to the newly formed Domestic Council.

The hiring of John Dean to replace Ehrlichman—essentially replacing a power figure with a demonstrably less senior successor—was done to assure the Counsel’s office did not again become a power base.  Dean has said ‘the title was the best part of the job’, since all he really was ‘just a messenger boy between Haldeman and Attorney General John Mitchell.  He told his sentencing officer that ‘His principle [sic] duty was of evaluating and handling security clearances and clemency petitions in addition to administrative duties.’  Amazingly in retrospect, the FBI full field investigation that would have preceded any appointment to the White House staff was waived in Dean’s case—since he would have been the one to review it.

III.  The Arch-Villain of Watergate

There are three operative figures at the very center of the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up:  John Dean, Gordon Liddy and Jeb Magruder.  In the end, it was their supervisors—Bob Haldeman, John Mitchell and John Ehrlichman—who were convicted in the Watergate Cover-up trial—and were certainly the most vilified, but the former three actually ran the operations.

We will focus on John Dean’s role.  His path to becoming a central figure began when he was assigned the responsibility of designing a campaign intelligence plan for Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign.  It was in this role that he recruited Gordon Liddy, placing him at the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP) and promising him a $1 million budget for its implementation.

Jeb Magruder, CRP’s acting chief of staff while John Mitchell remained Attorney General, soon informed Liddy that only Mitchell could approve such a $1 million program—and promptly sought John Dean’s assistance in arranging a meeting at the Attorney General’s office.  That fateful meeting occurred on January 28, 1972 and was attended by Liddy (who was presenting the plan), Dean (who had originated it), Magruder (who would be responsible for oversight) and Mitchell (whose approval was needed for budgetary purposes).  Liddy’s plan was off-the-wall, suggesting a program of mugging, bugging, kidnapping and prostitution.  It was not approved, but principally because it would cost too much.

Liddy was devastated, but on the trip back to their offices, Magruder and Dean urged Liddy to design a scaled down version.  He did and it was presented to the same folks in the same place on February 4^th, less than a week later.  By this time, mugging, kidnapping and prostitution had been eliminated, but specific bugging targets were identified, with an overall projected cost of $500,000.  Dean arrived a few minutes late and stated such a plan should not even be discussed in the presence of the Attorney General.  While he has portrayed this as an early sign of his reluctance, it was taken by others to mean Mitchell deserved some wiggle room (plausible deniability) should something go wrong with the plan’s implementation.  Regardless, the meeting ended without any approval.

There remains substantial ambiguity about whether Liddy’s plan was ever approved by Mitchell:  Magruder met with Mitchell on March 1 in Miami and Liddy’s plan (now priced at $250,000 was the last item on a list of some thirty topics.  Magruder swears it was approved; Mitchell devoted half his defense at trial trying to disprove Magruder’s assertion.  A third witness, Fred LaRue, who was at the meeting and later became a government witness, stoutly maintained that, while the topic was discussed, Mitchell never gave his approval for its implementation.  Regardless, Magruder acted as thought it had been approved, phoning CRP’s offices to authorize release of substantial funds to Liddy.  It may be that Magruder was fearful of returning and being confronted by Liddy without having obtained approval:  Liddy had already committed to substantial expenditures and bills were overdue.  Liddy was an intense guy and he had threatened Magruder’s life before.  Besides, Magruder had authorized $37,000 in payments to Liddy on his own authority even before ;going to Miami.

Fast forward several months:  Liddy’s plan is being implemented; bugs are planted in the offices of the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate Office Building and results are being shared with Magruder and Mitchell.  A second break-in is authorized, but goes awry:  the burglars are caught, one of whom is James McCord, a former CIA wire expert who is CRP’s head of security.

Understandable panic spreads among those with guilty knowledge, certainly including Dean, Magruder and Mitchell—each of whom was present for the two fateful meetings in Mitchell’s Attorney General offices (thereby subjecting each to potential criminal prosecution).

John Dean, who is just returning from a trip to the Philippines , is assigned responsibility for ascertaining what actually happened.   Not surprisingly, he meets with Liddy that Monday afternoon , confirms  that (as feared) it was his operation that went bad, and reports this to a meeting that evening of CRP staff in Mitchell’s Watergate apartment (including Liddy’s commitment to his team that their defense costs will be covered).

What Dean reports to Haldeman and Ehrlichman appears to be somewhat different:  He assuages their principal fear that this was an operation authorized by Charles Colson, Special Counsel to the President, and run out of the White House itself.  Dean states categorically that no one on the White House staff knew in of the break-in in advance.   Dean conveniently omits any mention of the two meetings in the Attorney General’s office or of his prior participation.

Assured the White House itself is not at risk, three things happen in quick succession:  (i) Dean is assigned oversight responsibility of liaison with CRP in its own effort to defend itself; (ii) Mitchell departs as head of CRP; and (iii) Dean casts his lot with those at CRP facing similar criminal charges—becoming, in his own words, the chief desk officer for the cover-up.

It is important to realize that, had the White House known of Dean’s own risk of prosecution (i.e.:  had he told them of his work with Liddy and participation in the two meetings in the Attorney General’s office), he would have been immediately removed from the White House staff—every bit as quickly as John Mitchell had been removed as head of CRP.  There was simply no reason to expose the White House itself to such a risk.  Instead, Dean led the cover-up, committing a whole series of criminal acts (including suborning perjury, destroying evidence and improperly revealing government information) while continuously counseling the White House to continue to stonewall on the growing scandal.

Dean Changes Sides—and His Story

When his cover-up collapsed at the end of March, 1973, as it surely should have, Dean was among the very first to realize that federal prosecutors would soon realize he was one of the ringleaders. He switched sides—both legally and politically—and then changed his story to enhance his role as principal witness for the prosecution:

• He was the very first person to approach the prosecutors, offering testimony against both Mitchell and Magruder in exchange for his own immunity.
• He retained as his criminal defense counsel a Kennedy Democrat, Charles Shaffer
• When this effort did not succeed, he removed a series of non-Watergate files from the Counsel’s office (including those on matters dating from when Ehrlichman was Counsel), sharing them both with the prosecutors and with his own attorney.  These matters became known as ‘the White House horrors’ as they were selectively leaked to destroy Nixon and his administration).
• Beginning on April 2, 1973, Dean and/or his lawyer held a series of wide-ranging meetings with the prosecutors, frequently lasting for three or four hours at a time.  As Dean angled for immunity, his own story began to change:  it was not until toward the end of April that he first began to mention a cover-up or to become antagonistic toward Haldeman and Ehrlichman.  Prior to that, Haldeman was clean and Ehrlichman’s involvement was restrained.  And it was not until early May, after Dean had been terminated from his position as Counsel, that he first mentioned any involvement of Nixon himself.  In the words quoted from a memo in the prosecution’s own files, “. . .thus changing dramatically from his previous stance.”

Dean was the only witness who could move the scandal from its operators (Dean, Liddy and Magruder) to the next level (Ehrlichman, Haldeman and Mitchell)—and he soon became the darling of the Kennedy Democrats:  making Dean a hero was critical to the political destruction of Nixon and a whole series of prominent Republicans.  Dean’s electrifying testimony before the Ervin Committee represented the culmination, drafted in a series of secret meetings between Dean, his own lawyer and Sam Dash, the Committee’s counsel, represents expert political spin:  the arch-villain of Watergate, the one who set events in motion that culminated in the Watergate break-in, the one who made the scandal far worse through an inept cover-up and who almost single handedly prevented any White House disclosures, was recast as an earnest young lawyer only interested in telling the truth about the wrongdoing in which he had found himself a part.

Dean’s testimony, lauded for his innocence and precise recollection of events, occurred prior to disclosure of the White House taping system.  A careful review of the Dean tapes, however, shows he was substantively wrong on numerous occasions.  An analysis done by the Special Prosecutor and available at National Archives enumerates some nineteen examples of where Dean’s’ assertions are either contradicted or not supported by review of the White House tapes.  Another witness might have faced a perjury investigation, but not John Dean:  he was far too valuable as a prosecution witness.  Indeed, even the disclosure of his ‘dramatically changing’ account of events was kept hidden from defense counsel in flagrant violation of the Brady Doctrine (requiring disclosure of exculpatory evidence).

Dean’s role and situation is best summed up by Richard Ben Veniste, in his own book about the Watergate prosecutions (Stonewall, The Real Story of the Watergate Prosecution)

Archie Cox was particularly firm in his personal determination that Dean be prosecuted no matter what.  Dean became an idée fixe for Cox.  True, as a witness Dean would cement otherwise weak cases against Haldeman and Ehrlichman.  But Cox preferred, if forced to choose, to take the relatively sure shot at Dean rather than the long shot against Dean’s superiors.  When the Saturday Night Massacre loomed close, it might have been propitious for Cox to make a deal with Dean and secure Dean’s testimony against President Nixon as another weapon to hold the President off.  Even then, Cox’s determination did not waiver.  With all the uncertainties of Watergate that swirled around him—the weakness of evidence against Nixon’s top aides without Dean’s testimony, the possibility of Presidential culpability, the problems of obtaining White House evidence and of dealing with “national security”—Cox saw Dean’s guilt as the one enduring constant.  During a particularly difficult period Archie remarked to us, “If everything else goes down the drain the one thing I can cling to is Dean’s venality.”

Moral balancing aside, the realpolitik of the situation was that Dean would not be an effective witness at trial if he got a free ride.  His credibility would be substantially diminished by his making a deal with the prosecutors to implicate others only if the prosecutors completely forgave his own deep involvement. The evident effect of Dean’s prison sentence later, on the jurors at the Watergate cover-up trial confirmed our tactical judgment.  As a man who was already serving a long jail term for doing what he testified he had been instructed to do by Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Dean made a measurably greater impression than if he had never been charged or punished for his acts. (p. 107)

But Archibald Cox, the first Special Prosecutor, was lost in the Saturday Night Massacre (which came the day after Dean was allowed to plead to a single felony count) and his staff was out for blood.  While Dean originally was to be sentenced ‘following the trial in which his testimony was relevant’ (the customary procedure in such cases), there were going concerns about his own credibility as a witness.  To strengthen his testimony, Dean was hurriedly sentenced to a substantial prison term of one to four years, with confinement to begin the first day of the Watergate Cover-up trial.  Of course, Dean did not actually go to a Federal prison:  instead, he spent his nights at Fort Holibird, a nearby witness holding facility in Maryland.  Many of his days were spent on the witness stand or in the prosecution’s office.  If not testifying, he was working on his book.

Dean was well rewarded for his changed role:  One week following convictions of all major defendants on all counts in the Watergate Cover-up trial, John Dean saw his sentence reduced to time served—emerging from confinement a free man, having spent only four months at Fort Holibird, the shortest term of any central Watergate figure.

Conclusion

Dean’s reissuance of his book, stepping once more into the political spectrum of Watergate, will certainly get media attention—except this time efforts to uncover what really happened in Watergate and its prosecution may focus more attention on Dean than he has anticipated.

Dean was a central figure in setting events into motion that resulted in the Watergate break-in; his deceit during the cover-up and his desertion to the Democrats cost Richard Nixon the Presidency.  Dean is already a convicted felon and a disbarred lawyer—but much more remains to be understood about his real role in Watergate and its aftermath.

Max Holland On The “Other” Deep Throat

November 6, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under News media, Nixon Administration, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

Last week I wrote of Max Holland’s highly interesting article in this month’s Washingtonian magazine concerning the unnamed lawyer connected with the Washington Post who (according to H.R. Haldeman in a conversation with RN on Oct. 19, 1972) had told a friend at the Justice Department (the late Henry Peterson, who then told John Dean, who told Haldeman) that Mark Felt was providing information about the Watergate affair for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s articles.

A considerably longer version of this article, with much greater detail (especially concerning the late Edward Bennett Williams) can now be found at Holland’s washingtondecoded site. It’s very much worth reading for anyone looking into that perennial question of what Woodward and Bernstein knew, and when (and from whom) they knew it.

The Last Of The Watergate Cubans Speaks

October 31, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Nixon Administration figures, U.S. History, Watergate | 3 Comments 

In June I wrote here of the death of Bernard L. Barker, one of the five men whose arrest at the Watergate complex on the evening of June 17, 1972, resulted in the unfolding of the scandal that claimed the Presidency of Richard Nixon. At that time I noted that of the five, only Eugenio Rolando Martinez, of the four Cuban-Americans arrested, and James W. McCord, who led the group into the offices of the Democratic National Committee, were still living.

Today, as a result of an English-language discussion at a left-wing website, I learned of an interview with Martinez, now 86, that appeared in July in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. This is a fairly interesting article, not least because it seems to add a startling new fact to the existing accounts of what happened that night.

Martinez states that he and his fellow Cubans thought that the object of the Watergate break-in was to obtain information establishing that the regime of Cuba’s Fidel Castro was taking an active part in the campaign of Sen. George McGovern for the White House. This much is not new; the late Frank Sturgis and the other Cubans have said this.

What is interesting is Martinez’s emphatic statement that the operation was betrayed by McCord. He mentions something that has been the source of much discussion over the decades: that McCord, a security expert so pre-eminent in the field that he once was in charge of physical security for CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, made the elementary mistake of taping the locks on the side of the doors leading into the DNC headquarters so that the tape was visible when the doors were closed, which was what tipped off Watergate security guard Frank Wills that someone was in the building without permission. (McCord, by titling his self-published book on Watergate A Piece Of Tape, subtly referred to this, though the book’s cover, showing audio tape reels, clouded the allusion.)

Martinez then goes on to say that McCord ordered his Cuban colleagues to turn off all their walkie-talkies before the arrival of the DC police, after Wills called them. This prevented Alfred Baldwin, who was monitoring the progress of the operation from the Howard Johnson’s hotel across the street, from alerting them that they were about to be apprehended. What’s significant here is that there were six walkie-talkies distributed by McCord to himself and the Cubans, while Baldwin had a radio apparatus in his HoJo’s room that could pick their transmissions up and send calls to them. Two of the six walkie-talkies had dead batteries. Bernard Barker acknowledged turning the third one off on hearing the approach of police outside the DNC offices because the apparatus was audibly crackling. Martinez’s statement, now, explains why the other three walkie-talkies were not available to pick up the call that Baldwin sent from the Ho-Jos, informing them of the arrival of the police outside the building – which might have enabled the intruders to leave before being arrested.

Though Martinez’s interview has gone unnoticed in the American press, it indicates that there’s still a lot of the Watergate story that remains unexplored.

“The Fugitive,” Guest Starring Carl Bernstein?

October 23, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Barack Obama, News media, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate, White House | 1 Comment 

Late last week Alexander Cockburn, one of the elder statesmen of unreconstructed radical journalism, posted an article on his CounterPunch.com site in which he discussed President Obama’s prospects of prevailing in his feud with Fox News. Unlike many more mainstream journalists, he seems to think that the President might actually prevail over the channel that shamelessly gives a forum to He Who Shall Not Be Named, as Glenn Beck was yesterday identified, in Harry Potterspeak, in a Senate committee hearing by Democratic lawmakers too scared, or something, to mouth his moniker aloud – I kid you not.

In his column, Cockburn, like many another left-leaning pundit this week, takes note of the Nixon White House’s conflicts with liberal newsmen in the early Seventies. (And, unlike most of them, he points out that not all of the press corps in those days endorsed lapses in objectivity and decorum. As an example Cockburn mentions the famed moment at a news conference when Dan Rather, upon being greeted with applause when RN called on him, replied to the President’s question, “are you running for anything?” with “no, Mr. President – are you?” and points out that many of Rather’s peers thought that the crack was inappropriate.)

Then Cockburn follows with this paragraph, by way of arguing that the Nixon White House was not especially skilled in fending off attacks from the press:

Actually it’s a measure of how sloppy the Nixon people were that across the entire Watergate Scandal they failed to excavate Carl Bernstein’s family ties to the Communist Party, nor the fact that every few weeks Bernstein would take time off from his investigative labors with Bob Woodward and drive up to Vermont to visit his cousin Shoshana who at that time was living under an alias in Brattleboro, one jump ahead of the FBI which had her on its Ten Most Wanted list as a radical bomber. People often overestimate the surveillance capacities of the state. One leak of that info to one of Nixon’s pet columnists and the Watergate scandal would have been over.

Huh? Good ol’ lovable Carl Bernstein, winner of his hometown’s Howdy Doody contest in the 1950s? Carl, with his all-American love of classic rock’n'roll? (Even while looking into Watergate he reviewed concerts for the Washington Post.) Carl, who’s visited a thousand college campuses (last week making a rare appearance with Bob Woodward at the University of Texas-Permian Basin) genially lecturing the students about the noble profession of journalism?

Of course, the Pulitzer winner’s hard-working middle-class parents and the difficulties they faced over their political views a half-century ago have never been a secret – he wrote a whole book about them, Loyalties, back in the 1980s – but never has there been any word before that he once used to drop in, from time to time, on a New England cousin who was wanted by the FBI.

Well, after some Googling, I figured out who Cockburn must have been talking about.

Between July and November 1969, New York City was hit by eight bombings of the offices of such institutions as Chase Manhattan Bank, Standard Oil, and General Motors, as well as Federal facilities. Most of the bombings occurred in the late-night hours and produced no fatalities, although one of them, hitting the Marine Midland Building, produced nineteen injuries. On November 12, just after the last of these attacks, a radical in his thirties, Sam Melville (a would-be nom de guerre, no relation to the novelist) was arrested (along with George Demmerle, the FBI informant who’d put the authorities on his trail) as he was loading dynamite onto National Guard trucks outside the 69th Regimental Armory in midtown Manhattan. Melville was found guilty of the bombings, sent to Attica Prison, and was killed there during its 1971 riots. His girlfriend and co-conspirator Jane Alpert was arrested at the same time as himself, but jumped bail a month before her sentencing and went underground, ultimately emerging to serve a prison sentence.

Another suspect in the cast who dropped out of sight while the authorities were searching for her was Patricia (or Pat) Swinton. Ms. Swinton, at the time of the bombings, was advertising manager of Rat, a radical-feminist underground paper for which Ms. Alpert wrote. Ms. Swinton ultimately made her way to Brattleboro, Vermont, where she settled down on a commune called Total Loss Farm (celebrated in a “classic” counterculture-era book by Raymond Mungo, whose subsequent works include a biography of Liberace). There, she took the name Shoshana – which indicates that she was the cousin of Carl Bernstein to whom Cockburn refers. (In 1975, she was located and apprehended, then acquitted by a Federal jury. Contrary to Cockburn’s heated description, Ms. Swinton was never on the Ten Most Wanted list.)

Of course, close students of Carl Bernstein’s career will realize that, back in ‘72, the ready availability of a particular organic substance, the medicinal value of which is now regarded as a legally recognized fact in fourteen states (and this week, tacitly, by the White House), was probably what brought him to Total Loss Farm almost as much as looking in on his wayward kinfolk.

But Cockburn’s claim that exposure of the journalist’s visits to Ms. Swinton would have resulted in Watergate being “over” is a tenuous one. It’s not especially a sure thing that Carl Bernstein would have been let go by the Post had they learned he was hanging out with a fugitive cousin in a Vermont commune – after all, this was the heyday of radical chic, and even a figure as elegant as the Georgetown doyenne Kay Halle would routinely offer her hospitality to a variety of unkempt rock stars and hippies in town to work for George McGovern.

It’s true that it doesn’t seem too likely that he and Bob Woodward could have stayed with the Watergate story had this been known. However, other reporters were chasing the Watergate saga too, such as the diligent, secretive, and staggeringly well-sourced Sandy Smith at Time, and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Seymour Hersh at the New York Times. So Cockburn’s notion that Watergate would have fizzled away with Woodstein out of the picture, while it may conform to the version of American history taught by the Post every fifth June 17 and August 9, doesn’t really hold up under examination.

But this is a good occasion to mention an article by veteran journalist Max Holland in the new (November) issue of Washingtonian. (A longer version, according to the magazine, is to appear at Holland’s washingtondecoded.com site, but is not up yet.) In it, Holland looks at a long-standing Watergate conundrum: who was H.R. Haldeman talking about when, in a taped White House conversation on October 19, 1972, he told President Nixon that John Dean had learned that a lawyer associated with the Washington Post (and identified by Haldeman as formerly being with the Justice Department) had identified Mark Felt as the main source of Bernstein and Woodward’s Watergate stories?

Holland looks at a number of attorneys with Post (or Washington Post Company) affiliations at the time, and concludes that two men – the late Harold Ungar, who worked for Justice in the early 1950s and who was on retainer to the Post in 1972, and Edward L. Smith, Newsweek’s counsel at the time (and a onetime Justice attorney) – could fit Haldeman’s description, though Smith, still living, told Holland that he wasn’t the person who ID’d Felt. (Thanks to Maarja Krusten for letting me know about this article.)

Edward Kennedy: Watergate’s “Hidden Hand”

September 14, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Nixon Administration, Richard Nixon, Watergate | 3 Comments 

On today’s Daily Beast, Chris Matthews exalts Senator Edward Kennedy’s prominent —indeed, in Matthews’ telling, pivotal— but hitherto largely unheralded role in using Watergate to cripple the Nixon administration and end the Nixon presidency.

The headline —most likely not written by Matthews but perfectly capturing his piece’s tone— tells it all: “How Kennedy Brought Nixon Down.”

The late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy is hailed as a liberal hero for his tireless crusade for health care, his push for civil rights, and his forceful effort to block Robert Bork from winning a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. But there is another chapter of his legacy that has gone largely overlooked: Kennedy’s role as a hidden hand during Watergate—helping to bring down President Richard M. Nixon.

The preeminently partisan motivation and more-than-potentially self-interested purposes behind the Watergate investigations and prosecutions have long been maintained by many Nixonphiles.  And they have long been mocked and dismissed as displaying typically Nixonian paranoia.

Now Chris Matthews supplies the latest evidence for the axiom that even paranoids have enemies.

Matthews traces the Senator’s seminal involvement that began right after the June 1972 break-in.   It was mostly, and purposely, kept on the down low lest people think that Kennedy or Kennedy partisans were behind it.

It was Kennedy’s Administrative Practices subcommittee—with its staff directed by the formidable Jim Flug and its investigations run by long-time Kennedy Family retainer Carmine Bellino— that tackled Watergate from the earliest days with the kind of passionate intensity and motivation that set them apart from the usual partisan probers on Capitol Hill.

Ted Kennedy had a firm grasp on the weapons he held as a member of the Judiciary Committee and knew precisely how to wield them. It turns out that Richard Nixon, like almost everyone else, was so afraid of the youngest Kennedy brother’s presidential ambitions that he was blinded to the backroom menace Kennedy posed.

Not long after the June 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate, Kennedy’s people went to work. Flug, who was chief counsel to Kennedy’s Judiciary subcommittee, had the Library of Congress begin collecting every news clipping on the break-in. Kennedy then got the full Judiciary Committee to investigate, using its subpoena power.

At Majority Leader Mike Mansfield’s suggestion, the Kennedy-mined information was laundered through North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin — whose faux bumpkin bonhomie belied his Harvard Law degree and masked his decidedly dicey civil rights record.

The initial investigations, and the tsunami of leaks that turned Watergate into a feeding frenzy for Democrats and a cottage industry for journalists, soon hobbled Nixon.  But for all the sordid implications and juicy details, they failed to produce any real evidence of the President’s awareness — much less his involvement.

In order to keep the issue alive, the stakes had to be ratcheted up.  By far the best way to do this was simply to go fishing through the thousands of hours of White House tapes.  If nothing else, that would be bound to produce enough embarrassing and hard-to-explain material to keep the administration on the ropes through the Kennedy restoration in 1976.

But even a powerful Senator with unlimited media backing might have a hard time crafting a subpoena for a fishing expedition.  Chris Matthews continues the story:

Kennedy began pushing for the creation of a special prosecutor to look into Watergate. That, he made clear, was his price for getting Richardson approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee. He rejected the names Richardson put forward until he got the one he wanted: Archibald Cox. Cox had served Attorney General Robert Kennedy as solicitor general, and before that had worked on Jack Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Cox managed JFK’s speechwriting and research operation, most importantly during the “Great Debates” with Nixon.

Kennedy demanded that Richardson give Cox a clear avenue to pursue his target—insisting that the special prosecutor be given unlimited money, unlimited time, and total protection from Nixon. He could not be fired except by Richardson himself—and only then in the event of “extraordinary improprieties.”

Cox proceeded to fill his investigative staff with veterans of Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department and the 1968 presidential campaign. Of the 11 senior counsels Cox hired, seven had been associated with either Jack, Bobby, or Teddy. The Watergate prosecution was going to be a Kennedy operation and Richard Nixon couldn’t do a thing about it.

All of this information —and much, much more, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act and some of the startling documents it debouched— can be found in Geoff Shepard’s recent book The Secret Plot To Make Ted Kennedy President.

The book was clumsily titled (at the non-negotiable insistence of the publisher) and disastrously timed (it was released a few weeks after Senator Kennedy’s brain tumor was diagnosed).  It’s hard to think of a more classic definition of a double whammy.  Maybe Chris Matthews’ unintended imprimatur will stir some interest in Shepard’s book, with its many new and hitherto unpublished documents.

There is no question that wrongs were done and crimes were committed involving and surrounding Watergate and its cover-up.  And the fact that others got away with as bad or worse as the result of a long-applied partisan and unfair double standard doesn’t absolve responsibility.   But the ways and means by which Watergate became the Crime of the Century that toppled a President who had just been re-elected by the second greatest landslide in American history has remained a frustratingly unexamined and unanswered question.

Thanks to the Beast and Chris Matthews, a wider public now has at least the beginnings of an answer.

More Coverage Of The Resignation’s 35th

August 9, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Frost/Nixon, John Dean At The Nixon Library, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon Library, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, TV News, U.S. History, Watergate | 2 Comments 

Today marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of President Nixon’s resignation, and since I wrote about coverage of this last night, some more articles and op-eds of note have appeared. Apart from the memorable discussion of RN’s achievements on this morning’s Chris Matthews Show, discussed in Jonathan Movroydis’s post below, I have not seen or read about any mention of the anniversary on TV. 

Right now MSNBC, for example, is finishing yet another hour of programming about the Manson murders, since today is also the fortieth anniversary of the murder of Sharon Tate and four others, while other networks have already started running shows about Woodstock’s 40th.

(It may be that a lot of younger viewers nowadays wonder how the coverage of Charles Manson affected the coverage of Woodstock in August 1969. It didn’t, since no one, apart from the killers themselves and a few who had crossed their paths, had any idea at the time who had committed the murders. It was not until December 1 of that year that arrest warrants were issued in the Tate case, which brought Manson’s evil to light, and less than a week later the disastrous free festival at Altamont, immortalized in the documentary Gimme Shelter, continued the ominous note on which the decade finished.)

But the Nixon Administration did come up in today’s New York Times online roundtable about Woodstock’s 40th.  The participants include such notables as Nixonland author Rick Perlstein, novelist Ishmael Reed, social critic Morris Dickstein, and historian Joan Hoff, author of Nixon Reconsidered.  Perlstein makes no mention of RN in his contribution, but Ms. Hoff discusses at some length why she thinks that ”Woodstock had little or nothing to do with the radical-conservative change in politics” that began during the Nixon years; she thinks that the big political story of the period was the rise of neoconservatism and the role it played in the emergence of Ronald Reagan on the national scene.

At NPR’s website, Daniel Schorr, who will turn 93 at the end of this month, speaks of the resignation and how it changed American perceptions of the presidency. He concludes:

After 35 years, Nixon is enjoying a revival of interest because of Frost/Nixon, first a stage play, then a movie based on Nixon’s 1977 television interviews with David Frost, for which Nixon was paid $600,000 — triple his annual salary as president.

For that, Frost got the closest thing to an apology that Nixon ever uttered for having put America through the wringer.

“I let the American people down,” he said, “and I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life.”

He did let the people down. And we are still carrying the burden.

And at Truthdig.com, historian Stanley I. Kutler, author of The Wars Of Watergate, offers some thoughts about the resignation, in a gentler tone than has sometimes been the case when he’s written about the Nixon White House.

Speaking of Kutler naturally brings John W. Dean to mind, since both have frequently criticized what they claim are “revisionist” examinations of the events surrounding Watergate. For the last several months, since his appearance at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, Dean has shown up from time to time in scenic Southern California locales such as Mission Viejo to promote his apparently self-published reissue of his book Blind Ambition, and last night he spoke to an audience at the Hotel Zoso in Palm Springs.

(Yes, Zoso as in the alternate title of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, the one with “Stairway To Heaven.”  For Watergate students familiar to that passage in Blind Ambition in which Dean describes H.R. Haldeman informing him that the President thought he was dressing like a “hippie” because his tie was wider than usual at the White House, this has to produce a chuckle.)

The Desert Sun, Palm Springs’s newspaper, has an account of this event. It’s worth mentioning that the caption to one of the photos that accompanies the Sun’s article refers to the current edition of Blind Ambition as being a “sequel” to the original 1976 edition of the book. The truth is that, apart from a new afterword of about 100 pages, it is the same book as that published over 30 years ago.  The real sequel to Blind Ambition was Dean’s 1982 book Lost Honor, which is mostly forgotten except for the chapter in which Dean argues at length that Gen. Alexander Haig was Deep Throat, a theory he later abandoned.

One Finest Hour

August 9, 2009 by David Emig | Filed Under Nixon Administration figures, Richard Nixon, Watergate | 6 Comments 

While the title of this essay might make one blanch; the concluding days of Watergate should be considered as one of Richard Nixon’s finest hours.  Along with the successes of the opening to China, arms control with the Soviet Union, and all of his domestic achievements.

As we all know, difficult times provide the greatest test of one’s character.  During the first days of August 1974, Richard Nixon’s character was tested unlike any other American president in history.

Becoming President of the United States was the great ambition of Richard Nixon.  It is the ultimate journey for any American politician.  Since his entry on to the national stage some twenty years before, it was a mighty struggle throughout his career.  Thru the valleys of two defeats that would have shattered anyone else; and the constant rigors of intense political battles.  Finally in 1969, thru all of his struggles; Richard Nixon became President of the United States.

Imagine for a moment how hard that would be to give up…  Something you worked you whole career for.  Something that possibly you valued more than anything else.

During the days of August, RNs political critics and adversaries feared the worse.  His harshest opponents saw him as power mad, frightfully capable of anything.  Would the President try to hold on to power by any means?  Nixon’s personal strain of the times might cause a calamity unprecedented in American history.  A member of RNs cabinet, James Schlesinger feared that the Armed Forces would be called to keep the President in power and sought to prevent it.

Of course, they did not know Richard Nixon.  They could have seen how Richard Nixon would have handled these last days of his Presidency.  After all, there was historical precedent for it in Nixon’s own career.  In 1960 in the immediate aftermath of the closest election in American history, many Nixon supporters thought that the election was stolen.  Many, including President Eisenhower favored contesting the election result.  However, Richard Nixon could not contest the election.  He felt that it would send the wrong message to young democracies that even American elections could not be legitimate.  A contested election, without a President would harm America and its prestige around the world.

He loved his country, and respected the presidency too much to put it thru the political apocalypse that Nixon’s opponents feared.  There would be no armed forces circling the White House.  RN didn’t even insist that the process of impeachment continue.  He thought that the country would be crippled by a part-time, politically damaged President.  So, Richard Nixon sacrificed the very thing he valued most…  The Presidency.

While there is much to criticize about Nixon’s handling of Watergate and related areas, future generations of Americans owe Richard Nixon a debt of gratitude.  In other nations, other leaders in Richard Nixon’s position would have held tightly to power until a tragic end.  History is filled with events like that.  But Richard Nixon didn’t do that.  He established a precedent for an orderly transfer of power, and in the final analysis the fact that no person is above the law.

Two Anniversaries

August 8, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Apollo XI XLth, Healthcare, News media, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, Senate, U.S. History, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

Last month the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, and of Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin’s historic moonwalk, was the subject of many hours of TV coverage and commentary, and of innumerable column-inches of articles and op-eds in what remains of American newsmagazines and the daily press – not to mention what was written and pictured online.  Next weekend, when Woodstock turns 40, we’ll undoubtedly see an almost equal amount of coverage. 

Back in 1969, these two events were seen by some to represent opposite, perhaps irreconcilable sides of the nation; it may be that for every mud-soaked hippie and teenager in Woodstock who was willing to grant that walking on the moon was “far out,” there were two that would have complained about all the “bread” spent on getting the astronauts to the lunar surface when there were, “like,” so many things wrong with the inner cities, and the environment that needed fixing.  (“Tricia, Tell Your Daddy,” co-written in 1969 by former Phil Spector collaborator Jeff Barry and Jay And The Americans’s Marty Sanders, and recorded by the latter’s band as well as bubblegum singer Andy Kim, presents these sentiments in musical form.)  But today, Woodstock and Apollo tend to be seen in the nostalgic mist of memory and idealism, two sides of the same cherished coin. 

Two other, less happy anniversaries have gone more or less unnoticed.  The Media Research Center’s website pointed out last month that on July 21, 1969, and in the succeeding days before and after Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins splashed down, coverage of the Apollo mission had to jostle for attention with the news coming out of Massachusetts, after it was revealed that Sen. Edward Kennedy, on the night of July 18, had driven off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island adjoining Martha’s Vineyard, and that while he had survived the accident, his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, had not.

What happened that night – and in the following days, as Sen. Kennedy tried to explain what had happened -  ended the senator’s hopes for the Presidency, as became clear when he unsuccessfully challenged President Carter in 1980.  But two generations now have no memory of Chappaquiddick, and, in any event, with Sen. Kennedy now gravely ill, it’s understandable that last month the anniversary of this tragedy passed with little comment. (Indeed, I only glancingly thought about Chappaquiddick in late July, and I have more reason to recall it than most: on July 25, 1969, I sat with Sen. Edmund Muskie in a hotel room in New Albany, Indiana, while he watched Kennedy give his televised speech about what had happened – a speech that, at that instant, made Muskie the Democratic front-runner in the 1972 race.)

As the Media Research Center article notes, the anniversary went unnoticed on the evening network newscasts;  Bill Maher unexpectedly brought it up to his startled panelists on his HBO show Real Time, but other than that it went unmentioned on the air.  Ken Rudin devoted a post to Chappaquiddick at his political blog at NPR’s site on July 21 and was deluged with angry comments. Jeff Simon, the arts editor of the Buffalo News, was the only columnist in a daily newspaper to write about the anniversary, and Jon Meacham, Newsweek’s editor, spoke about it in his column in the magazine’s July 27 issue, which was mainly devoted to a long article by Kennedy about the need for comprehensive health-care legislation. 

To turn to another event, which happened thirty-five years ago this weekend: as recently as 2004, the anniversary of President Nixon’s resignation was the subject of  a fair number of articles and op-eds every five years.  But in 2007, the Watergate break-in’s 35th received much less notice than before.  Most likely this not only had to do with the passage of time, but with the fact that Vanity Fair’s unveiling of W. Mark Felt as “Deep Throat” in 2005 removed the mystery that was the linchpin for much of what was written about Watergate in the previous quarter-century.

And such has been the case with this year’s anniversary of RN’s resignation. So far I’ve spotted three items of much significance. One is a column by Matt Lewis in Politics Daily which also reproduces RN’s August 9 remarks in the East Room in toto.  Another is a column by onetime Nixon White House speechwriter Ben Stein in the American Spectator, in which he reminisces, once more, about being present for those remarks, and notes that the resignation had the effect of introducing the first major note of uncertainty in his own life.  The third is an interview with Nixon’s chief of staff at the time of the resignation, Gen. Alexander M. Haig, in the Palm Beach Post.  There, Gen. Haig remarks:

“Watergate was misunderstood because people didn’t realize they had a very visionary president in Richard Nixon,” Haig said. “The only thing that kept him from office, which was his own fault probably and he’d be the first to admit it, is that he wasn’t lovable. That’s because he was preoccupied with the consequences of his acts, and he always took action only after very careful and systematic analysis.”

Haig said it was Nixon, not Ronald Reagan, who should be credited for ending the Cold War.

“He opened the door to China and that won the Cold War without a shot being fired,” Haig said. “People never understood what going to China meant.”

Arachnophobia At The Watergate

July 31, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Humor, Nixon in the News, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

"Get back, you eight-legged freaks" – actor David Arquette’s ad-lib that inspired the title of the 2002 film Eight Legged Freaks, which was called Arach Attack in production

There was also the 1990 film Arachnophobia with Jeff Daniels. But both of these Hollywood epics somewhat pale in comparison with what transpiredthis week at the ever-newsworthy Watergate complex in Washington.

The management of the Watergate East, the oldest part of the building which houses co-ops (many of whose residents are on the elderly side), periodically sends a newsletter to those who live there.  The current issue, according to Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger of the Washington Post’s Reliable Source column, was rather on the alarmist side:

Nearly half of it, according to the reporters,

was devoted to a cautionary tale about public restrooms. In lurid detail, the building’s management described the tragic deaths of "three women in North Florida" — far from the Watergate, but knock on wood anyway — who took ill after visiting the same restaurant … where toxicologists later found "a small spider … the Two-Striped Telamonia (Telamonia Dimidiata)." Also, a Jacksonville lawyer died with "a puncture wound on his right buttock" after getting off a plane from Indonesia — and officials found spiders’ nests in the toilets of four planes!

"So please," Watergate management warned its residents, "before you use a public toilet, lift the seat to check for these creatures. It can save your life!" (Watergate toilets themselves were not implicated — but still!)

A scary tale indeed – poisonous Asian spiders imported into Florida (a state where many noxious species from abroad have made their home) and obviously ready to hitch rides on vehicles moving up I-95, perhaps to wreak havoc on the Washington tourist industry right around the Labor Day weekend.  It was definitely one of those situations where one pictures our President ripping off his jacket and shirt to display that big letter "O" so familiar from T-shirts hawked during Inauguration Week, and getting on the hotline to Spiderman (who’d naturally know how to handle a situation like this – indeed, might be able to cajole the creatures with an arachnoid version of beer diplomacy).

However, things weren’t quite as bad as the Watergate East management was reporting. Roberts and Argetsinger continue:

The story is completely bogus. It’s a well-traveled urban legend — the kind of tantalizing falsehood that circulates in e-mails forwarded from your mom — that has long since been debunked. Just Google "telamonia" and you’ll see.

The Watergate was not psyched to discuss this. "This was only for residents," said a woman in the management office who declined to give her name. "We realized that it was an Internet hoax, so we have sent another letter telling them that."

The telamonia is a real-life critter. But "it’s a jumping spider, found mostly in Burma or Himalayan regions," [Rick Vetter, a University of California-Riverside entomologist] said, "and no jumping spiders are known to be dangerous."

And so it is that the lavatories of America are not threatened by murderous critters that somehow got past Samuel L. Jackson (or whoever is now in charge of keeping such things off of planes). It’s true that our own brown recluse spider is a rather dangerous thing – I recently had to crush one that was stubbornly trying to invade my father’s house in Indiana – but it’s not known for its affinity for toilet seats. Spidey can go back to weathering the blasts of J. Jonah Jameson, in that happy land where daily newspapers are still thriving.

Uncovering the Nixonian Holy Grail

July 28, 2009 by David Emig | Filed Under Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon, Watergate | 1 Comment 

From “Mother Jones”, there seems to be a new attempt afoot to find out what was on the infamous 18 1/2 minute gap on the tapes.  Not from the tapes, but Haldeman’s notes during the meeting.

More On The Ticket That Never Was

July 25, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Democratic Party, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | 14 Comments 

Today’s Washington Post has an article by Frank Mankiewicz in which the political director of the 1972 McGovern campaign goes into more detail about the notion he toyed with in the hours after his candidate received the nomination one sweltering summer night in Miami Beach: to ask Walter Cronkite, "the most trusted man in America" (according to a poll Mankiewicz had recently examined), to be the South Dakota senator’s running-mate.

Mankiewicz observes (as I recounted in my first post on this subject earlier this week) that it was Sen. Robert Kennedy who proposed, in the early weeks of 1968, that Cronkite run for the seat occupied by New York’s other senator, Jacob Javits. According to Mankiewicz, this was after Cronkite, who had turned against Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House on Vietnam, pleaded with RFK to run against LBJ; this was before the New Hampshire primary gave a shot in the arm to Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s quixotic antiwar candidacy. Kennedy replied (in Mankiewicz’s hearing), "I’ll do it, Walter, if you run for the Senate in New York." This proved unfeasible not only because Cronkite was a Connecticut resident (though RFK had not let his own status as a Virginia resident keep him from running in 1964) but because he was also a registered independent and as such did not meet the requirements to file as a Democrat.

But Mankiewicz kept the conversation in mind, and after McGovern was turned down by Edmund Muskie, Hubert Humphrey, and Ted Kennedy in turn, he brought up Cronkite’s name. The idea was dismissed by the rest of the candidate’s brain trust as unrealistic, and McGovern did not contact the anchorman.

But years later, as I mentioned earlier, Cronkite told McGovern that had he been asked to run on the 1972 Democratic ticket he would have accepted. Mankiewicz says that Cronkite also told a corporate board (on which both men served in the 1990s) that he would have agreed to the vice-presidential nod "in a minute."

Mankiewicz notes in his op-ed that at the time of the Democratic convention Nixon’s lead over McGovern had narrowed to four to seven points in some polls. He is sure that with Cronkite on the ticket, McGovern could either have won or lost by such a narrow margin that, after RN’s resignation – he evidently assumes the Watergate saga would have played itself out in the same manner – the McGovern-Cronkite ticket would have been renominated in 1976 and would have captured the White House.

This is how the op-ed concludes. But it’s worth noting that Mankiewicz does not go on to wonder if McGovern would have achieved re-election in 1980, with Cronkite succeeding him in the White House for eight years.

(This scenario is also called "Dan Rather’s Nightmare." Indeed, the most intriguing part of this alternate history is what would have happened at CBS if Cronkite had quit anchoring in 1972. Rather, at that time, did not have the prestige that he had by 1980 when he took over at CBS Evening News. My guess is that Roger Mudd, or possibly the now-forgotten George Herman, would have been the more likely person to replace Cronkite had he left earlier.)

It may be that Mankiewicz is aware that most likely, if McGovern had been "vindicated" by a near-win in 1972 and won in 1976, we would have seen a Presidency more or less the same as the Carter years, except worse – rampant inflation, friction with Congress, one misstep after another in foreign policy, with the Soviet Union gaining ground across the globe – with the same result: the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Flush Times At The Watergate

July 25, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Nixon in the News, U.S. History, Watergate | 1 Comment 

This week, the Watergate Hotel went up for auction and, despite its enduring notoriety as the site of the June 1972 break-in that ultimately brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency, found no takers – at least for the moment. (The development corporation that owned the hotel planned to convert it into condominiums last year, in partnership with Lehman Brothers, but the collapse of the latter firm and the ensuing recession terminated this plan.)

Quite a number of news stories have appeared about the hotel in recent weeks because it’s on the block, but today’s Toronto Globe and Mail has the most elegantly written and fascinating story I’ve seen so far. In recent years, the Watergate has become mainly known as the residence of very well-established Beltway figures, often on the elderly side, such as former Sen. Bob Dole, the late Robert McNamara, and the late Ralph De Toledano.

There are also some efficiencies occupied by people whose work sometimes brings them to Washington, such as Placido Domingo. But in its earliest years, before the break-in connected the Watergate forever to a particular period in American history, it was quite the glitzy and glamorous place – even attaining the ultimate in DC prestige by hosting movie stars like Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Ingrid Bergman. The article’s opening paragraphs describe an aura still hinted at even in the somewhat musty atmosphere of the present Watergate:

In better days, when beautiful people decorated the restaurant and yet-to-be infamous burglars skulked in the hallways, the Watergate Hotel was all about class. The black-and-white Italian marble floor in the lobby gleamed. Bouquets of fresh flowers blossomed by a grand entrance. The rooms, including 13 presidential suites, offered exclusive views of the Potomac River.

The caviar came on demand. “Everything you need or want at your fingertips (the one you use to ring for the elevator),” boasted an early brochure for the Watergate complex, a boomerang layout of apartments and office buildings, shops and swimming pools with the hotel as the hub. The Washington Post called it, in 1970, the “snob appeal” complex, a cachet exaggerated only by its future scandals and spilled secrets.

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