Fixing US Democracy with Facts
From Editor Robert Parry: In our 18 years, Consortiumnews.com has had one
priority: to chart a truthful history of the United States and its role in the
world. In doing so, we have examined key chapters of that history so our readers
can get an honest and independent assessment of how Americans got to the point
we have.
I realize that this journalistic journey has not made everyone happy. Frankly,
we have uncovered evidence that shook even our own prior beliefs. For instance,
my discovery of President Lyndon Johnson’s “‘X’ Envelope,” which contained topsecret evidence of Richard Nixon’s scheme to sabotage LBJ’s Vietnam peace talks,
surprised me.
I had always assumed that Johnson’s promise about seeking peace in 1968 was
empty rhetoric, but here was documentary evidence that LBJ was sincere and was
closing in on his goal until Nixon’s ruthless team convinced the South
Vietnamese to boycott the peace talks in Paris, thus extending that dreadful war
four more years.
Johnson not only called Nixon’s actions “treason” but ordered his national
security aide Walt Rostow to remove from the White House the top-secret file
containing the evidence, which I found at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas,
where Rostow belatedly deposited it.
This “lost file” also dropped into place a crucial piece of the Watergate
puzzle, explaining why Nixon created his Plumbers in the first place. Nixon had
learned about the missing file but couldn’t find it, a predicament that grew
critical in the wake of Dan Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.
Nixon knew something the rest of us didn’t that there was a Pentagon Papers
“sequel,” what we now know as the “‘X’ Envelope” but he didn’t know where it
was. If disclosed, it would have meant Nixon’s political undoing. So he brought
in ex-CIA officer E. Howard Hunt and ordered the first break-in, at Brookings,
in pursuit of the file.
In other words, our Web site through its commitment to independent journalism
rewrote the history of both the Vietnam War and Watergate. We have done much the
same regarding the dark chapters of the Reagan/Bush era, including filling in
crucial gaps in the Iran-Contra scandal. [See “Rethinking Watergate/IranContra.”]
A parallel case to Nixon’s Vietnam gambit occurred in 1980 when operatives of
Ronald Reagan’s campaign interfered with President Jimmy Carter’s frantic
efforts to negotiate freedom for 52 U.S. hostages then held in Iran. Though the
evidence of Reagan’s “treason” was strong, Republicans mounted a fierce and
effective cover-up to frustrate official investigations.
Again, it has taken a long time but we were finally able to uncover documents
(this time at the George H.W. Bush Library in College Station, Texas) showing
that Bush’s White House hid key evidence from congressional investigators. Just
this June, the lead investigator, former Rep. Lee Hamilton, acknowledged that
his inquiry had been deceived. Thus, history has been changed for the better.
[See “Second Thoughts on October Surprise.”]
Another example, which occurred shortly after our founding in 1995, was the case
of investigative journalist Gary Webb, who, in 1996, revived the Reagan-era
Contra-cocaine scandal. Though the major U.S. newspapers trashed Webb, we took
his side and explained how various government reports though superficially
criticizing Webb actually documented the severity of the Contra-cocaine problem
and showed how Ronald Reagan’s team had covered up those crimes. [See Lost
History, for details.]
Sadly, we could not save Webb’s career nor prevent his downward spiral that
ended in his 2004 suicide. But we helped push back against the Big Media’s
unfair judgment, keeping his case alive enough for Hollywood to undertake a
movie version of his tragic story. Filming is scheduled to start this summer.
So, again and again, Consortiumnews has taken on the falsehoods and false
narratives that have distorted American democracy. To that end, we have been
aided not only by superb journalists but by brilliant former intelligence
analysts, who I discovered to my surprise were facing the same pressure to twist
the truth as mainstream journalists were.
It turned out I guess not surprisingly that corrupt politicians and their paid
propagandists understood that the best way to control a population in a “free
society” was to control the flow of information, to inundate the people with
fake news while blocking channels of real news.
At Consortiumnews, we have spent 18 years doing our best to reverse that
process. But we can only continue with your help. Our summer fundraising drive
seeks to raise a modest $25,000 to cover our costs for the next several months.
Here are three ways you can help:
First, you can make a donation, which may be tax-deductible since we are a 501c-3 tax-exempt non-profit. You can donate by credit card online or by mailing a
check to Consortium for Independent Journalism (CIJ); 2200 Wilson Blvd., Suite
102-231; Arlington VA 22201. (For readers wanting to use PayPal, you can address
contributions to our account, which is named after our e-mail address:
“consortnew @ aol.com”).
Second, you can buy one of my last four books through the Consortiumnews’ Web
site or my latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, through Amazon.com, either
in paper or the e-book version. A portion of each sale will go toward our goal.
Third, for only $34, you can get the trilogy that traces the history of the two
Bush presidencies and their impact on the world. The three books Secrecy &
Privilege, Neck Deep (co-authored with Sam and Nat Parry) and America’s Stolen
Narrative would normally cost more than $70.
To get the books for less than half price and help us meet our fundraising goal
just go to the Web site’s “Donate” button and make a $34 “donation” using Visa,
Mastercard or Discover. We will read a donation of that amount as an order for
the trilogy.
If your mailing address is the same as your credit card billing address, we will
ship the books to that address. If your mailing address is different, just send
us an e-mail at [email protected] and we will make the adjustment. For U.S.
orders, we will pay for the shipping. (For non-U.S. orders, add $20 to defray
the extra cost.)
You can also take advantage of this special offer by mailing a check for $34 to
The Media Consortium; 2200 Wilson Blvd.; Suite 102-231; Arlington VA 22201. Or
you can use our Paypal account, “consortnew @ aol.com.” Just make sure you
include your mailing address in the message.
Thanks for your support.
Robert Parry is a longtime investigative reporter who broke many of the IranContra stories for the Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. He founded
Consortiumnews.com in 1995 to create an outlet for well-reported journalism that
was being squeezed out of an increasingly trivialized U.S. news media.
Does Woodward Know Watergate?
Exclusive: Republicans are hyping the flap over Benghazi talking points by
calling it “worse than Watergate,” a false narrative that Bob Woodward has
helped along by ignoring new evidence connecting Richard Nixon’s sabotage of
Vietnam War peace talks in 1968 to his political spying in 1971-72, writes
Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward has popped up on TV recently affirming a key
Republican talking point, likening the “scandal” over the Obama administration’s
Benghazi talking points to Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, which Woodward
helped make famous.
But, as he joins in hyping the GOP’s Benghazi scandal-mongering, Woodward
doesn’t appear to know that new documentary evidence has transformed our
understanding of Watergate and especially its tie-in to the Vietnam War and how
those documents make comparisons between Watergate and Benghazi both ludicrous
and obscene.
During an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on May 17, Woodward compared the
administration’s development of talking points for TV appearances by UN
Ambassador Susan Rice in 2012 to Nixon’s mendacious editing of his Oval Office
tapes to conceal the role of his reelection campaign in the break-in at the
Democrats’ Watergate headquarters in 1972.
“You were talking earlier about kind of dismissing the Benghazi issue as one
that’s just political and the president recently said it’s a sideshow,” Woodward
said. “But if you read through all these e-mails, you see that everyone in the
government is saying, ‘Oh, let’s not tell the public that terrorists were
involved, people connected to al-Qaeda. Let’s not tell the public that there
were warnings.’”
Then, noting that four U.S. diplomatic personnel died in the attack on the U.S.
consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, Woodward added, “I would not
dismiss Benghazi. It’s a very serious issue. As people keep saying, four people
were killed.”
But Woodward appears to have been relying on Republican talking points in his
understanding of why Obama administration officials decided to leave out some
details from Rice’s talking points, specifically a concern that divulging
certain specifics would compromise the ongoing investigation to catch the
Islamic terrorist believed responsible.
At the time, there also remained genuine confusion over the connection between
the Benghazi attack and angry demonstrations sweeping the Middle East over an
American video mocking the Prophet Muhammad. Indeed, the recently released emails buttress then-CIA Director David Petraeus’s testimony about concerns over
the possibility of harming the investigation.
By contrast, Nixon systematically reviewed tape transcripts of his Oval Office
conversations to remove sections that incriminated him and his top aides in a
felonious cover-up. We also now know what Nixon’s most dangerous secret was,
i.e., why he hired ex-CIA officer E. Howard Hunt to organize an espionage team
in the first place.
Nixon was terrified that a missing file might surface revealing FBI wiretaps of
his 1968 campaign’s sabotage of President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks,
a politically motivated case of obstruction that Johnson privately called
“treason.”
In other words, the ultimate secret of Watergate one that apparently still
remains a mystery to Woodward was that Nixon was terrified that the American
people might learn that he had extended the Vietnam War for an additional four
years to get an edge in a political campaign.
As a result of LBJ’s failed peace initiative, some 20,000 more U.S. soldiers
died along with an estimated one million Vietnamese and countless more dead in
Cambodia. The war also tore apart America’s political and social fabric.
So, to put the flap over the Benghazi talking points in the same sentence with
Nixon’s Watergate crimes suggests either a complete lack of proportionality or
some self-serving agenda. It’s possible that Woodward doesn’t want to
acknowledge the new evidence because it would show that he missed the most
important element of a scandal that made his career.
Recognition of the fuller Watergate scandal also would shatter a favorite saying
of Official Washington, “the cover-up is worse than the crime.” That surely
wouldn’t be true if the Watergate scandal were understood to encompass Nixon’s
treacherous scheme to block Johnson’s Vietnam peace deal.
Memoirs and Documents
We now know based on memoirs of principals and documents available at the LBJ
Library in Austin, Texas, that in 1969, Johnson ordered his national security
aide, Walt Rostow, to remove the wiretap file on Nixon’s peace-talk sabotage
from the White House and that Nixon later learned of the file’s existence from
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover
However, Nixon’s senior advisers, Henry Kissinger and H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, were
unable to locate the missing file, not realizing that it was in Rostow’s
personal possession. Nixon’s concern about the incriminating wiretaps grew into
a panic after June 13, 1971, when the New York Times began publishing the topsecret Pentagon Papers, which detailed the mostly Democratic lies that had drawn
the United States into the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1967.
As those stories dominated the front pages of newspapers across the nation and
the world, Nixon realized something that few others knew, that there was a
sequel that was arguably even more scandalous, a file containing evidence of his
campaign’s successful sabotage of Johnson’s peace talks, which could have
negotiated an end to the war in 1968.
As the Pentagon Papers dominated the news, Nixon summoned Kissinger and Haldeman
into the Oval Office again on June 17, 1971, and ordered them to redouble their
efforts to locate the missing file. Nixon’s panic is captured on an Oval Office
tape that was made public decades ago but not fully understood.
“Do we have it?” Nixon asked Haldeman about Johnson’s file. “I’ve asked for it.
You said you didn’t have it.”
Haldeman: “We can’t find it.”
Kissinger: “We have nothing here, Mr. President.”
Nixon: “Well, damnit, I asked for that because I need it.”
Kissinger: “But Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together.”
Haldeman: “We have a basic history in constructing our own, but there is a file
on it.”
Nixon: “Where?”
Haldeman: “[Presidential aide Tom Charles] Huston swears to God that there’s a
file on it and it’s at Brookings.”
Nixon: “Bob? Bob? Now do you remember Huston’s plan [for White House-sponsored
break-ins as part of domestic counter-intelligence operations]? Implement it.”
Kissinger: “Now Brookings has no right to have classified documents.”
Nixon: “I want it implemented. Goddamnit, get in and get those files. Blow the
safe and get it.”
Haldeman: “They may very well have cleaned them by now, but this thing, you need
to “
Kissinger: “I wouldn’t be surprised if Brookings had the files.”
Haldeman: “My point is Johnson knows that those files are around. He doesn’t
know for sure that we don’t have them around.”
But Johnson did know that the file was no longer at the White House because he
had ordered Rostow to remove it in the final days of his own presidency.
On June 30, 1971, Nixon again berated Haldeman about the need to break into
Brookings and “take it [the file] out.” Nixon even suggested using former CIA
officer E. Howard Hunt to conduct the Brookings break-in.
“You talk to Hunt,” Nixon told Haldeman. “I want the break-in. Hell, they do
that. You’re to break into the place, rifle the files, and bring them in. Just
go in and take it. Go in around 8:00 or 9:00 o’clock.”
Haldeman: “Make an inspection of the safe.”
Nixon: “That’s right. You go in to inspect the safe. I mean, clean it up.”
For reasons that remain unclear, it appears that the Brookings break-in never
took place. Also unclear to historians was the full significance of the missing
file. They knew that it had a connection to Johnson’s peace initiative in
October 1968 but they assumed, mistakenly, that it was a file containing policy
papers, not wiretap evidence.
The ‘X’ Envelope
The missing link to the story was filed away at the LBJ Library, where Rostow
eventually deposited what he labeled “The ‘X’ Envelope.” Rostow transferred the
file to the library after Johnson’s death in 1973 but with instructions that it
not be opened for 50 years. Library officials eventually overrode Rostow’s
mandate but not until 1994 when the envelope was opened and declassification of
its contents began.
But the two-decade delay caused serious damage to the historical record because,
in the interim, a distorted narrative of the Watergate scandal had taken shape
and solidified. Not knowing the contents of the missing file the one that Nixon
thought might be at Brookings led Woodward and other Watergate reporters to
concentrate on the cover-up, not the underlying crime.
Because of that mistaken focus, an entire generation of journalists cut their
teeth saying, “The cover-up is worse than the crime.” There also grew an
animosity toward evidence suggesting that Republicans would go behind the back
of a Democratic president to undermine an important foreign policy initiative
like, say, trying to end the Vietnam War. Somehow disclosing such facts was
deemed not “good for the country.”
So, my discovery of the missing piece of the Watergate mosaic in 2012 was
unwelcome news in many quarters, easier to ignore than to explain. However, the
false narrative of Watergate is not old news; it has become a current reference
point for Republican efforts to undermine another Democratic president on a
foreign policy incident.
Because of the lack of proportionality made possible by the distorted Watergate
narrative Sen. John McCain and other leading Republicans can breezily call the
Benghazi story “worse” than Watergate. Then, by recycling some bad history, Bob
Woodward contributes to the problem. [For details on Rostow’s “X Envelope,” see
Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book,
America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon
and barnesandnoble.com).
The Great Benghazi Distraction
The Benghazi “scandal” has enabled congressional Republicans to keep
their “base” worked up to a fever pitch, but the hyping of the controversy
beyond all reason is doing real harm to U.S. national security by distracting
officials from actual foreign policy problems, according to ex-CIA analyst Paul
R. Pillar.
By Paul R. Pillar
If I were a political adviser to those relentlessly pushing recriminations about
the attack last year on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, I think my advice would
be, “Give it a rest.” This pseudo-scandal has become so forced, so contrived,
and so blatantly driven by motives other than safeguarding the security of U.S.
interests that the unending push has already passed the point where it serves
any identifiable objectives, even partisan political ones.
The subject, about which a panel of inquiry has completed its work and issued
its report, is already tiresome; imagine how much more tiresome it will be to
voters by 2016 after three more years of it.
A poll on Benghazi released this week by Public Policy Polling suggests that the
agitation on the subject is keeping a Republican base agitated but not making
wider inroads on public opinion. One has to ask what good it does Republicans to
dwell on something that keeps one segment of the population angry about Barack
Obama (and Hillary Clinton) when that segment was already angry about Obama
anyway.
When asked whom the respondent trusted more on the issue of Benghazi, 49 percent
said Hillary Clinton and 39 percent said Congressional Republicans. On other
questions asking for an overall favorable or unfavorable rating, Clinton enjoys
an eight-point margin over Congressional Republicans, the same margin as in a
similar poll in March.
The poll did show that the angry base has gotten the intended message that there
is supposedly a scandal involved. A plurality of Republicans (but only small
percentages of either Democrats or independents) said yes to the question of
whether this was the “biggest scandal in American history.” By margins of
greater than three to one, Republicans polled said it was a worse scandal than
Watergate, Iran Contra, or Teapot Dome.
That’s an interesting result given that in one case [Benghazi] the issue
involved nuances conveyed in some talking points, while each of the others
involved criminal behavior in the form of attempted subversion of an American
election with a subsequent cover-up, illegal diversion of arms into a foreign
war, or bribery of a cabinet officer to get preferred exploitation of publicly
owned natural resources.
The customary ignorance of the American public is no doubt at play. Probably the
proportion of the general population that could say today what Teapot Dome was
about measures in the single digits. A scandal seems worse if you’ve actually
heard about it.
The ignorance factor was suggested by another question in the poll asking where
Benghazi is. Ten percent believe it is in Egypt, nine percent in Iran, six
percent in Cuba, five percent in Syria, four percent in Iraq, and one percent
each in North Korea and Liberia, with another four percent being unwilling to
guess. Maybe those who said Cuba have Benghazi confused with Guantanamo. It
would be interesting to know what those who said North Korea think the incident
was about.
Probably the failure of the agitation about Benghazi to make wider inroads on
public opinion is due not only to the tiresome, contrived and partisan nature of
the agitation but also to the fact that it never had a logic in the first place.
The message being promoted seems to be that the administration was shying away
from describing the incident as terrorism in order not to undermine, during the
2012 election campaign, a claim to having success against international
terrorists.
But when did Barack Obama ever contend that international terrorism has been
licked? When the presidential candidates were asked in one of the debates,
several months after Osama bin Laden had been killed, what each believed to be
the biggest national security threat facing the country, Obama replied,
“terrorism.” However the incident in Benghazi is characterized, four Americans
were killed. There is no way to sugar-coat that, whether the T-word is used or
not.
The endless harping about Benghazi has costs beyond, and more important than,
wasted time by Republicans who have better ways to try to win votes and defeat
Hillary Clinton. Among those costs is the fostering of misunderstanding of some
fundamental realities about such incidents and about terrorism.
Shortly after the Benghazi attack I mentioned some of those realities, including
the inherent hazards of overseas representation and the inability to protect
every installation everywhere, and the fact that the details of such incidents
are nearly always obscure initially and become clear only in hindsight.
As the harping continued other costs grew. These included promoting yet another
misunderstanding about terrorism: the idea that popular anger at the United
States and the machinations of a group are somehow mutually exclusive
explanations for any terrorist incident. Still another is the notion that nonstate violence is worth worrying about if it can be linked to al-Qaeda but is
not much of a threat if it cannot. There also is the cost of inducing future
secretaries of state and other officials to impair U.S. diplomacy by futilely
pursuing a zero-risk approach to overseas representation.
As the pseudo-scandal continues to be pushed, other costs come to mind. An
obvious one is the big distraction this entails from useful work Congress could
otherwise be doing. Of course, we are no strangers to similarly ineffective use
of congressional time and attention. Probably the Benghazi kick has been no more
of a distraction than the House of Representatives voting for the 33rd time (or
maybe it’s more, it’s so many there doesn’t seem to be an accurate count) to
repeal Obamacare.
One also needs to consider, however, the drain on the time and attention of
officials in the Executive Branch. Having five different House committees
holding hearings on the same subject is an enormous diversion from the main
duties of those who are responsible for diplomatic security.
The poll questions about the relative severity of different scandals brings to
mind another cost: a debasing of the currency regarding what really is a scandal
and what episodes in our nation’s history ought to be thought about and have
lessons extracted from them. Another example of this is found in a column this
week by the Washington Post‘s Jackson Diehl.
Diehl validly observes that the unending agitation over talking points about
Benghazi is a misdirected digression from serious issues that ought to be
addressed in a bipartisan manner, such as a failure to “adequately prepare for
an emergency in post-revolution North Africa.” One might broaden the point by
saying that we also ought to be discussing, again in a bipartisan manner, what
assumptions underlay the Western intervention in Libya and whether it ever was a
good idea.
But then in an apparent effort to achieve some kind of partisan balance, or just
to scratch some old itch, Diehl contends there is equivalence between the
folderol over Benghazi and the episode in which in the course of selling the
invasion of Iraq the George W. Bush administration made a false claim about
Iraqi purchases of uranium ore in Africa, with the office of Vice President
Cheney doing battle with a former ambassador who investigated the matter.
There is no equivalence at all between these two episodes. The one involving the
Vice President’s office, like Watergate, Iran-Contra, and Teapot Dome, but
unlike Benghazi, involved criminal behavior. Vice presidential aide I. Lewis
Libby was convicted of perjury, providing false statements to investigators, and
obstruction of justice.
Diehl also gets the other essentials about the episode wrong. Although he writes
that what the retired ambassador, Joseph Wilson, said was mostly “grossly
exaggerated, or simply false,” the principal thing Wilson said, that no such
purchases of uranium ore were ever made, was absolutely correct, with the
administration’s claim being dead wrong.
The reason the Vice President’s office got so deeply involved in the matter was
to try to find ways to discredit Wilson and the agency that hired him because
the truths they spoke were complicating the effort to sell the Iraq War.
Although Diehl says we should have had “a serious discussion of why U.S.
intelligence about Iraq was wrong,” he fails to mention that on this very matter
U.S. intelligence was right, having repeatedly warned the White House against
using the temptingly juicy tidbit about purchases of uranium ore.
The episode was one of the most salient indications that far from being misled
into Iraq by bad intelligence, the war-makers in the administration were
determined for other reasons to launch the war and were only using intelligence
selectively to try to bolster their campaign to sell the invasion.
And lest we forget, the damage to the national interest from that expedition was
many, many times greater than anything involving Benghazi. Now that’s
scandalous.
Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be
one of the agency’s top analysts. He is now a visiting professor at Georgetown
University for security studies. (This article first appeared as a blog post at
The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)
The Right’s ‘Scandal’ Funhouse Mirror
Exclusive: Official Washington is captivated by the image of Obama “scandals,”
including Benghazi talking points and extra IRS questions posed to Tea Party
groups, but journalists are peering into the Right’s funhouse mirror which for
decades has made big scandals small and small scandals big, says Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The modern American news media operates like a giant right-wing funhouse mirror
reflecting back some large things as small and some small things as large. The
Right gets to decide which items will be misshapen in which ways and the
mainstream press then reinforces the distortions.
Though not very funny, this funhouse mirror has been in operation since at least
the 1980s and is now so well established that most mainstream journalists and
many politicians assume the exaggerations and minimizations are the way things
really are.
This funhouse effect was first noticeable during the scandals of Ronald Reagan,
when it didn’t seem to matter how much evidence was compiled about his
complicity in grotesque human rights crimes including genocide in Central
America, his tolerance of drug trafficking by his anticommunist clients, and his
support for sophisticated propaganda operations to destroy troublesome
journalists and other investigators.
The Right, as it built this hall of mirrors during those years, was determined
to transform Reagan’s shocking crimes into something insignificant. Meanwhile,
careerists in the mainstream news media learned to behave as if these
distortions were just normal, the way things should be seen. If you insisted the
funhouse reflections weren’t real, you quickly became an outcast.
For instance, the New York Times’ Raymond Bonner detected politically motivated
massacres in El Salvador, including the extermination of entire villages in the
area of El Mozote, but the Reagan administration and its right-wing allies
simply explained that there had been no massacres and that Bonner was just a
biased reporter who needed to be removed, which he soon was.
You might think that a cover-up of mass murder in El Salvador as also was
occurring in nearby Guatemala would be a big scandal, especially since President
Reagan was facilitating the slaughters by providing modern equipment to the
killers and by discrediting brave journalists who tried to reveal the truth. But
that was not how things appeared in the funhouse mirrors of Official Washington.
The troublesome reporters were just getting what they deserved.
Similarly, Reagan’s Nicaraguan Contra rebels appeared to human rights
investigators and other independent observers to be thugs who swept through
Nicaraguan towns killing peasants, torturing prisoners, raping women and
engaging in a variety of practices that one might, in other circumstances, call
terrorism. But reflected in the funhouse mirror, these ugly images were made to
disappear, along with well-documented evidence of Contra cocaine smuggling.
Even when reality occasionally intruded on Official Washington with outside
disclosures about Reagan’s White House illegally shipping weapons to the Contras
(because one of the U.S. planes was shot down over Nicaragua) and about Reagan’s
team paying for some of those weapons by secretly selling missiles to Iran (as
revealed by a Lebanese newspaper), the Iran-Contra scandal was quickly
downsized into a legalistic dispute over whether it was ever okay to lie to
Congress.
Trashing Gary Webb
The mainstream Washington news media became so accustomed to the funhouse
mirrors that when Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News revived the Contracocaine story in 1996, the big newspapers the New York Times, the Washington
Post and the Los Angeles Times knew exactly what to do: reshape Webb from a
respected investigative journalist into a conspiracy nut.
That distortion remained in place despite a CIA inspector general’s report that
not only confirmed that the Nicaraguan Contras were deeply involved in the
cocaine trade but that the Reagan administration knew about the problem and
systematically covered it up. But Webb lost his job at the Mercury News, could
not find a decent-paying position anywhere in journalism and, in 2004, committed
suicide. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Warning in Gary Webb’s Death.”]
The funhouse mirror even affects how Official Washington understands historic
scandals like the two October Surprise operations the one in 1968 when Richard
Nixon’s campaign sabotaged President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks to
give Nixon an edge in that tight election and the one in 1980 when Ronald
Reagan’s campaign used similar tactics to frustrate President Jimmy Carter’s
efforts to free 52 American hostages then held in Iran.
Again, no matter how much proof is piled up, Official Washington won’t see
what’s lying there in front of it even though the two October Surprise cases
also appear to have been the starting points for the Watergate scandal for Nixon
and the Iran-Contra scandal for Reagan, respectively. [See Consortiumnews.com’s
“Rethinking Watergate/Iran-Contra” or Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen
Narrative.]
The Right’s funhouse mirror also means that tiny or fabricated scandals
implicating Democrats and progressives are turned into something huge. When Bill
Clinton was in office, it was Whitewater and “Clinton’s Mysterious Deaths.”
After Barack Obama took office, it was “Fast and Furious,” the Benghazi talking
points and now the Internal Revenue Service asking extra questions to Tea Party
groups that wanted to get tax-exempt status.
Yet, even as the Republicans insist that the IRS asking Tea Party groups some
extra questions is equal to or worse than Watergate, it’s been noted that
Republican voiced no such protests in 2004 when George W. Bush’s IRS responding
to Republican demands instigated a two-year audit of the NAACP and threatened to
take away the historic civil rights group’s tax-exempt status because NAACP
chairman Julian Bond had criticized Bush’s Iraq War and his trampling of the
Constitution.
In other words, even in parallel cases (although asking a couple of dozen extra
questions isn’t nearly as intrusive or expensive as a two-year audit), the
funhouse mirror makes right-wing political groups the victims of “tyranny” under
President Obama while the NAACP was just getting its comeuppance under President
Bush.
But the larger question is: Can a democratic Republic long survive with such
systematic distortions of reality. What will happen if one side of America’s
political equation the Right continues to possess a vast and sophisticated media
apparatus, a vertically integrated structure meshing newspapers, newsmagazine
and books with radio, TV and the Internet in a synergy that spreads the rightwing message and maximizes profits, while the other side the Left has nothing
comparable, just scattered and underfunded outlets that have to fend for
themselves?
Compounding this situation is the fact that the careerist mainstream media knows
that there’s no risk and a great benefit to leap onto the Right’s “scandal”
bandwagons when they roll by and there’s virtually no upside and a big downside
to report on real scandals that get in the Right’s way.
There have been too many good reporters, like Raymond Bonner and Gary Webb,
crushed under the wheels of the right-wing juggernaut. For average Americans,
the only advice is that they must realize that they are inside a media funhouse
and that the mirrors don’t reflect the real story.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book,
America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon
and barnesandnoble.com).
Rethinking Watergate/Iran-Contra
Special Report: New evidence continues to accumulate showing how Official
Washington got key elements of the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals wrong,
especially how these two crimes of state originated in treacherous actions to
secure the powers of the presidency, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
A favorite saying of Official Washington is that “the cover-up is worse than the
crime.” But that presupposes you accurately understand what the crime was. And,
in the case of the two major U.S. government scandals of the last third of the
Twentieth Century Watergate and Iran-Contra that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Indeed, newly disclosed documents have put old evidence into a sharply different
focus and suggest that history has substantially miswritten the two scandals by
failing to understand that they actually were sequels to earlier scandals that
were far worse. Watergate and Iran-Contra were, in part at least, extensions of
the original crimes, which involved dirty dealings to secure the immense power
of the presidency.
In the case of Watergate the foiled Republican break-in at the Democratic
National Committee in June 1972 and Richard Nixon’s botched cover-up leading to
his resignation in August 1974 the evidence is now clear that Nixon created the
Watergate burglars out of his panic that the Democrats might possess a file on
his sabotage of Vietnam peace talks in 1968.
Shortly after Nixon took office in 1969, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover informed
him of the existence of the file containing national security wiretaps
documenting how Nixon’s emissaries had gone behind President Lyndon Johnson’s
back to convince the South Vietnamese government to boycott the Paris Peace
Talks, which were close to ending the Vietnam War in fall 1968.
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 hold onto 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.
So, the missing file remained a troubling mystery inside Nixon’s White House,
but Nixon still lived up to his pre-election agreement with South Vietnamese
President Nguyen van Thieu to extend U.S. military participation in the war with
the goal of getting the South Vietnamese a better outcome than they would have
received from Johnson in 1968.
Nixon not only continued the Vietnam War, which had already claimed more than
30,000 American lives and an estimated one million Vietnamese, but he expanded
it, with intensified bombing campaigns and a U.S. incursion into Cambodia. At
home, the war was bitterly dividing the nation with a massive anti-war movement
and an angry backlash from war supporters.
Pentagon Papers
It was in that intense climate in 1971 that Daniel Ellsberg, a former senior
Defense Department official, gave the New York Times a copy of the Pentagon
Papers, the secret U.S. history of the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1967. The
voluminous report documented many of the lies most told by Democrats to draw the
American people into the war.
The Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers on June 13, 1971, and the
disclosures touched off a public firestorm. Trying to tamp down the blaze, Nixon
took extraordinary legal steps to stop dissemination of the secrets, ultimately
failing in the U.S. Supreme Court.
But Nixon had an even more acute fear. He knew something that few others did,
that there was a sequel to the Pentagon Papers that was arguably more explosive
the missing file containing evidence that Nixon had covertly prevented the war
from being brought to a conclusion so he could maintain a political edge in
Election 1968.
If anyone thought the Pentagon Papers represented a shocking scandal and clearly
millions of Americans did how would people react to a file that revealed Nixon
had kept the slaughter going with thousands of additional American soldiers dead
and the violence spilling back into the United States just so he could win an
election?
A savvy political analyst, Nixon recognized this threat to his reelection in
1972, assuming he would have gotten that far. Given the intensity of the antiwar movement, there would surely have been furious demonstrations around the
White House and likely an impeachment effort on Capitol Hill.
So, on June 17, 1971, Nixon summoned Haldeman and Kissinger into the Oval Office
and as Nixon’s own recording devices whirred softly pleaded with them again to
locate the missing file. “Do we have it?” Nixon asked Haldeman. “I’ve asked for
it. You said you didn’t have it.”
Haldeman: “We can’t find it.”
Kissinger: “We have nothing here, Mr. President.”
Nixon: “Well, damnit, I asked for that because I need it.”
Kissinger: “But Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together.”
Haldeman: “We have a basic history in constructing our own, but there is a file
on it.”
Nixon: “Where?”
Haldeman: “[Presidential aide Tom Charles] Huston swears to God that there’s a
file on it and it’s at Brookings.”
Nixon: “Bob? Bob? Now do you remember Huston’s plan [for White House-sponsored
break-ins as part of domestic counter-intelligence operations]? Implement it.”
Kissinger: “Now Brookings has no right to have classified documents.”
Nixon: “I want it implemented. Goddamnit, get in and get those files. Blow the
safe and get it.”
Haldeman: “They may very well have cleaned them by now, but this thing, you need
to “
Kissinger: “I wouldn’t be surprised if Brookings had the files.”
Haldeman: “My point is Johnson knows that those files are around. He doesn’t
know for sure that we don’t have them around.”
But Johnson did know that the file was no longer at the White House because he
had ordered Rostow to remove it in the final days of his own presidency.
Forming the Burglars
On June 30, 1971, Nixon again berated Haldeman about the need to break into
Brookings and “take it [the file] out.” Nixon even suggested using former CIA
officer E. Howard Hunt to conduct the Brookings break-in.
“You talk to Hunt,” Nixon told Haldeman. “I want the break-in. Hell, they do
that. You’re to break into the place, rifle the files, and bring them in. Just
go in and take it. Go in around 8:00 or 9:00 o’clock.”
Haldeman: “Make an inspection of the safe.”
Nixon: “That’s right. You go in to inspect the safe. I mean, clean it up.”
For reasons that remain unclear, it appears that the Brookings break-in never
took place, but Nixon’s desperation to locate Johnson’s peace-talk file was an
important link in the chain of events that led to the creation of Nixon’s
burglary unit under Hunt’s supervision. Hunt later oversaw the two Watergate
break-ins in May and June of 1972.
While it’s possible that Nixon was still searching for the file about his
Vietnam-peace sabotage when the Watergate break-ins occurred nearly a year
later, it’s generally believed that the burglary was more broadly focused,
seeking any information that might have an impact on Nixon’s re-election, either
defensively or offensively.
As it turned out, Nixon’s burglars were nabbed inside the Watergate complex on
their second break-in on June 17, 1972, exactly one year after Nixon’s tirade to
Haldeman and Kissinger about the need to blow the safe at the Brookings
Institution in pursuit of the missing Vietnam peace-talk file.
Ironically, too, Johnson and Rostow had no intention of exposing Nixon’s dirty
secret regarding LBJ’s Vietnam peace talks, presumably for the same reasons that
they kept their mouths shut back in 1968, out of a benighted belief that
revealing Nixon’s actions might somehow not be “good for the country.”
In November 1972, despite the growing scandal over the Watergate break-in, Nixon
handily won reelection, crushing Sen. George McGovern, Nixon’s preferred
opponent. Nixon then reached out to Johnson seeking his help in squelching
Democratic-led investigations of the Watergate affair and slyly noting that
Johnson had ordered wiretaps of Nixon’s campaign in 1968.
Johnson reacted angrily to the overture, refusing to cooperate. On Jan. 20,
1973, Nixon was sworn in for his second term. On Jan. 22, 1973, Johnson died of
a heart attack.
Toward Resignation
In the weeks that followed Nixon’s Inauguration and Johnson’s death, the scandal
over the Watergate cover-up grew more serious, creeping ever closer to the Oval
Office. Meanwhile, Rostow struggled to decide what he should do with “The ‘X’
Envelope.”
On May 14, 1973, in a three-page “memorandum for the record,” Rostow summarized
what was in “The ‘X’ Envelope” and provided a chronology for the events in fall
1968. Rostow reflected, too, on what effect LBJ’s public silence then may have
had on the unfolding Watergate scandal.
“I am inclined to believe the Republican operation in 1968 relates in two ways
to the Watergate affair of 1972,” Rostow wrote. He noted, first, that Nixon’s
operatives may have judged that their “enterprise with the South Vietnamese” in
frustrating Johnson’s last-ditch peace initiative had secured Nixon his narrow
margin of victory over Hubert Humphrey in 1968.
“Second, they got away with it,” Rostow wrote. “Despite considerable press
commentary after the election, the matter was never investigated fully. Thus, as
the same men faced the election in 1972, there was nothing in their previous
experience with an operation of doubtful propriety (or, even, legality) to warn
them off, and there were memories of how close an election could get and the
possible utility of pressing to the limit and beyond.” [To read Rostow’s memo,
click here, here and here.]
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 yearslong 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. In a typed cover letter to LBJ Library
director Harry Middleton, Rostow wrote: “Sealed in the attached envelope is a
file President Johnson asked me to hold personally because of its sensitive
nature. In case of his death, the material was to be consigned to the LBJ
Library under conditions I judged to be appropriate.
“After fifty years the Director of the LBJ Library (or whomever may inherit his
responsibilities, should the administrative structure of the National Archives
change) may, alone, open this file. If he believes the material it contains
should not be opened for research [at that time], I would wish him empowered to
re-close the file for another fifty years when the procedure outlined above
should be repeated.”
Ultimately, however, the LBJ Library didn’t wait that long. After a little more
than two decades, on July 22, 1994, the envelope was opened and the archivists
began the long process of declassifying the contents.
Yet, because Johnson and Rostow chose to withhold the file on Nixon’s “treason,”
a distorted history of Watergate took shape and then hardened into what all the
Important People of Washington “knew” to be true. The conventional wisdom was
that Nixon was unaware of the Watergate break-in beforehand that it was some
harebrained scheme of a few overzealous subordinates and that the President only
got involved later in covering it up.
Sure, the Washington groupthink went, Nixon had his “enemies list” and played
hardball with his rivals, but he couldn’t be blamed for the Watergate break-in,
which many insiders regarded as “the third-rate burglary” that Nixon’s White
House called it.
Even journalists and historians who took a broader view of Watergate didn’t
pursue the remarkable clue from Nixon’s rant about the missing file on June 17,
1971. Though a few other historians did write, sketchily, about the 1968 events,
they also didn’t put the events together.
So, the beloved saying took shape: “the cover-up is worse than the crime.” And
Official Washington hates to rethink some history that is considered already
settled. In this case, it would make too many important people who have
expounded on the “worse” part of Watergate, i.e. the cover-up, look stupid. [For
details, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]
The Iran-Contra Cover-up
Similarly, Official Washington and many mainstream historians have tended to
dismiss Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal as another case of some overzealous
subordinates intuiting what the President wanted and getting everybody into
trouble.
The “Big Question” that insiders were asking after the scandal broke in November
1986 was whether President Reagan knew about the decision by White House aide
Oliver North and his boss, National Security Advisor John Poindexter, to divert
some profits from secret arms sales to Iran to secretly buy weapons for the
Nicaraguan Contra rebels.
Once Poindexter testified that he had no recollection of letting Reagan in on
that secret and with Reagan a beloved figure to many in Official Washington the
inquiry was relegated to insignificance. The remaining investigation focused on
smaller questions, like misleading Congress and a scholarly dispute over whether
the President’s foreign policy powers overrode Congress’ power to appropriate
funds).
At the start of the Iran-Contra investigation, Attorney General Edwin Meese had
set the time parameters from 1984 to 1986, thus keeping outside of the frame the
possibility of a much more serious scandal originating during Campaign 1980,
i.e., whether Reagan’s campaign undermined President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations
to free 52 American hostages in Iran and then paid off the Iranians by allowing
Israel to ship weapons to Iran for the Iran-Iraq War.
So, while congressional and federal investigators looked only at how the
specific 1985-86 arms sales to Iran got started, there was no timely attention
paid to evidence that the Reagan administration had quietly approved Israeli
arms sales to Iran in 1981 and that those contacts went back to the days before
Election 1980 when the hostage crisis destroyed Carter’s reelection hopes and
ensured Reagan’s victory.
The 52 hostages were not released until Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981.
Over the years, about two dozen sources including Iranian officials, Israeli
insiders, European intelligence operatives, Republican activists and even
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat have provided information about alleged
contacts with Iran by the Reagan campaign.
And, there were indications early in the Reagan presidency that something
peculiar was afoot. On July 18, 1981, an Israeli-chartered plane crashed or was
shot down after straying over the Soviet Union on a return flight from
delivering U.S.-manufactured weapons to Iran.
In a PBS interview nearly a decade later, Nicholas Veliotes, Reagan’s assistant
secretary of state for the Middle East, said he looked into the incident by
talking to top administration officials. “It was clear to me after my
conversations with people on high that indeed we had agreed that the Israelis
could transship to Iran some American-origin military equipment,” Veliotes said.
In checking out the Israeli flight, Veliotes came to believe that the Reagan
camp’s dealings with Iran dated back to before the 1980 election. “It seems to
have started in earnest in the period probably prior to the election of 1980, as
the Israelis had identified who would become the new players in the national
security area in the Reagan administration,” Veliotes said. “And I understand
some contacts were made at that time.”
When I re-interviewed Veliotes on Aug. 8, 2012, he said he couldn’t recall who
the “people on high” were who had described the informal clearance of the
Israeli shipments but he indicated that “the new players” were the young
neoconservatives who were working on the Reagan campaign, many of whom later
joined the administration as senior political appointees.
Neocon Schemes
Newly discovered documents at the Reagan presidential library reveal that
Reagan’s neocons at the State Department particularly Robert McFarlane and Paul
Wolfowitz initiated a policy review in 1981 to allow Israel to undertake secret
military shipments to Iran. McFarlane and Wolfowitz also maneuvered to put
McFarlane in charge of U.S. relations toward Iran and to establish a
clandestine U.S. back-channel to the Israeli government outside the knowledge of
even senior U.S. government officials.
Not only did the documents tend to support the statements by Veliotes but they
also fit with comments that former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir made in
a 1993 interview in Tel Aviv. Shamir said he had read the 1991 book, October
Surprise, by Carter’s former National Security Council aide Gary Sick, which
made the case for believing that the Republicans had intervened in the
1980 hostage negotiations to disrupt Carter’s reelection.
With the topic raised, one interviewer asked, “What do you think? Was there an
October Surprise?”
“Of course, it was,” Shamir responded without hesitation. “It was.”
And, there were plenty of other corroborating statements as well. In 1996, for
instance, while former President Carter was meeting with Palestine Liberation
Organization leader Arafat in Gaza City, Arafat tried to confess his role in the
Republican maneuvering to block Carter’s Iran-hostage negotiations.
“There is something I want to tell you,” Arafat said, addressing Carter in the
presence of historian Douglas Brinkley. “You should know that in 1980 the
Republicans approached me with an arms deal [for the PLO] if I could arrange to
keep the hostages in Iran until after the [U.S. presidential] election,” Arafat
said, according to Brinkley’s article in the fall 1996 issue of Diplomatic
Quarterly.
As recently as this past week, former Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr
reiterated his account of Republican overtures to Iran during the 1980 hostage
crisis and how that secret initiative prevented release of the hostages.
In a Christian Science Monitor commentary about the movie “Argo,” Bani-Sadr
wrote that “Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine
negotiation which prevented the attempts by myself and then-U.S. President Jimmy
Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 U.S. presidential election took
place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election
in favor of Reagan.”
Though Bani-Sadr had discussed the Reagan-Khomeini collaboration before, he
added in his commentary that “two of my advisors, Hussein Navab Safavi and Sadral-Hefazi, were executed by Khomeini’s regime because they had become aware of
this secret relationship between Khomeini, his son Ahmad, … and the Reagan
administration.”
In December 1992, when a House Task Force was examining this so-called “October
Surprise” controversy and encountering fierce Republican resistance Bani-Sadr
submitted a letter detailing his behind-the-scenes struggle with Khomeini and
his son Ahmad over their secret dealings with the Reagan campaign.
Bani-Sadr’s letter dated Dec. 17, 1992 was part of a flood of last-minute
evidence implicating the Reagan campaign in the hostage scheme. However, by the
time the letter and the other evidence arrived, the leadership of the House Task
Force had decided to simply declare the Reagan campaign innocent. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “‘October Surprise’ and ‘Argo.’”]
Burying the History
Lawrence Barcella, who served as Task Force chief counsel, later told me that so
much incriminating evidence arrived late that he asked Task Force chairman, Rep.
Lee Hamilton, a centrist Democrat from Indiana, to extend the inquiry for three
months but that Hamilton said no. (Hamilton told me that he had no recollection
of Barcella’s request.)
Instead of giving a careful review to the new evidence, the House Task Force
ignored, disparaged or buried it. I later unearthed some of the evidence in
unpublished Task Force files. However, in the meantime, Official Washington
dismissed the “October Surprise” and other Iran-Contra-connected scandals, like
Contra drug trafficking, as conspiracy theories. [For the latest information on
the October Surprise case, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]
As with Watergate and Nixon, Official Washington has refused to rethink its
conclusions absolving President Ronald Reagan and his successor President George
H.W. Bush of guilt in a range of crimes collected under the large umbrella of
Iran-Contra.
When journalist Gary Webb revived the Contra-Cocaine scandal in the mid-to-late
1990s, he faced unrelenting hostility from Establishment reporters at the New
York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. The attacks were so ugly that
Webb’s editors at the San Jose Mercury News forced him out, setting in motion
his professional destruction.
It didn’t even matter when an internal investigation by the CIA’s inspector
general in 1998 confirmed that the Reagan and Bush-41 administrations had
tolerated and protected drug trafficking by the Contras. The major newspapers
largely ignored the findings and did nothing to help rehabilitate Webb’s career,
eventually contributing to his suicide in 2004. [For details on the CIA report,
see Robert Parry’s Lost History.]
The major newspapers have been equally unwilling to rethink the origins and the
significance of the October Surprise/Iran-Contra scandal. It doesn’t matter how
much new evidence accumulates. It remains much easier to continue the
politically safe deification of “Gipper” Reagan and the fond remembrances of
“Poppy” Bush.
Not only would rethinking Iran-Contra and Watergate stir up anger and abuse from
Republican operatives and the Right, but the process would reflect badly on many
journalists and historians who built careers, in part, by getting these
important historical stories wrong.
However, there must come a point when the weight of the new evidence makes the
old interpretations of these scandals intellectually untenable and when
treasured sayings like “the cover-up is worse than the crime” are swept into the
historical dustbin.
[For a limited time, you can purchase Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush family
for only $34. For details, click here.]
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new
book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book
(from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Richard Nixon’s Even-Darker Legacy
Exclusive: Richard Nixon, who was born a century ago, cast a long shadow over
U.S. politics, arguably reaching to the anything-goes tactics of today’s
Republican Party. His admirers want to reverse history’s negative judgment but
perhaps the Nixon centennial can finally allow for recognition of Nixon’s
dirtiest trick, says Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
This year’s centennial of Richard Nixon’s birth has brought some of his old
guard out the shadows in what amounts to a last-ditch battle to refurbish his
reputation by stressing the positives of his five-plus years in the White
House. Thus, there is much talk of Nixon’s opening to China and the
Environmental Protection Agency as well as favorable comparisons between the
relatively pragmatic Nixon and today’s crop of ideological Republicans.
However, this rehabilitation
led by the likes of Nixon’s National Security
Adviser Henry Kissinger and daughter Julie Nixon Eisenhower ignores a darker
side of Nixon’s legacy, how he helped shape the behavior of the modern GOP,
bequeathing a win-at-all-cost ethos that still resonates, from the crypto-racism
of his Southern Strategy to his dirty election tactics in both 1968 and 1972.
There is a direct lineage from the thinly veiled racism directed toward
President Barack Obama today and Nixon’s coded appeals to unreconstructed white
segregationists in the South four-plus decades ago and between Republican
efforts at election rigging now and Nixon’s gaming the system through the
sabotage of President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks in 1968 and the
Watergate chicanery in 1972.
Simply put, some of the ugliest tactics of the modern Republican Party can be
traced to Richard Nixon. Indeed, he could be viewed as providing the DNA for
today’s GOP operatives who make quasi-racist appeals to white Southerners and
who seek to suppress the votes of blacks and other minorities.
And arguably, the granddaddy of all electoral dirty tricks occurred in 1968 when
Nixon’s presidential campaign went behind President Johnson’s back and got the
South Vietnamese government to boycott Paris peace talks just as Johnson was on
the verge of bringing the bloody Vietnam War to an end.
The evidence of this maneuver is now overwhelming, both from U.S. Archives and
from personal accounts of South Vietnamese and GOP participants. Still, it
remains one of those thoroughly unpleasant chapters of U.S. history that even
Nixon’s critics in the mainstream media hesitate to mention.
Indeed, one of the remarkable elements of the mainstream treatment of the
current Nixon rehabilitation campaign is how the Watergate scandal is raised
briefly to counter the pro-Nixon spin but only in the most antiseptic ways.
It’s as if the declassified records from the past several decades never were
released regarding Nixon’s 1968 caper and the fuller history of Watergate. We’re
back to the narrow understanding of Watergate that prevailed at the time of
Nixon’s resignation in 1974, that he had participated in the cover-up, but knew
little or nothing about the actual crime.
For instance, the New York Times’ Andrew Rosenthal reflected on the ongoing
reconsideration of Nixon by writing that Nixon’s “achievements, and his
liberalism by the standards of today’s Republican Party, may ultimately prove
more significant than his failings.” Then, after ticking off the EPA and other
progressive reforms, Rosenthal lamented that Nixon’s posthumous comeback would
end like many of the failed rehabilitations during his lifetime.
Rosenthal wrote, “in the end, these achievements won’t really matter as far as
Nixon the Historical Figure is concerned. His flaws and his dramatic downfall
will forever reduce the importance of his positive traits. Yes, he was a great
political analyst and promoted important social-welfare programs, but he also
was a crook who was forced to relinquish the presidency. That is his legacy.”
But Rosenthal offered no fresh historical perspective on what kind of “a crook”
Nixon was or what his full legacy entails. That topic is a focus of my latest
book, America’s Stolen Narrative, deriving from declassified evidence at the LBJ
Library in Austin, Texas, and by piecing together other facts that have been
known for years but never put into this new context.
The Missing File
For example, we now know that President Johnson ordered his national security
aide Walt Rostow to remove from the White House the top secret file on Nixon’s
sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks and that Nixon after learning of the file’s
existence from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ordered Kissinger and White House
chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman to conduct a search for this missing file.
Though Kissinger and Haldeman were able to recreate what was in the file, they
failed to locate the actual file, a situation that grew critical in Nixon’s mind
in June 1971 when he saw the impact of the New York Times’ publication of the
Pentagon Papers, which recorded the Vietnam War deceptions from 1945 to 1967,
mostly by Democratic presidents.
But Nixon knew something that few other people did, that there was a sequel to
the Pentagon Papers, a file containing wiretap evidence of what Johnson had
called Nixon’s “treason,” i.e. the story of how the war was prolonged so Nixon
could gain a political advantage over Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968. If
the missing file surfaced prior to Election 1972, Nixon almost surely would have
faced defeat if not impeachment.
So, according to Oval Office tape recordings released in connection with the
Watergate scandal Nixon on June 17, 1971, ordered a renewed effort to locate the
missing file. One of Nixon’s aides believed the file was hidden in the safe at
the Brookings Institution, leading Nixon to order a break-in at Brookings to
recover the file.
About two weeks later, Nixon proposed having ex-CIA officer E. Howard Hunt set
up a special team to conduct the Brookings break-in, which apparently never took
place although Hunt did organize a team of burglars whose political spying was
exposed on June 17, 1972, when five of its members were caught inside the
Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex.
In other words, the two scandals the Nixon campaign’s 1968 peace-talk sabotage
and the Watergate spying operation were linked. Nixon’s fear of exposure on the
first led, at least indirectly, to the second. (Exactly what was the target of
the Watergate break-ins in May and June 1972 remains something of a historical
mystery. Participants offered different accounts, although the burglars seemed
to be engaged in a general intelligence-gathering operation, looking for any
information that might be helpful to Nixon’s reelection campaign, both what
surprises the Democrats might plan to spring on the President and any insights
into Democratic vulnerabilities.)
As it turned out, Johnson’s 1968 file containing wiretap evidence of the Nixon
campaign’s appeal to the South Vietnamese government to torpedo the Vietnam
peace talks remained in the possession of Walt Rostow who had no inclination to
release it, at least not until after Johnson’s death. Even then, after Johnson
died on Jan. 22, 1973, two days into Nixon’s second term, Rostow decided that
the file should be kept secret at the LBJ Library for at least another 50 years.
It was not until the 1990s when the LBJ Library overruled Rostow and opened the
file, which Rostow had labeled “The ‘X’ Envelope.” That began a long
declassification process, which is still not complete. Though a few historians
have touched on these documents in books about Nixon and the Vietnam War, the
evidence of what Johnson called Nixon’s “treason” and its connection to
Watergate have never penetrated Official Washington’s conventional wisdom
regarding Nixon’s legacy.
Mainstream journalists and many historians still prefer to treat Watergate as
something of a one-off affair driven by Nixon’s political paranoia, not from his
understandable fear that his 1968 campaign’s actions, which extended the Vietnam
War for political gain, might be exposed with devastating consequences for his
reelection in 1972.
By June 1971, when Nixon ordered creation of Hunt’s team to search for the
missing file, the war was ripping America apart as thousands of body bags with
dead American soldiers continued to come back from Vietnam, as another million
or so Vietnamese died, and as the war spread into Cambodia.
Perhaps, if nothing else, the centennial commemorations of Nixon’s birth on Jan.
9, 1913, will allow for this fuller and darker understanding of Nixon’s legacy.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new
book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book
(from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Swanson Critiques Parry’s New Book
Robert Parry’s new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, details how Republican
treason became normalized through the actions of Richard Nixon, George H.W.
Bush, Ronald Reagan and others, but it lets the Democrats off too easily, writes
David Swanson at warisacrime.org.
By David Swanson
How did right-wing politics in the United States survive the 1960s and 1970s and
thrive beyond?
Not only did the wealthy invest in the corruption of politics,
but the politicians invested in the normalization of treason.
When presidential candidate Richard Nixon sabotaged the peace process in
Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson privately called it treason and publicly kept
his mouth shut. By the time Bush the Elder, also involved in that earlier
treason, worked with Robert Gates and William Casey to sabotage President
Carter’s efforts to free hostages in Iran, the normalization was well underway.
The corruption of Watergate involved not only no-holds-barred political
thievery, but also Nixon’s fear that Daniel Ellsberg or the Brookings
Institution or someone else had possession of a file detailing Nixon’s
successful 1968 efforts to prevent the war on Vietnam from ending.
The Iran-Contra scandal that grew out of the U.S.-Israeli-Iranian plot to
replace Carter with Reagan, and the Iraq-gate scandal that followed, witnessed a
last fling of half-hearted pushback in Congress and the corporate media. Today
such non-sexual scandals no longer end in -gate. In fact, they are no longer
scandals.
Piling George W. Bush’s blatantly stolen elections onto the history of recent
U.S. politics calls into question the ability of Republicans to get elected to
national office without cheating. But the normalization of treason has been very
much a bi-partisan affair.
Robert Parry, who runs the invaluable website ConsortiumNews.com, has a new book
out called “America’s Stolen Narrative.” My recommendation is to immediately
read this book from Chapter 2 through to the end.
The introduction and chapter 1 depict President Barack Obama as having nothing
but the best intentions, glorify the American Revolution, argue in favor of a
strong federal government, and defend the practice of requiring people to
purchase private health insurance (a Republican idea in its origins, of course,
although Parry has adopted it as Democratic and good).
Also, Chapter 3 takes a detour into arguing unpersuasively for lesserevilism. If you’re into that sort of thing, knock yourselves out. But in my view
such discussions muddle and belittle the significance of the rest of this
tremendously important book.
The “stolen narratives” referred to in the title are the accurate accounts that
Parry presents of the treasonous acts I’ve mentioned above. Parry is an
investigative journalist who has unearthed powerful evidence of the crimes of
Nixon, Reagan and others. Parry not only details the evidence but recounts the
processes of coverup and distortion that the U.S. media has made its second
nature.
The result of this history is, I’m afraid, far worse than Parry’s opening pages
let on. Not only do Americans imagine that their politicians mean well when they
do not, particularly in the area of foreign policy, but the United States has
fundamentally accepted unlimited presidential powers.
Nixon’s crimes during his famous cover-up, and the far worse underlying crimes
as well, have now been legalized and accepted. Presidents do not answer to
Congress or the public or the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.
To a great extent, the people of our country have accepted temporary despots,
and to a great extent our people falsely believe themselves powerless to
act. They imagine the Left did something wrong through acting. This is part of
how history must be explained when leaving out the fact that the Right has been
cheating.
Parry’s account of Nixon’s undoing of peace in Vietnam, allowing for another
four years of slaughter in Southeast Asia, is the best I’ve seen and alone worth
the purchase of America’s Stolen Narrative.
Parry imagines what it might have meant, not only for peace in the world, but
also for social justice and the “war on poverty” in the United States had Hubert
Humphrey defeated Nixon. To the extent that Nixon’s successful electoral
sabotage in 1968 opened the door to dirtier politics ever since, the damage can
be multiplied.
Needless to say, that door was always somewhat opened. The Business Plot of 1933
was hardly less treasonous than anything Nixon did. Nixon’s go-between with the
Vietnamese in 1968 was the widow of Claire Lee Chennault who had worked to
provide China with U.S. planes, pilots and training to plan the firebombing of
Japan and provoke Japan into the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Our false narratives still require the acceptance or glorification of all things
related to World War II, but in fact one can see a bit of the husband in the
widow Chennault. And then there’s the assassination of President Kennedy, which
evidence suggests George H.W. Bush played a role in as in most of Parry’s
post-1960’s narrative. But Parry’s case that we turned a corner toward a nastier
political world with the Nixon presidency is a strong one.
The account of the Carter-Reagan October Surprise is also the best I’ve seen, in
terms of the evidence presented and the background provided, including on the
central role of the Israeli government. The same gang that hung President Carter
out to dry for failing to free the hostages had earlier pressured him to bring
the Shah of Iran to the United States, thereby provoking the fears of Iranians
and the seizure of the U.S. Embassy.
The weapons shipments to Iran later grew into the Iran-Contra scandal, but
common understanding of that scandal fails to trace it to its roots in the
treasonous bargain that kept the hostages prisoners until the day of Reagan’s
inauguration.
Parry devotes whole chapters to the history of corrupt manipulation by a couple
of the dirtiest individuals in Washington: Colin Powell and Robert Gates. These
two manage their heights of corruption and influence, in part, through their
cross-partisanship. Democrats in Parry’s worldview seem to be largely battered
wives failing to push back, failing to speak out, refusing to investigate or
prosecute or impeach. True enough, as far as it goes.
But I think there is a great measure of complicity and outright expansion of
bipartisan abuses that must be credited to the Democrats as well. An accurate
understanding of exactly how evil some of our Republicans have been need not
turn us into cheerleaders for the party of the current president, his record
classifications, his groundbreaking secrecy claims, his record whistleblower
prosecutions, his record levels of warrantless spying, his imprisonments without
trial, his wars without Congress, his war-making CIA, or his “kill list” murder
program.
Instead, an accurate understanding of how evil some of our politicians have been
should move us to become, like Robert Parry, dogged pursuers of the facts that
those in power seek to bury or beautify.
[Parry’s book is available in print here or as an e-book from Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com.]
David Swanson’s books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at http://davidswanson.org
and http://warisacrime.org and works as Campaign Coordinator for the online
activist organization http://rootsaction.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. Follow
him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.
The Death Toll of Watergate
Exclusive: Major gaps in the history of Watergate and Iran-Contra have let
Republicans minimize those scandals by comparing them to the fabricated
“scandal” over the Benghazi attacks. A fuller understanding of Watergate would
reveal its links to Richard Nixon’s prolonging the Vietnam War, writes Robert
Parry.
By Robert Parry
Republicans are fond of comparing their scandal-mongering like the current hype
over the terrorist assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya with genuine
scandals, like Watergate, which sank Richard Nixon’s second term, and IranContra, which marred Ronald Reagan’s last two years in office.
The GOP’s false equivalence represents both an effort to puff up their latest
accusations against Democrats and an attempt to minimize the misconduct of those
two Republican presidents. For instance, one favorite GOP comment about Benghazi
is: “No one died at Watergate. Four brave Americans died in Benghazi.”
This apples-and-oranges sophistry misses the point that Watergate and IranContra were complex conspiracies that required intensive investigations to
unravel their secrets (many of which remain hidden or in dispute to this day)
while the Benghazi affair boils down to an easily resolved question as to why
the U.S. intelligence community withheld some of the details in the immediate
aftermath of the attack last Sept. 11.
The answers seem to be that the Benghazi consulate had evolved into a CIA base
for secret operations and that U.S. intelligence didn’t want to tip off the
attack’s perpetrators regarding how much the agency knew about their identities.
So, the word “extremists” replaced specific groups and the CIA affiliation of
two slain Americans was withheld.
By contrast, the history of Watergate is still substantially misunderstood even
by supposed experts. Evidence from the National Archives now indicates that
Nixon’s Watergate operation linked back to his 1968 campaign’s sabotage of
President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks, an operation that Johnson
privately called “treason.”
As I explain in my new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, Johnson had learned, in
the days before Election 1968, that Nixon’s campaign was keeping the South
Vietnamese away from the Paris talks. LBJ even confronted Nixon by phone just
two days before the election. Nixon denied any skullduggery but Johnson didn’t
believe him.
Nixon’s campaign feared that if Johnson did achieve a Vietnam peace
breakthrough, which was then in the offing, Vice President Hubert Humphrey would
likely win the election, consigning Nixon to another bitter defeat.
There was also the possibility that if Johnson went public with what he knew
about the Nixon campaign’s interference with the negotiations while a half
million American troops were in the Vietnam war zone and more than 30,000 had
already died the disclosure might put Humphrey over the top.
But Johnson’s advisers feared what might happen to the country’s unity if
Nixon’s maneuver were revealed and he still went on to victory. They foresaw a
dangerously weakened president and national disorder. As Defense Secretary Clark
Clifford told Johnson in a conference call:
“Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering
whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly
have a certain individual [Nixon] elected. It could cast his whole
administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our
country’s interests.”
So, Johnson kept quiet; Nixon narrowly won the election; and the Paris peace
talks remained stalled for the remainder of LBJ’s presidency. Johnson’s only
revenge was to order his national security aide Walt Rostow to remove from the
White House the file of “top secret” wiretap transcripts and other evidence of
Nixon’s gambit when Johnson’s term ended on Jan. 20, 1969. Rostow labeled the
file “The ‘X’ Envelope.”
Hoover’s Tip
Early in his presidency, Nixon received unsettling news from FBI Director J.
Edgar Hoover about how much Johnson knew about the Vietnam peace sabotage.
Hoover described a widespread wiretapping operation against Nixon’s campaign.
Hoover apparently overstated the extent of the actual wiretapping, but the
report unnerved Nixon.
Nixon ordered his top assistants, White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman and
National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, to track down the file, which
they discovered was missing. They managed to reconstruct much of what had been
in the file but they didn’t know where the original documents had gone.
The missing file became a sudden crisis for Nixon in mid-June 1971 when the New
York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, a secret history of the Vietnam
War from 1945 to 1967, which exposed many of the lies behind the war, mostly
told by Democrats.
However, as the Pentagon Papers dominated the front pages of U.S. newspapers in
June 1971, Nixon understood something that few others did that there was a
shocking sequel to the Pentagon Papers, a secret file explaining how Nixon had
torpedoed Johnson’s peace talks in 1968 and thus extended the war for several
more years.
In other words, there was a file that could doom Nixon’s reelection in 1972 or
possibly worse, result in his impeachment and even his prosecution. Nixon had
not only continued the war, with the hope of getting his South Vietnamese allies
a better deal than Johnson would have given them, but he had escalated the war
with an invasion of Cambodia in 1970.
Beyond the unspeakable bloodshed in Indochina, the United States had been torn
apart domestically with parents turning against their children, with massive
street protests against the war, and with four American students slain at Kent
State in Ohio and two at Jackson State in Mississippi.
The Missing File
Nixon was reminded of his vulnerability when the first installments of the
Pentagon Papers were published in mid-June 1971. Just four days after the Times
began publishing the leaked history, one of Nixon’s Oval Office tapes on June
17, 1971 recorded him demanding extraordinary measures to locate the missing
file.
Nixon’s team referred to the file as related to Johnson’s Vietnam bombing halt
of Oct. 31, 1968, but the file encompassed LBJ’s failed peace negotiations and
more importantly the Republican sabotage of those talks, a reality that Nixon
understood from Hoover’s briefing.
“Do we have it?” a perturbed Nixon asked Haldeman about the file. “I’ve asked
for it. You said you didn’t have it.”
Haldeman responded, “We can’t find it.”
Kissinger added, “We have nothing here, Mr. President.”
Nixon: “Well, damnit, I asked for that because I need it.”
Kissinger: “But Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together.”
Haldeman: “We have a basic history in constructing our own, but there is a file
on it.”
Nixon: “Where?”
Haldeman: “[Presidential aide Tom Charles] Huston swears to God that there’s a
file on it and it’s at Brookings.”
Nixon: “Bob? Bob? Now do you remember Huston’s plan [for White House-sponsored
break-ins as part of domestic counter-intelligence operations]? Implement it.”
Kissinger: “Now Brookings has no right to have classified documents.”
Nixon: “I want it implemented. Goddamnit, get in and get those files. Blow the
safe and get it.”
Haldeman: “They may very well have cleaned them by now, but this thing, you need
to “
Kissinger: “I wouldn’t be surprised if Brookings had the files.”
Haldeman: “My point is Johnson knows that those files are around. He doesn’t
know for sure that we don’t have them around.”
But Johnson did know that the file was no longer at the White House because he
had ordered Walt Rostow to remove it in the final days of his own presidency.
Hiring Hunt
On June 30, 1971, Nixon again berated Haldeman about the need to break into
Brookings and “take it [the file] out.” Nixon even suggested using former CIA
officer E. Howard Hunt (who later oversaw the two Watergate break-ins in May and
June of 1972) to conduct the Brookings break-in.
“You talk to Hunt,” Nixon told Haldeman. “I want the break-in. Hell, they do
that. You’re to break into the place, rifle the files, and bring them in. Just
go in and take it. Go in around 8:00 or 9:00 o’clock.”
Haldeman: “Make an inspection of the safe.”
Nixon: “That’s right. You go in to inspect the safe. I mean, clean it up.” For
reasons that remain unclear, it appears that the planned Brookings break-in
never took place, but Nixon’s desperation to locate Johnson’s peace-talk file
was an important link in the chain of events that led to the creation of Nixon’s
Plumbers unit and then to Watergate.
Ironically, Walt Rostow made that link in his own mind when he had to decide
what to do with “The ‘X’ Envelope” in the wake of Johnson’s death on Jan. 22,
1973. On May 14, 1973, as Rostow pondered what to do, the Watergate scandal was
spinning out of Nixon’s control. In a three-page “memorandum for the record,”
Rostow reflected on what effect LBJ’s public silence may have had on the
unfolding Watergate scandal.
“I am inclined to believe the Republican operation in 1968 relates in two ways
to the Watergate affair of 1972,” Rostow wrote. He noted, first, that Nixon’s
operatives may have judged that their “enterprise with the South Vietnamese” in
frustrating Johnson’s last-ditch peace initiative had secured Nixon his narrow
margin of victory over Hubert Humphrey in 1968.
“Second, they got away with it,” Rostow wrote. “Despite considerable press
commentary after the election, the matter was never investigated fully. Thus, as
the same men faced the election in 1972, there was nothing in their previous
experience with an operation of doubtful propriety (or, even, legality) to warn
them off, and there were memories of how close an election could get and the
possible utility of pressing to the limit and beyond.” [To read Rostow’s memo,
click here, here and here.]
But there was a third link between Nixon’s Vietnam gambit and Watergate, one
that Rostow did not know: In Nixon’s desperate search for the missing file, he
had brought in E. Howard Hunt and created the team of burglars that later got
trapped in Watergate.
What to Do?
In spring 1973, Rostow struggled with the question of what to do with “The ‘X’
Envelope” as the Watergate scandal continued to deepen. 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. In a typed cover letter to LBJ Library
director Harry Middleton, Rostow wrote: “Sealed in the attached envelope is a
file President Johnson asked me to hold personally because of its sensitive
nature. In case of his death, the material was to be consigned to the LBJ
Library under conditions I judged to be appropriate.
“After fifty years the Director of the LBJ Library (or whomever may inherit his
responsibilities, should the administrative structure of the National Archives
change) may, alone, open this file. If he believes the material it contains
should not be opened for research [at that time], I would wish him empowered to
re-close the file for another fifty years when the procedure outlined above
should be repeated.”
Ultimately, however, the LBJ Library didn’t wait that long. After a little more
than two decades, on July 22, 1994, the envelope was opened and the archivists
began the process of declassifying the contents, some of which remain classified
to this day.
Yet, Rostow’s delay in releasing “The ‘X’ Envelope” had other political
consequences. Since the full scope of Nixon’s political intelligence operations
were not understood in 1973-74, Washington’s conventional wisdom adopted the
mistaken lesson from the Watergate scandal that “the cover-up is worse than the
crime.” What wasn’t understood was how deep Nixon’s villainy may have gone.
Another consequence is that Republicans still can disparage the significance of
Watergate, sometimes referring to it as Nixon did, as “a third-rate burglary.”
Not understanding the scope of criminality behind Nixon’s clandestine
operations, GOP officials even rate Watergate as less important than the current
flap over Benghazi because supposedly “no one died in Watergate.”
However, if the full continuum of Watergate were recognized that it partly
stemmed from a cover-up of Nixon’s Vietnam War “treason” in 1968 the notion that
“no one died” would sound like a sick joke.
Because Nixon extended the Vietnam War for four-plus years and expanded it into
Cambodia, millions of people perished, the vast majority inhabitants of
Indochina, but also more than 20,000 additional Americans. It is well past time
that this more complete history is recognized.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book,
America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon
and barnesandnoble.com).
A Strange New Watergate Book
Exclusive: A new book, Watergate: The Hidden History, suggests Teamster boss
Jimmy Hoffa and a Cuban report on attempts to kill Fidel Castro played major
roles in the scandal, but author Lamar Waldron relies on dubious evidence,
strange theories and sketchy sources, writes James DiEugenio.
By James DiEugenio
Let me start this critical essay with a quiz. On this, the 40th anniversary of
Watergate, what author could write a book about that legendary scandal in which
the following occur:
1.) Richard Nixon is not elected president until page 403.
2.) The Watergate burglars do not get caught until page 638.
3.) More space is spent on the JFK assassination than on the Watergate trials.
4.) Jimmy Hoffa is presented as a more prominent figure in the scandal than John
Dean.
If you answered “Lamar Waldron” to all four questions, you would be correct. But
before we explain who Waldron is and what this book is like, let us do a brief
review of Watergate to try and fit his book into an appropriate backdrop.
In the early morning hours of June 17, 1972, five men were caught breaking and
entering into the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters at the
Watergate hotel complex. The five were James McCord, Frank Sturgis, Eugenio
Martinez, VIrgilio Gonzalez and Bernard Barker.
After search warrants were obtained, authorities later rounded up two other men
who were involved in the crime: Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt. Due to the
listening devices and cameras in evidence it was clear they were illegally
spying on the Democratic headquarters.
Former Attorney General John Mitchell who was then running Nixon’s reelection
campaign — denied any connection between his organization and the burglary.
Mitchell said none of the men apprehended that night was “operating in our
behalf or with our consent.” (Washington Post 6/19/72)
This denial soon became untenable. For instance, when the address book of one of
the burglars was examined, Hunt’s name and phone number at President Nixon’s
White House was listed in it. (Stanley Kutler,The Wars of Watergate, p. 188)
James McCord, who had given the police a false name, worked under Mitchell for
the Committee to Reelect the President, or CREEP. (ibid, p. 189)
Liddy also
served there as, of all things, a legal counsel. (ibid)
Six weeks later, it was discovered that a Nixon campaign check for $25,000 wound
up in the bank account of Barker two months before the break-in. (Washington
Post, 8/1/72) In the spring of 1973, the Senate created a bipartisan committee
headed by Sen. Sam Ervin, D-North Carolina, to investigate.
By then, Liddy and McCord had been convicted on multiple charges stemming from
the burglary; the others had pleaded guilty. Judge John Sirica suspended very
long sentences over the seven men in hopes one of them would talk.
In March, one of them did. In a letter to Sirica, McCord said that pressure had
been applied to the defendants to remain silent; others involved had not been
named; perjury had occurred in the courtroom; even though he had worked for the
Agency for many years, Watergate was not a CIA operation. It really originated
out of the White House. (Kutler, p. 260)
McCord’s Role
In an interesting aside, in December 1972, McCord had written to John Caulfield
at the White House that, “if [CIA Director Richard] Helms goes, and the
Watergate operation is laid at the CIA’s feet every tree in the forest will
fall. It will be a scorched desert.” (ibid, p. 261)
McCord’s letter was the beginning of the end. He could expose, among other
things, that hush money was being sent to the defendants through CREEP employee
Herbert Kalmbach. (Kutler, p. 273) He was also one of the most important
witnesses that summer for the Ervin Committee.
That proceeding was a disaster for the White House. It exposed the fact that the
Watergate burglary was not an isolated incident. For the White House had set up
a covert unit — called the plumbers — to not just gather intelligence on the
Democrats but to “plug leaks” in the press about Nixon’s foreign policy. Their
most notable previous crime was a burglary at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s
psychiatrist in 1971. This was intended to gather information to smear Ellsberg
who had leaked the secret Pentagon Papers to the New York Times.
By the summer of 1973, President Nixon’s Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman and
Domestic Adviser John Ehrlichmann had resigned, and legal counsel John Dean had
been fired. Dean felt Nixon was setting him up as the fall guy for Watergate. So
he decided to testify for Ervin.
Dean stated that Nixon knew all about the extensive cover-up of Watergate and
had contributed ideas to the plan. The problem with Dean’s testimony was that it
amounted to his word against Nixon’s. But after Dean, another White House aide,
Alexander Butterfield testified. Butterfield revealed the existence of an
extensive taping system in the White House. This system would show just how far
Nixon’s culpability went.
Archibald Cox had been appointed Special Prosecutor for the scandal. He
requested several of these tapes as evidence for his criminal case. Nixon only
agreed to hand over written summaries. Cox rejected this deal. On Saturday, Oct.
20, 1973, Nixon ordered Attorney General Eliot Richardson to fire Cox.
Richardson resigned instead. His deputy, William Ruckelshaus, did the same.
Solicitor General Robert Bork finally terminated Cox.
This episode quickly became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.” Nixon had
made a huge miscalculation. For this event created an immediate firestorm in
Washington and throughout America. It even ignited demands for impeachment. And
an impeachment panel was assembled in the House under Rep. Peter Rodino, D-New
Jersey. Nixon had to turn over some tapes.
The Watergate Tapes
Texas lawyer, and former Lyndon Johnson confidante, Leon Jaworksi, replaced Cox.
One month later Judge Sirica announced the infamous 18-minute gap on one of the
tapes. Although Nixon tried to attribute this gap to an accident by secretary
Rose Mary Woods, an expert panel later adjudicated that the erasure was
deliberate. (Kutler, p. 431)
In late December, a Harris poll revealed that, by a margin of 73-21, the public
felt that the President had lost so much credibility he should step down. (ibid,
p. 430)
On Dec. 31, Jaworski announced that 12 others had now pleaded guilty in
the scandal, and he was charging four more individuals. Nixon still refused to
resign.
Jaworski and Rodino demanded more tapes. Nixon balked, claiming executive
privilege, even as Mitchell, Haldeman and Ehrlichman were being indicted. After
a lower court ruled against his claim, Nixon appealed to the Supreme Court. On
July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court ruled against the White House. One of the tapes
showed that, contrary to what Nixon had claimed, he was actively involved in the
cover-up.
This tape was made on June 23, 1972, just a week after the break-in. It
consisted of Haldeman and Nixon discussing using Vernon Walters of the CIA to
block an FBI investigation of campaign money being funneled to the plumbers.
Within a week, the House returned three articles of impeachment. Facing sure
removal from office, Nixon resigned on Aug. 9, 1974.
What I have outlined above is the official story of Watergate. It was first
propounded by the Washington Post, chiefly through reporters Bob Woodward and
Carl Bernstein. And it was followed by the Ervin Committee, with prominent
minority member, Howard Baker, continually asking: “What did the president know
and when did he know it?”
Actor Robert Redford then further imprinted this version on the public
consciousness. Redford actually purchased the rights to the Woodward-Bernstein
book All the President’s Men before it was published.
When the book became a runaway bestseller, and the film was nominated for eight
Oscars, this strengthened the Post version as part of Americana: two young,
intrepid reporters relentlessly pursued the truth about a scandal and, in a
David and Goliath duel, brought down a corrupt and evil president. Justice had
won out. Woodward, Bernstein and editor Ben Bradlee became journalistic heroes.
But even in 1976, when Woodward and Bernstein were becoming even wealthier
because of their sequel, The Final Days, there were puzzling questions laying
around which the Post, the MSM and the film did not address. Some of these
questions were brought up in the minority report of the Ervin Committee, led by
Baker and his counsel Fred Thompson. They also surfaced in the House report by
Rep. Lucien Nedzi, D-Michigan.
For instance, how did a private eye from New York named A. J. Woolsten-Smith
know in advance that the Republicans had a spy operation manned by several
Cubans that targeted the DNC? Smith then passed this information on to
Democratic operative William Haddad, who actually informed the target of the DNC
break-in, Larry O’Brien, about it in late March. (The New Republic, 6/23/82)
Astonishingly, O’Brien’s assistant, John Stewart, then met with Woolsten-Smith
and Haddad on April 26 and learned that Liddy and McCord would be involved in
the burglary as well as Cubans from south Florida. (Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda,
p. 79)
Smith uncannily said that the purpose of the raid was to show that Fidel Castro
had contributed illegal funds to the Democrats. (Which is what the Cubans
actually thought they were looking for evidence of at the DNC.) Woolsten-Smith
even showed Stewart an example of a bugging device that would be used.
Origins of the Plumbers
Another question: Why did Hunt visit Miami in April of 1971 to recruit Barker
and Martinez for certain operations which had not been planned yet? (ibid, p.
27) As White House aide Charles Colson told author Jim Hougan, “The Pentagon
Papers hadn’t been published. The Plumbers were months away. So you tell me: How
did Hunt know that he’d need the Cubans?” (ibid, p. 29) [The New York Times
began publishing the Pentagon Papers on June 13, 1971.]
This is an interesting question from Colson, the man who would hire Hunt to work
in the White House two months later. Which leads to another interesting question
about Hunt, who told the Cubans he had retired from the CIA. Yet, he was working
at the Mullen Company, a public relations firm, at the time. Why would he need
to recruit Cubans for a PR company? It was later discovered that the Mullen
Company was used as a front organization to place and conceal CIA agents.
Richard Helms had personally intervened with Robert Mullen to hire Hunt. (ibid,
p. 6)
And finally, why did Hunt and McCord deny that they knew each other prior
to their work for Nixon, when it is almost certain that they worked together in
the Agency as far back as Cuban exile operations in late 1962. (ibid, p. 18)
As the reader can see, the Woodward-Bernstein-Ervin version left some nagging
questions in the narrative, and also some gaping holes in the characterizations.
These, and many other lacunae, caused a major revision of Watergate in 1984,
when Jim Hougan published Secret Agenda. This book allowed for much more CIA
involvement in Watergate, especially through Hunt and McCord. And the author
made a good argument for the final break-in at the DNC being sabotaged.
In 1992, there was another revision. This one was by Len Colodny and Robert
Gettlin in their book Silent Coup. By this time, the political spectrum in
America had switched far to the right. Therefore, this book argued that John
Dean was not the man responsible for bringing down Nixon. He was actually
covering himself because it was he who proposed the break-in. This second
revision was not as successful or as influential as the first.
Nixon’s Fears
As more tapes from the era were declassified, a new reason emerged to explain
the creation of the so-called “plumber’s unit,” the extralegal covert operators
meant to perform burglaries for the White House. It had been assumed that the
motivation for starting the “plumbers” was to plug leaks like that of the
Pentagon Papers. However, the tapes indicate that it more likely was about a
search for a White House file which revealed information about Republican
efforts to sabotage Vietnam War peace talks before the 1968 election.
The Republicans understood that President Johnson was making progress toward a
negotiated end to the Vietnam War in 1968. To counteract the possibility of such
an election-year peace breakthrough, which could have thrown the close election
to Hubert Humphrey, they opened a backchannel to the leadership of South Vietnam
through right-wing Chinese émigré Anna Chennault. She convinced the leaders in
Saigon that they would get a better deal if they refused to cooperate with
Johnson and waited for Nixon to be elected.
It turns out, however, that Johnson knew a great deal about this interference in
his foreign policy. According to audiotapes of LBJ’s phone calls released in
2008, Johnson even confronted Nixon with the possibility that the White House
would reveal the Chennault operation before the 1968 election. However, Johnson
ultimately chose to stay silent about the Republican sabotage and Nixon narrowly
defeated Humphrey.
After taking office, Nixon was told by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that Johnson
had instructed the Bureau to perform surveillance on the Republicans to find out
what they had done to sabotage his peace initiative. This wiretap information
had then gone into a file at the White House. But on Johnson’s orders the file
was removed by national security adviser Walt Rostow before LBJ’s presidency
ended. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “LBJ’s ‘X’ File on Nixon’s ‘Treason.’”]
Nixon grew exasperated that he could not find the file and became even more
concerned in June 1971, in the days after the New York Times began publishing
the Pentagon Papers, which had focused on the Vietnam War’s history through
1967. If Johnson’s file on Nixon’s 1968 peace-talk interference found its way
into the press, it could have represented a powerful sequel to the Pentagon
Papers and could have destroyed Nixon’s reelection hopes.
An aide in the Nixon White House, Tom Huston, suspected the missing file could
be at the Brookings Institution. After Huston voiced this belief to Haldeman,
Nixon told Haldeman on June 17, 1971, to act on Huston’s previously composed
plan for illegal break-ins: “I want it implemented. God damn it, get in and get
those files. Blow the safe and get it.”
On June 30, 1971, Nixon even recommended the involvement of burglars under the
command of Howard Hunt. “You talk to Hunt,” Nixon told Haldeman. “I want the
break-in. Hell, they do that. You’re to break into the place, rifle the files,
and bring them in. Just go in and take it. Go in around 8:00 or 9:00 o’clock.”
[For details, see Robert Parry’s “The Dark Continuum of Watergate.”]
A New Book
Now we have Lamar Waldron’s Watergate: The Hidden History, an attempt at a
further revision of the Watergate story. Yet, I predict it will be even less
successful and influential than Silent Coup. I have had the opportunity to
observe and interact with Waldron at length. I read and reviewed Waldron’s
previous two books (written with Thom Hartmann) called Ultimate Sacrifice and
Legacy of Secrecy.
I have also seen him speak at two JFK conferences. And, most recently, I dealt
with him at Appian Way, Leonardo DiCaprio’s production office in West Hollywood.
DiCaprio’s father Giorgio is producing a film about the JFK assassination based
upon Legacy of Secrecy. Paul Schrade and I went to Appian Way to discuss this
project with Giorgio and documentary producer Earl Katz.
More precisely, we were there in hopes of talking them out of their decision.
Unfortunately for us, and many others, we were not successful. No matter how
many cogent and accurate flaws we pointed out in the books, it wasn’t enough. No
matter how many ad hominem attacks or non-sequitirs Waldron responded with,
DiCaprio and Katz never, ever took exception.
For instance, during our discussions, Waldron said that Peter Noyes’s book
Legacy of Doubt was a New York Times bestseller and that it was labeled as such
on its paperback version. Later, I checked the Times bestseller lists for 1973,
when the book was published. It did not show up anywhere on the list. Further,
the paperback version says nothing about being a bestseller. How could it say
such a thing? The book was never released in hardcover.
Before I demonstrate why that false attribution about the Noyes book is
important, let me describe the contents of Waldron’s new 792-page book,
Watergate: The Hidden History. The first section, well over 100 pages, consists
of a biography of Richard Nixon. It takes us from his college days to the end of
his vice presidency.
If one looks at the footnotes for this section of the book, another rather
surprising characteristic reveals itself: Waldron’s overwhelming reliance on
secondary sources. The two books that the author uses there, and throughout, are
the biographies of Nixon by Stephen Ambrose and Anthony Summers. If you have
read those biographies, as I had, there really was not any reason to read this
section.
The second major section covers the Kennedy administration’s Cuban policy up
until and beyond JFK’s assassination. Again, this section goes on for hundreds
of pages. And it is nothing if not self-indulgent. Much of this is used as a
platform for the author to propagate his take on the assassination of President
Kennedy. And although Waldron insists on trying to connect this to the end of
the book, there really is no credible relationship established between the two
crimes of the Kennedy assassination and Watergate.
The third part deals with Nixon’s second attempt to gain the White House, his
election, his reelection, and his downfall due to the Watergate scandal. Thus,
the actual arrest of the Watergate burglars does not occur until more than 600
pages into the book, with less than 100 pages of text left in the volume. Talk
about putting the horse after the cart.
Curious Structure
After having read the book and taken 26 pages of notes, I do not really
understand why this structure was done. Explaining Nixon’s odd character could
have been accomplished in a much shorter space. More importantly, Waldron never
really establishes any connection between JFK’s murder and Watergate, so the
second section is also dubiously inserted.
Perhaps, Waldron was most interested in exposing to a new and unsuspecting
audience his bizarre Kennedy assassination theory, which connects JFK’s murder
on Nov. 22, 1963, to an alleged plan to invade Cuba that December. People might
have picked up the new book thinking that they were going to be reading about
Watergate.
But besides noting that virtually no one in the JFK research community buys into
Waldron’s theory, even people to whom Waldron dedicates his book, it is
important to note that there is simply no credible evidence for it. (For a long
analysis as to why not, click here.)
As with his previous books, this tome is much inflated in size and there is no
way to justify its bloated length. I blame this on Waldron’s editors at his
publishing company, Counterpoint in Berkeley. They are also to blame for the
poor production quality of this volume. For instance, on page 551 the name Liddy
is spelled Libby, and on page 261, Waldron writes that the U.S. had 161,000
advisers in Vietnam in 1963, which is so off as to be ludicrous.
There is also no way that a very considerable sum of Waldron’s book actually
connects to Watergate, even on Waldron’s unusual terms. Waldron writes as if
Teamster union boss Jimmy Hoffa were an important figure in Watergate.
As far as I can tell he bases this on three factors. First, there is an alleged
bribe by a Mafia friend of Hoffa to forestall any indictment of the Teamster
leader during the latter days of the Eisenhower administration. (What that would
have to do with Watergate eludes me, but let us proceed as if it’s relevant.)
Then, there was a forestalled indictment of Hoffa under Eisenhower. Next, there
was some kind of tip-off to the Watergate Committee by Hoffa. The problem with
this evidence is multileveled. First, it is poorly sourced; second, it is
questionable on its surface; third, it has little, if anything, to do with
Watergate.
Unreliable Source
Let us examine the first. Waldron describes Dan Moldea’s 1978 tome, The Hoffa
Wars, as a great book. (Waldron, p. 80)
understatement.
To say that I disagree is an
But Moldea’s book provides some of the sourcing for this half
million-dollar bribe to Nixon by the Mafia on Hoffa’s behalf. The problem with
this story is that if one looks at the annotation of Moldea’s book, the source
for this is a man named Edward Grady Partin.
Moldea does what he can to conceal the myriad liabilities of Partin as a
witness. For example, he buried some of the derogatory information about him in
his footnotes. (Moldea, p. 427) These consisted of charges of embezzlement and
kidnapping.
The late and illustrious Fred Cook expounded on Partin at much greater length in
a long article in The Nation (April 27, 1964). In 1943, Partin was arrested for
breaking and entering. He drew a 15-year prison term. He twice broke out of
jail. When finally freed, he joined the Marines and was dishonorably discharged.
Partin then became chief of a Baton Rouge union local. When he was suspected of
embezzlement of union funds and visiting a Castro aide in Cuba, an investigation
was triggered. But before the investigators arrived on the scene, the local’s
600-pound safe, containing all the local’s records and books, disappeared from
the union hall. The now empty safe was later recovered from the Amite River.
But the investigation continued and Partin was indicted for forging a withdrawal
card, which removed one of his critics from the union. Two other critics were
ambushed and beaten up by six Teamsters. One of these two, A. G. Klein, was then
killed when a truck loaded with sand “fell on him” in St. Francisville, east of
Baton Rouge. These incidents caused further inquiries about Partin.
In summer 1962, Partin was indicted on 26 counts of forging union records and
embezzlement. If convicted of all charges and given the maximum penalties, he
would have been fined $260,000 and sentenced to 78 years in prison. Later,
Partin was indicted on charges of manslaughter and leaving the scene of an
accident. He was then indicted for kidnapping. But since the two infants later
showed up at the courthouse, he was made eligible for parole.
At first, Partin had trouble raising the bail money, but he miraculously
succeeded in securing a $60,000 bond. After his release on Oct. 7, 1962, he
telephoned his acquaintance Jimmy Hoffa, who did not know the call was recorded.
In other words, to escape a possible 78-year sentence, Partin had agreed to turn
informant against Hoffa. Suddenly, his legal problems disappeared. (Though after
Hoffa was convicted, Partin then was indicted on new charges of extortion,
obstruction of justice, racketeering and further embezzlement of union funds.)
It was Partin’s testimony that was key in convicting Hoffa of jury-tampering.
But then, after Hoffa’s conviction, Partin still had many more tales to tell.
Since Moldea’s book was published after the discoveries of the Church Committee,
Partin’s new stories had the appropriate topicality. Somehow, Hoffa was the
original go-between for the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. (Moldea, p. 12)
Hoffa was involved with gun-running activities into Cuba. (Ibid, p. 107)
And
Hoffa was also sending aircraft to Castro. (Ibid, p. 123)
Again, these late-arriving accusations against Hoffa have serious problems. To
name a serious one, there is no corroboration for them that I know outside of
Partin. The Church Committee never found any trace of Hoffa being involved with
the CIA-Mafia plots. [Hoffa disappeared on July 30, 1975, and was presumed
murdered in a gangland hit.]
But even worse, as I later discovered in the declassified files of the Jim
Garrison investigation, a professional society of polygraphers got hold of a lie
detector test that the Justice Department had done on Partin. At a convention
held in New York, they announced they had found traces of deception throughout
the test, but especially in the part dealing with a death threat by Hoffa
against Robert Kennedy. In other words, the test was rigged in advance since the
technician knew Partin would lie.
In light of the above, Moldea was, at best, unwise to use so much of Partin in
his book. But Waldron is even worse because although Moldea is not upfront about
Partin’s serious problems as a witness he at least mentions some of them.
Waldron mentions none of them.
The other problem with this so-called Nixon bribe is that, as Waldron finally
acknowledges, it didn’t work for Hoffa was later indicted by the Eisenhower
Justice Department (Waldron, p. 147), which, of course, makes the origin of the
story even more questionable.
Missing Attribution
Concerning the third supposed link between Hoffa and Watergate, Waldron writes
that Hoffa tipped off the Senate Watergate Committee about the CIA-Mafia plots
to kill Castro. He footnotes this to Moldea’s book. Yet, when I turned to the
listed reference on page 321, I could not locate the information.
This last difficulty points up a recurrent problem with the author. For
instance, in this book, Waldron makes much of a later alleged bribe from the
Teamsters to Nixon to pardon Hoffa and to bar him from replacing the new
Teamsters’ president Frank Fitzsimmons. Nixon did do both things.
But Waldron tries to relate this alleged bribe to the famous segment on the
March 21, 1973, tape in which Nixon was talking to John Dean about the Watergate
burglars’ demands for large sums of hush money. Nixon states, “What I mean is
you could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash.” But when one
looks up the source for this, a Time magazine article of Aug. 8, 1977, it is all
very speculative, part of an FBI inquiry that was ongoing.
Since the target was Charles Colson, and he was never indicted on any such
charge of receiving bribe money, one can say the case was never proven. But
further, we know through the Ervin Committee that the money to pay the burglars
to keep quiet was given to Nixon’s personal lawyer Herbert Kalmbach by campaign
chairman Maurice Stans from presidential campaign funds. (Kutler, p. 371)
But then there is an even more serious instance of questionable referencing.
Early on in the book Waldron clearly implies that Howard Hunt was working for
the Plumbers unit before Charles Colson at the White House officially hired him
on July 7, 1971. (Waldron, p. 19) When I read this I thought it was a really
interesting discovery.
But I then noted it was sourced to Stanley Kutler’s book Abuse of Power. That
book was published in 1997, fifteen years ago. Why did no one pick up on it in
the interim? Well, when I looked up the source material I discovered why.
Kutler’s book is a transcription of declassified Watergate tapes interpolated
with his comments.
In summer 1971, President Nixon is talking with first, Chief of Staff Bob
Haldeman, and then his counsel Charles Colson. The topic is the aforementioned
possible burglary at the centrist-oriented Brookings Institute. In conversations
dated June 30 and July 1, the three are discussing people to run a raid at
Brookings. Nixon brings up Hunt’s name as an example of someone who they could
use for such a mission.
Then on July 1, Colson brings up Hunt’s name again. Nixon asks how old he is,
and Colson replies he is 50. Nixon says that would be alright because he may
still have the energy. (Kutler, pgs. 6, 13) In reading this through, it’s clear
that Hunt is not working for the White House at the time. His name is being
floated as someone they could use for some illegal activities. Hunt is hired a
few days later.
Stale Material
In light of the above, it is now time to cut to the chase. What is the testimony
or evidence on which Waldron bases his nearly 800-page attempt at radical
revisionism? Well, it’s not anything recently declassified from the National
Archives. It is an unsworn interview given by Frank Sturgis to journalist Andrew
St. George in 1972. (Waldron p. 575)
Sturgis said that the reason the burglars were at the Watergate was they were
looking for the Cuban Dossier put together by Castro’s intelligence force on
attempts by the CIA to kill him. Waldron never asks: What on earth would that be
doing at the DNC? And he never asks this either: What would it be doing in Maxie
Wells’s desk? For one of the burglars, Eugenio Martinez, had the key to her
desk. (Wells was secretary to Spencer Oliver, the executive director of the
Association of State Democratic Chairmen.)
No other book has given credence to Sturgis’s claim. Nor has any other official
investigation of Watergate endorsed it. Further, Frank Sturgis had a notorious
reputation as being an unreliable witness. Authors and investigators like Edwin
Lopez and Gaeton Fonzi have concluded that he was a disinformation agent.
(Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation, p. 80) And as far as I can see, Waldron
provides no other corroboration for Sturgis.
There are other things in the book that make this idea dubious. For instance,
why would James McCord. Gordon Liddy and Hunt risk being sent to jail over this
document? As a product of Castro’s intelligence network, it could easily be
denied. The really important bombshell in this regard was, of course, the Church
Committee’s uncovering of the CIA’s Inspector General report on the plots.
This was something that could not be denied since the Agency itself had
generated it back in 1967 under the supervision of Director Richard Helms for
President Johnson. And when the Church Committee exposed these plots, backed up
by the report, it did create a considerable furor.
But here is another major problem for Waldron: Richard Nixon is not named in
either document. As John Newman does, one can make a case that Nixon was privy
to the origins of these plots. (Oswald and the CIA, pgs. 113-132)
But he never
figured in their operation, and there is no evidence he knew about them once
they began. (ibid, p. 131) So why would he be included in any report on their
operation? He wouldn’t be, and Nixon had to know that.
I have to say this because this is the argument Waldron makes. He goes as far as
to state that Nixon ordered the break-in at the Watergate, though there was
never any credible evidence adduced for this by either the Ervin Committee or
the Special Prosecutors’ office headed by Leon Jaworski.
The best evidence that could be produced was that John Mitchell, after turning
down two previous break-in and sabotage plans in his office, finally approved a
third presentation. This presentation was a revised version that was scaled down
by Gordon Liddy. It was then passed on to Jeb Magruder, who was the Deputy
Director of Nixon’s re-election committee under Mitchell. Magruder presented
this version to Mitchell at a third meeting in Key Biscayne, Florida. According
to Magruder’s Ervin Committee testimony, Mitchell approved the plan. Something
that Mitchell disputed.
Magruder Interview
But Waldron now uses an interview Magurder did in 2003 for PBS when Magruder
then changed his story in a significant way. He said that during the meeting at
Key Biscayne, he himself called Haldeman. Magruder told the Chief of Staff that
he was not enthusiastic about the plan; but Haldmen said he was and so was
Nixon.
Haldeman then asked for Mitchell. Magruder passed the phone as requested. He
then said he overheard Nixon’s voice say, “John, we need to get the information
on Larry O’Brien, the only way we can do that is through Liddy’s plan, and you
need to do that.” After that, Mitchell approved the plan and the funding.
(Waldron, p. 551)
This exchange, with Nixon saying the reason for the break-in was to wiretap
O’Brien, contradicts Waldron’s thesis about the Cuban Dossier, but Waldron
ignores that. He also ignores the fact that Magruder had published a book on
Watergate in 1974. There he did not mention this conversation with Nixon. In
fact, in that book, called An American Life, he actually stated that, to his
knowledge, Nixon did not know about the Watergate break-in in advance.
Secondly, there was another witness in the room with Magruder and Mitchell, Fred
La Rue, who denies Magruder’s 30-years-later-recovered memory. As with the Cuban
Dossier angle, this belated story about a Nixon phone call at Key Biscayne lacks
credibility. And the fact that it is single sourced, from a witness who has told
conflicting stories in the past, makes it more so.
There is no denying that the reason for the break-in was always murky. As
Magruder alludes to above, most people thought that the motive was to spy on
Larry O’Brien, who had been effectively attacking the White House over the Dita
Beard/ITT influence-peddling scandal and who was believed to have information
about Nixon’s connection to billionaire Howard Hughes.
Hughes had given Nixon’s brother Donald a six-figure loan prior to the 1960
election. This became public and hurt Nixon in the press. Therefore, many people
believed that Nixon was very much worried that O’Brien, who had worked for
Hughes as a lobbyist, had more dirt on this Nixon/Hughes topic. John Meier, a
close adviser to Hughes, kept telling Donald Nixon that this in fact was the
case.
Journalist Robert Parry has also dug up another possible reason for the break-in
and the targeting of Spencer Oliver. Parry interviewed Oliver for his book
Secrecy and Privilege. It turns out that Oliver was spearheading an effort on
behalf of the Democratic state chairmen to block the candidacy of George
McGovern, whom many Democrats viewed as a sure loser.
One idea was to deny McGovern any delegates from the Texas state convention and
then replace him at the Democratic National Convention with Terry Sanford,
former governor of North Carolina. The Republicans, from the beginning of the
1972 campaign, had plotted to subvert stronger candidates, like Maine Sen.
Edmund Muskie, to ensure that Nixon would be running against a perceived weak
candidate like McGovern.
Oliver, whose phone (along with O’Brien’s) was bugged when the Watergate
burglars first penetrated the Democratic headquarters in May 1972, later came to
believe that Nixon’s campaign learned of this last-ditch effort to stop McGovern
by listening in on Oliver’s phone, which as it turned out had the only
operational eavesdropping device.
Oliver further suspected that former Texas Gov. John Connally, a Democrat who
had joined the Nixon administration as Treasury Secretary, and Connally’s
longtime protégé, Robert Strauss, who was still part of the Democratic
hierarchy, were tasked by Nixon’s campaign to intervene in the Texas Democratic
convention to make sure that McGovern got enough delegates to put him within
reach of the nomination. Waldron mentions this interesting aspect, but he then
drops it for the Cuban Dossier angle. (Waldron, p. 590)
Loose Ends
Let me briefly deal with two other points to which Waldron attaches great
weight.
At the end of the book, there is summary of an interview the Watergate
Committee did with Mafia figure John Roselli. After reading it twice, I don’t
know why it’s there. There is simply nothing of substance in it that relates to
Watergate.
Finally, there is the matter of the Chilean Embassy break-in. A few days before
the Watergate break-in there was a reported break in at the Chilean Embassy in
Washington. (New York Times, 2/26/99) Waldron explains this as the Plumbers
searching for the Cuban Dossier. Presumably, Castro was somehow shopping it
around to other countries. However, other authors, like Andrew Rudvalvige, chalk
the break-in up to trying to gain information about the socialist designs of
President Salvador Allende who Nixon and Henry Kissinger were obsessed with
overthrowing. (The New Imperial Presidency, p. 74)
So, in summary, what does this book actually represent? As someone familiar with
both Watergate and Waldron, I believe it represents three things. As previously
mentioned, it’s a way for Waldron to sneak in his weird and untenable theory
about the Kennedy assassination into a different subject area.
Secondly, it serves another personal obsession of Waldron’s. It’s a way to
somehow inject the Mafia into the Watergate scandal, something that, to my
knowledge, no one had really done before. Waldron doesn’t either, but he tries.
And there is a third general motif that has now become typical of Waldron: The
attempt to cover up a paltry amount of new and pointed material by burying it in
hundreds of pages of irrelevancy. I think this is supposed to convey the
illusion of depth and erudition.
Fortunately for him, Waldron has his own mini-echo chamber. Thom Hartmann was
his writing partner on Legacy of Secrecy and Ultimate Sacrifice. Hartmann now
has his own daily TV show called The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann.
Waldron
makes appearances there to promote his books.
Previously, when Hartmann was on Air America Talk Radio, Hartmann interviewed
him there. Syndicated columnist Liz Smith, a protégé of Walter Winchell, has
always promoted a Mafia angle in the JFK case. Therefore, she essentially prints
Waldron’s press releases.
There is no doubt that Waldron is a tireless worker on his own behalf to the
point that he has been involved with more than one cable special on the JFK
case.
And this is where Giorgio DiCaprio saw him and got in contact with him.
DiCaprio then got in contact with documentary film-maker Earl Katz to do an
accompanying documentary film with the Legacy of Secrecy feature.
Well, in the acknowledgements to Watergate: The Hidden History, we now see just
how deeply DiCaprio and Katz have bought into Waldron’s absolutely ahistorical
methodology. On page 756, the following sentence appears: “Thanks is also due to
producer Earl Katz, for helping to clear the Watergate documentary rights for
this book.”
It’s a chilling thought that we may actually have to face a cable TV documentary
about Jimmy Hoffa’s (non-existent) role in Watergate. That is the price one pays
for titling a former comic book creator, which Waldron was, as a historian.
James DiEugenio is a researcher and writer on the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy and other mysteries of that era.
The Dark Continuum of Watergate
Special Report: The 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in has brought
reflections on the scandal’s larger meaning, but Official Washington still
misses the connection to perhaps Richard Nixon’s dirtiest trick, the torpedoing
of Vietnam peace talks that could have ended the war four years earlier, Robert
Parry reports.
By Robert Parry
The origins of the Watergate scandal trace back to President Richard Nixon’s
frantic pursuit of a secret file containing evidence that his 1968 election
campaign team sabotaged Lyndon Johnson’s peace negotiations on the Vietnam War,
a search that led Nixon to create his infamous “plumbers” unit and to order a
pre-Watergate break-in at the Brookings Institution.
Indeed, the first transcript in Stanley I. Kutler’s Abuse of Power, a book of
Nixon’s recorded White House conversations relating to Watergate, is of an Oval
Office conversation on June 17, 1971, in which Nixon orders his subordinates to
break into Brookings because he believes the 1968 file might be in a safe at the
centrist Washington think tank.
Unknown to Nixon, however, President Lyndon Johnson had ordered his national
security adviser, Walt Rostow, to take the file out of the White House before
Nixon was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1969. Rostow labeled it “The ‘X’ Envelope” and
kept it until after Johnson’s death in 1973 when Rostow turned it over to the
LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, with instructions to keep it secret for decades.
Yet, this connection between Nixon’s 1968 gambit and the Watergate scandal four
years later has been largely overlooked by journalists and scholars. They mostly
have downplayed evidence of the Nixon campaign’s derailing of the 1968 peace
negotiations while glorifying the media’s role in uncovering Nixon’s cover-up of
his re-election campaign’s spying on Democrats in 1972.
One of the Washington press corps’ most misguided sayings that “the cover-up is
worse than the crime” derived from the failure to understand the full scope of
Nixon’s crimes of state.
Similarly, there has been a tendency to shy away from a thorough recounting of a
series of Republican scandals, beginning with the peace talk sabotage in 1968
and extending through similar scandals implicating Ronald Reagan and George H.W.
Bush in the 1980 interference of President Jimmy Carter’s hostage negotiations
with Iran, drug trafficking by Reagan’s beloved Nicaraguan Contra rebels, and
the Iran-Contra Affair and reaching into the era of George W. Bush, including
his Florida election theft in 2000, his use of torture in the “war on terror”
and his aggressive war (under false pretenses) against Iraq.
In all these cases, Official Washington has chosen to look forward, not
backward. The one major exception to that rule was Watergate, which is again
drawing major attention around the 40th anniversary of the botched break-in at
the Democratic National Committee on June 17, 1972.
Wood-stein Redux
As part of the commemoration, the Washington Post’s star reporters on Watergate
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward penned a reflection on the scandal, which puts
it in a broader context than simply a one-off example of Nixon’s political
paranoia.
In their first joint byline in 36 years, Woodward and Bernstein write that the
Watergate scandal was much worse than they had understood in the 1970s. They
depict Watergate as essentially five intersecting “wars” that Nixon was waging
against his perceived enemies and the democratic process, taking on the anti-war
movement, the news media, the Democrats, justice and history.
“At its most virulent, Watergate was a brazen and daring assault, led by Nixon
himself, against the heart of American democracy: the Constitution, our system
of free elections, the rule of law,” they wrote in the Post’s Outlook section on
June 10, 2012.
In the article, Woodward and Bernstein take note of the Oval Office discussion
on June 17, 1971, regarding Nixon’s eagerness to break into Brookings in search
of the elusive file, but they miss its significance referring to it as a file
about Johnson’s “handling of the 1968 bombing halt in Vietnam.”
That bombing halt ordered by Johnson on Oct. 31, 1968 was part of a larger
initiative to achieve a breakthrough with North Vietnam to end the war,
which had already claimed more than 30,000 American lives and countless
Vietnamese. To thwart the peace talks, Nixon’s campaign went behind Johnson’s
back to convince the South Vietnamese government to boycott those talks and thus
deny Democrat Hubert Humphrey a last-minute surge in support, which likely would
have cost Nixon the election.
Rostow’s “The ‘X’ Envelope,” which was finally opened in 1994 and is now largely
declassified, reveals that Johnson had come to know a great deal about Nixon’s
peace-talk sabotage from FBI wiretaps. In addition, tapes of presidential phone
conversations, which were released in 2008, show Johnson complaining to key
Republicans about the gambit and even confronting Nixon personally.
In other words, the file that Nixon so desperately wanted to find was not
primarily about how Johnson handled the 1968 bombing halt but rather how Nixon’s
campaign obstructed the peace talks by giving assurances to South Vietnamese
leaders that Nixon would get them a better result.
After becoming President, Nixon did extend and expand the conflict, much as
South Vietnamese leaders had hoped. Ultimately, however, after more than 20,000
more Americans and possibly a million more Vietnamese had died, Nixon accepted a
peace deal in 1972 similar to what Johnson was negotiating in 1968. After U.S.
troops finally departed, the South Vietnamese government soon fell to the North
and the Vietcong.
‘I Need It’
Yet, in 1971, the file on Nixon’s 1968 gambit represented a real and present
danger to his re-election. He considered its recovery an important priority,
especially after the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, which revealed the
deceptions mostly by Democrats that had led the United States into the Vietnam
War.
If the second shoe had dropped revealing Nixon’s role in extending the war to
help win an election the outrage across the country would have been hard to
predict.
The transcript of the Oval Office conversation on June 17, 1971, suggests Nixon
had been searching for the 1968 file for some time and was perturbed by the
failure of his staff to find it.
“Do we have it?” Nixon asked his chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman. “”I’ve
asked for it. You said you didn’t have it.”
Haldeman responded, “We can’t find it.”
National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger added, “We have nothing here, Mr.
President.”
Nixon: “Well, damnit, I asked for that because I need it.”
Kissinger: “But Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together.”
Haldeman: “We have a basic history in constructing our own, but there is a file
on it.”
Nixon: “Where?”
Haldeman: “[Presidential aide Tom Charles] Huston swears to God that there’s a
file on it and it’s at Brookings.”
Nixon: “Bob? Bob? Now do you remember Huston’s plan [for White House-sponsored
break-ins as part of domestic counter-intelligence operations]? Implement it.”
Kissinger: “Now Brookings has no right to have classified documents.”
Nixon: “I want it implemented. Goddamnit, get in and get those files. Blow the
safe and get it.”
Haldeman: “They may very well have cleaned them by now, but this thing, you need
to “
Kissinger: “I wouldn’t be surprised if Brookings had the files.”
Haldeman: “My point is Johnson knows that those files are around. He doesn’t
know for sure that we don’t have them around.”
‘The X Envelope’
But Johnson did know that the file was no longer at the White House because he
had ordered Walt Rostow to remove the documents in the final days of his own
presidency. According to those documents and audiotapes of phone conversations,
Johnson left office embittered over the Nixon campaign’s interference, which he
privately called “treason,” but he still decided not to disclose what he knew.
In a conference call on Nov. 4, 1968, the day before the election, Johnson
considered confirming a story about Nixon’s interference that a Saigon-based
reporter had written for the Christian Science Monitor, but Johnson was
dissuaded by Rostow, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Defense Secretary Clark
Clifford.
“Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering
whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly
have a certain individual [Nixon] elected,” Clifford said. “It could cast his
whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our
country’s interests.”
Three years later as Nixon headed toward his re-election campaign, he worried
about what evidence Johnson or the Democrats might possess that could be
disclosed to the American people. According to Nixon’s taped White House
conversations, he remained obsessed with getting the file.
On June 30, 1971, he again berated Haldeman about the need to break into
Brookings and “take it [the file] out.” Nixon even suggested using former CIA
officer E. Howard Hunt (who later oversaw the two Watergate break-ins in May and
June of 1972) to conduct the Brookings break-in.
“You talk to Hunt,” Nixon told Haldeman. “I want the break-in. Hell, they do
that. You’re to break into the place, rifle the files, and bring them in. Just
go in and take it. Go in around 8:00 or 9:00 o’clock.”
Haldeman: “Make an inspection of the safe.”
Nixon: “That’s right. You go in to inspect the safe. I mean, clean it up.” (For
reasons that remain unclear, it appears that the planned Brookings break-in
never took place.)
Offense or Defense
In the Outlook piece, Woodward and Bernstein interpret Nixon’s interest in the
file as mostly offensive, that his White House team was looking for material
that could be used to “blackmail Johnson” in Haldeman’s words presumably over
Nixon’s belief that Johnson had engaged in illegal wiretaps of Nixon’s campaign
in 1968 regarding its contacts with South Vietnamese officials.
Nixon revived this LBJ-bugged-us-too complaint after the botched Watergate
break-in on June 17, 1972. And, Johnson’s silence about the peace-talk sabotage
may have convinced Nixon that Johnson was more worried about disclosures of his
wiretaps than Nixon was about revelations of his campaign’s Vietnam treachery.
As early as July 1, 1972, Nixon cited the 1968 events as a possible blackmail
card to play against Johnson to get his help squelching the expanding Watergate
probe.
According to Nixon’s White House tapes, his aide Charles Colson touched off
Nixon’s musings by noting that a newspaper column claimed that the Democrats had
bugged the telephones of Nixon campaign operative (and right-wing China Lobby
figure) Anna Chennault in 1968, when she was serving as Nixon’s intermediary to
South Vietnamese officials.
“Oh,” Nixon responded, “in ’68, they bugged our phones too.”
Colson: “And that this was ordered by Johnson.”
Nixon: “That’s right”
Colson: “And done through the FBI. My God, if we ever did anything like that
you’d have the ”
Nixon: “Yes. For example, why didn’t we bug [the Democrats’ 1972 presidential
nominee George] McGovern, because after all he’s affecting the peace
negotiations?”
Colson: “Sure.”
Nixon: “That would be exactly the same thing.”
Over the next several months, the tale of Johnson’s supposed wiretaps of Nixon’s
campaign was picked up by the Washington Star, Nixon’s favorite newspaper for
planting stories damaging to his opponents.
Washington Star reporters contacted Walt Rostow on Nov. 2, 1972, and, according
to a Rostow memo, they asked whether “President Johnson instructed the FBI to
investigate action by members of the Nixon camp to slow down the peace
negotiations in Paris before the 1968 election. After the election [FBI
Director] J. Edgar Hoover informed President Nixon of what he had been
instructed to do by President Johnson. President Nixon is alleged to have been
outraged.”
Planting a Story
But Hoover apparently had given Nixon a garbled version of what had happened,
leading Nixon to believe that the FBI bugging was more extensive than it was.
According to Nixon’s White House tapes, he pressed Haldeman on Jan. 8, 1973, to
get the story about the 1968 bugging into the Washington Star.
“You don’t really have to have hard evidence, Bob,” Nixon told Haldeman. “You’re
not trying to take this to court. All you have to do is to have it out, just put
it out as authority, and the press will write the Goddamn story, and the Star
will run it now.”
Haldeman, however, insisted on checking the facts. In The Haldeman Diaries,
published in 1994, Haldeman included an entry dated Jan. 12, 1973, which
contains his book’s only deletion for national security reasons.
“I talked to [former Attorney General John] Mitchell on the phone,” Haldeman
wrote, “and he said [FBI official Cartha] DeLoach had told him he was up to date
on the thing. A Star reporter was making an inquiry in the last week or so, and
LBJ got very hot and called Deke [DeLoach’s nickname], and said to him that if
the Nixon people are going to play with this, that he would release [deleted
material — national security], saying that our side was asking that certain
things be done.
“DeLoach took this as a direct threat from Johnson,” Haldeman wrote. “As he
[DeLoach] recalls it, bugging was requested on the [Nixon campaign] planes, but
was turned down, and all they did was check the phone calls, and put a tap on
the Dragon Lady [Anna Chennault].”
In other words, Nixon’s threat to raise the 1968 bugging was countered by
Johnson, who threatened to finally reveal that Nixon’s campaign had sabotaged
the Vietnam peace talks. The stakes were suddenly raised. However, events went
in a different direction.
On Jan. 22, 1973, ten days after Haldeman’s diary entry and two days after Nixon
began his second term, Johnson died of a heart attack. Haldeman also apparently
thought better of publicizing Nixon’s 1968 bugging complaint.
Rostow’s Lament
Several months later with Johnson dead and Nixon sinking deeper into the
Watergate swamp Rostow, the keeper of “The ‘X’ Envelope,” mused about whether
history might have gone in a very different direction if he and other Johnson
officials had spoken out about the sabotaging of the Vietnam peace talks in real
time.
On May 14, 1973, Rostow typed a three-page “memorandum for the record”
summarizing the secret file that Johnson had amassed on the Nixon campaign’s
sabotage of Vietnam peace talks to secure the 1968 election victory.
Rostow reflected, too, on what effect LBJ’s public silence may have had on the
then-unfolding Watergate scandal. As Rostow composed his memo in spring 1973,
Nixon’s Watergate cover-up was unraveling. Just two weeks earlier, Nixon had
fired White House counsel John Dean and accepted the resignations of two top
aides, H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman.
As he typed, Rostow had a unique perspective on the worsening scandal. He
understood the subterranean background to Nixon’s political espionage
operations.
“I am inclined to believe the Republican operation in 1968 relates in two ways
to the Watergate affair of 1972,” Rostow wrote. He noted, first, that Nixon’s
operatives may have judged that their “enterprise with the South Vietnamese” in
frustrating Johnson’s last-ditch peace initiative had secured Nixon his narrow
margin of victory over Hubert Humphrey in 1968.
“Second, they got away with it,” Rostow wrote. “Despite considerable press
commentary after the election, the matter was never investigated fully. Thus, as
the same men faced the election in 1972, there was nothing in their previous
experience with an operation of doubtful propriety (or, even, legality) to warn
them off, and there were memories of how close an election could get and the
possible utility of pressing to the limit and beyond.” [To read Rostow’s memo,
click here, here and here.]
Also, by May 1973, Rostow had been out of government for more than four years
and had no legal standing to possess this classified material. Johnson, who had
ordered the file removed from the White House, had died. And, now, a major
political crisis was unfolding about which Rostow felt he possessed an important
missing link for understanding the history and the context. So what to do?
Rostow apparently struggled with this question for the next month as the
Watergate scandal continued to expand. On June 25, 1973, 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.
Keeping the Secrets
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. In a typed cover letter to LBJ Library
director Harry Middleton, Rostow wrote: “Sealed in the attached envelope is a
file President Johnson asked me to hold personally because of its sensitive
nature. In case of his death, the material was to be consigned to the LBJ
Library under conditions I judged to be appropriate.
“The file concerns the activities of Mrs. [Anna] Chennault and others before and
immediately after the election of 1968. At the time President Johnson decided to
handle the matter strictly as a question of national security; and in
retrospect, he felt that decision was correct.
“After fifty years the Director of the LBJ Library (or whomever may inherit his
responsibilities, should the administrative structure of the National Archives
change) may, alone, open this file. If he believes the material it contains
should not be opened for research [at that time], I would wish him empowered to
re-close the file for another fifty years when the procedure outlined above
should be repeated.”
Ultimately, however, the LBJ Library didn’t wait that long. After a little more
than two decades, on July 22, 1994, the envelope was opened and the archivists
began the process of declassifying the contents.
The dozens of declassified documents reveal a dramatic story of hardball
politics played at the highest levels of government and with the highest of
stakes, not only the outcome of the pivotal 1968 presidential election but the
fate of a half million U.S. soldiers then sitting in the Vietnam war zone. [For
details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “LBJ’s ‘X’ File on Nixon’s ‘Treason.’”
However, in 1973, Rostow’s decision to keep the file secret had consequences.
Though Nixon was forced to resign over the Watergate scandal on Aug. 9, 1974,
the failure of the U.S. government and press to explain the full scope of
Nixon’s dirty politics left Americans divided over the disgraced President’s
legacy and the seriousness of Watergate, whether the cover-up was worse than the
crime.
Even today, four decades after Watergate as some of the key surviving players
finally conclude that the scandal was much bigger than they understood at the
time, the full dimensions of the scandal remain obscured.
Nixon’s interference with Johnson’s peace talks is still not regarded as
“legitimate” history despite the now overwhelming evidence. In an otherwise
perceptive article, Woodward and Bernstein still don’t appear to understand what
happened in 1968 and why Nixon would have been so worried about the missing file
and what it might reveal.
Nor has Official Washington come to grips with how Nixon’s destroy-your-enemy
politics continues to infuse the Republican Party. After the Watergate scandal,
a series of failed investigations let Republican operatives off the hook again
and again, from the 1980 “October Surprise” case over Carter’s Iran hostage
negotiations (nearly a replay of Nixon’s 1968 gambit) to the various Iran-Contra
crimes of the Reagan-Bush years to George W. Bush’s political abuses and
national security crimes last decade.
Viewed from a historical perspective, one could conclude that Watergate was an
anomaly in that at least some of the perpetrators went to jail and the
implicated President was forced to resign. Nevertheless, a top lesson that the
Washington press corps drew from Watergate was the gross misunderstanding that
“the cover-up is worse than the crime.”
Looking back, Woodward and Bernstein, who built their careers by exposing that
cover-up, agree that those pearls of wisdom missed the point that the Watergate
cover-up was a minor offense when compared to what Nixon was covering up.
Yet, possibly Nixon’s worst crime obstructing peace talks that could have saved
countless lives remains outside Official Washington’s conventional wisdom.
To read more of Robert Parry’s writings, you can now order his last two books,
Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep, at the discount price of only $16 for both.
For details on the special offer, click here.]
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the
Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous
Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and
can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege:
The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras,
Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there.