Watergate

Subterms

    Latest story

    200 Shares178 Views

    If cover-up is the real crime, Trump’s hush-money charges have a Nixonian ring | Sidney Blumenthal

    by

    Of all of Donald Trump’s charged crimes, spelled out in 88 felony counts – from plotting to overthrow the government of the United States to stealing national security secrets, and obstruction of justice along the way – there is one case that most closely parallels the greatest political crime in American history: his trial in New York, scheduled to begin 15 April, for falsifying business records.Yet against the enormity of the former president’s transgressions, that case’s gravitas has been diminished by some legal pundits as the “runt of the litter” and “probably the least serious of the crimes he’s been charged with”. This case, brought by the Manhattan district attorney, however, reveals Trump as having essentially the same purpose as Richard Nixon in Watergate, hiding the truth through fraud and bribery in order to manipulate the outcome of a presidential election.From the beginning, Nixon tried to persuade the public that Watergate was much ado about nothing. On 17 June 1972, five men of the White House “plumbers” unit were arrested in a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. The next day, the White House press secretary, Ron Ziegler, trotted out to minimize the incident as a “third-rate burglary attempt”. He was following Nixon’s directive to downplay the affair as meaningless. “It’s going to be forgotten,” Nixon said on 20 June. The next day, in one of the first meetings in which he orchestrated the cover-up, he said: “I think the country doesn’t give much of a shit about it … And the answer, of course, is that most people around the country probably think this is routine, that everybody’s bugging everybody else, it’s politics.”But Nixon’s attempt to bury the break-in spread into an elaborate effort to contain and conceal the scandal in order to protect his campaign for re-election. His White House counsel, John Dean, told him there was “a cancer on the presidency”. But Nixon’s cover-up grew: from obstructing the FBI investigation, to misleading the public, to discrediting the investigative reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, who were virtually alone in pursuing the story for months, to paying hush money to the burglars.“Goddamn hush money”, Nixon called it. “We could get that,” he told Dean. “On the money, if you need the money you could get that. You could get a million dollars. You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten. It is not easy, but it could be done. But the question is who the hell would handle it? Any ideas on that?”On 1 March 1974, the Department of Justice Watergate special prosecution force’s Watergate road map, officially titled the Grand Jury Report and Recommendation Concerning Transmission of Evidence to the House of Representatives, was delivered under seal to chief judge John Sirica of the US district court in the District of Columbia. He then provided it to the House judiciary committee, which launched its impeachment inquiry. This document was not publicly released by the National Archives until 2018 – about one month before Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen, was sentenced to three years in prison for arranging hush-money payments on his client’s behalf.Nixon’s and Trump’s motives run starkly parallel. “The President was well aware, as tapes and transcripts demonstrate,” the Watergate road map stated, “that the primary purpose of the conspiracy prior to the election (the ‘containment theory’) was to protect the President’s own political future.”The road map also laid out the potential consequences for Nixon if his cover-up had been exposed after his re-election: “If the cover-up and obstruction of justice that had already occurred came to light in the spring of 1973, not only would all the President’s close advisors be subject to criminal liability but the President himself would have had to shoulder ultimate responsibility (moral, if not legal) for their actions. The President could well expect that the failure of the conspiracy at that stage (at least at its center) would jeopardize his ability to continue successfully in office and to remain an effective political force in the country and Republican Party.”Echoing Nixon, Trump in his 2016 campaign conspired to exchange hush money for silence about certain of his actions that he believed would cost him the election if the public knew about them. As in Watergate, his crimes involved bribery, illegal campaign contributions and tax fraud. Trump directed his cover-up when he was a candidate, when he was the president-elect, and, in one instance, when he was president.Every one of the 34 felony counts in Trump’s indictment begins with a citation of the same New York State criminal statute, §175.10, on falsifying business records in the first degree, which requires a mens rea – a state of mind – that “includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof”. Essentially, Trump has been indicted on what the Watergate prosecutors in the road map called the “concealment theory” that was at the heart of Nixon’s cover-up. In short, both Trump and Nixon committed business crimes to further their political crimes.The New York indictment alleges that Trump falsified his business records, committing tax fraud and violating campaign finance law, to prevent the voters from learning that he had paid bribes. “From August 2015 to December 2017, the Defendant orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the Defendant’s electoral prospects,” reads the statement of facts connected to the indictment.Like Nixon, Trump conspired with others to achieve his ends. Several of his co-conspirators have already “admitted to committing illegal conduct in connection with the scheme”, according to the statement of facts. In 2018, Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, named as “Lawyer A” in the indictment, was prosecuted by the US attorney of the southern district of New York and found guilty of two crimes of illegal campaign contributions. He has since served a three-year prison term.David Pecker, the chairman and CEO of American Media, Inc, which owned the National Enquirer and other tabloids, entered into a plea agreement for non-prosecution with the southern district in exchange for his confession that he engaged in a “catch and kill scheme” to discover and pay sources so they “did not publicize damaging allegations” about Trump “before the 2016 presidential election and thereby influence that election”. Pecker had known Trump since 1998, when as a publisher he produced a quarterly magazine called Trump Style for Trump to distribute at his golf clubs, casinos and hotels.Per the indictment, the conspiracy began at a meeting in August 2015 at Trump Tower of Trump, Cohen and Pecker. Trump had announced his candidacy two months earlier. Pecker pledged to be his “eyes and ears”, on the lookout “for negative stories about the Defendant and alerting Lawyer A [Cohen] before the stories were published”.The first payment went to a former Trump Tower doorman named Dino Sajudin, who had bruited about the rumor that Trump had an illegitimate child with a housekeeper. He said he was repeating a story he had heard from Trump’s head of security, Matthew Calamari. Although Sajudin passed a lie-detector test administered by a private detective hired by the National Enquirer, the Enquirer’s reporters could find no evidence to back up his the claim, nor could Ronan Farrow of the New Yorker when he investigated. Nonetheless, the Enquirer paid the loose-lipped doorman $30,000 to zip it.Pecker “directed that the deal take place because of his agreement with the Defendant and Lawyer A [Cohen]”, and “falsely characterized this payment in AMI’s books and records, including in its general ledger”, according to the statement of facts. After determining that the story was false, Pecker wanted to release Sajudin from his non-disclosure agreement, but Cohen told him to wait “until after the presidential election”.The next payment went to “Woman 1”, Karen McDougal, the 1998 Playmate of the Year, whom Trump had met at a pool party at the Playboy Mansion in June 2006, three months after his wife Melania had given birth to their son. Trump and McDougal had an affair that lasted for 10 months. Ronan Farrow of the New Yorker reported her note on that initial encounter: “We talked for a couple hours – then, it was ‘ON’! We got naked + had sex. He offered me money. I looked at him (+ felt sad) + said, ‘No thanks–I’m not ‘that girl.’ I slept w/you because I like you–NOT for money’–He told me ‘you are special.’”Trump, Cohen and Pecker held “a series of discussions about who should pay off Woman 1 to secure her silence”, according to the statement of facts. Pecker agreed to cover the payment if he were reimbursed. “So what do we got to pay for this? One fifty?” Trump asked Cohen in an audio recording. Trump suggested an untraceable cash payment. Cohen created a shell company, Resolution Consultants, LLC, to pay McDougal by check, but, in the end, Pecker made the whole payment himself.On 7 October 2016, the 2005 Access Hollywood tape of Trump’s lascivious boasting broke: “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” Three days later, in full damage-control mode, Pecker’s AMI editor connected Cohen with the lawyer of a new danger, “Woman 2”, “to secure Woman 2’s silence and prevent disclosure of the damaging information in the final weeks before the presidential election”.The recipient of the third payment, Woman 2, was the adult film actor Stephanie Clifford, better known as Stormy Daniels. Trump and Daniels had a sexual encounter in July 2006, at a golf tournament at Lake Tahoe to which Trump had also brought McDougal (“Woman 1”). (He and McDougal had begun their affair just a month earlier.) That same weekend, Ronan Farrow has reported, Trump invited four other adult film actors to his hotel room for sex, offering one of them $10,000, but that they rejected him.Cohen and Pecker’s lawyer struck a deal to pay Stormy Daniels $130,000 to “prevent disclosure of the damaging information in the final weeks before the presidential election”, per the indictment. But Trump resisted paying, calculating that “if they could delay the payment until after the election, they could avoid paying altogether, because at that point it would not matter if the story became public”. In the end, Cohen paid himself through the shell company after Trump agreed he would pay him back personally.On 14 February 2017, Valentine’s Day, Cohen submitted fraudulent invoices for a fraudulent retainer for fraudulent services rendered that then president Trump paid with two checks from his trust, fraudulently recording them as retainers and stapled to the fraudulent invoices.During the presidential transition, Trump invited Pecker to Trump Tower to thank him “for handling the stories of the Doorman and Woman 1 [McDougal]”, and invited him to the inauguration and to a White House dinner. He was grateful to Pecker for more than the “catch and kill” operation. Throughout the campaign, Pecker had also conducted the systematic smearing of Trump’s opponents from both parties as part of the deal. While the hush money was secret, wild stories about his rivals were blazoned on Pecker’s tabloids displayed at every supermarket counter.The Enquirer and AMI’s even more down-market Globe headlined stories of his Republican rivals: Ted Cruz’s father was linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of John F Kennedy; Cruz was covering up his numerous extramarital affairs; Carly Fiorina was “a homewrecker”; John Kasich was a closeted homosexual. On Hillary Clinton, the papers screamed “Six Months To Live!” She was a money launderer who “will face prison”. She was gay. Bill Clinton was a cocaine addict who was not Chelsea Clinton’s father.“You can’t knock the National Enquirer,” Trump said, defending the tabloid libels, while falsely disclaiming any responsibility of his own for them. “I’m just referring to an article that appeared. It has nothing to do with me.”Many if not most of the fabricated stories originated with Roger Stone, a former Nixon Committee To Re-Elect operative and a link between the “ratfucking” dirty tricks of the Nixon underworld and Trump’s. Trump reviewed the smears before they appeared, and Cohen gave them a final stamp of approval.In 2018, federal prosecutors granted Pecker immunity for his testimony on the “catch and kill” scheme in the Michael Cohen case that led to his conviction. In 2019, Pecker sold AMI to an equity firm, and a year later he was removed as CEO.Now, with Trump’s chief media co-conspirator taking the non-prosecution deal, Trump has substituted his Truth Social site for the National Enquirer. He cannot rely on Pecker and the Enquirer to do his smearing for him. His previous “containment strategy” having failed, he has been forced to run a campaign of obfuscation, obstruction and intimidation openly by himself. His tweets attacking the judges presiding over his cases, their relatives and court clerks have filled the vacuum left by the Enquirer.“It is no longer just a mere possibility or a reasonable likelihood that there exists a threat to the integrity of the judicial proceedings. The threat is very real,” stated Judge Juan Merchan of the New York court in his second gag order. Trump’s “recent attacks”, he said, constitute “a direct attack on the Rule of Law itself”.Trump’s targeted assaults on the justice system are intended to instill fear while at the same time he depicts himself as the victim. They are also an extension of his cover-up. It is fundamental to both his defense and political strategy. If he could, he would engage in a “Saturday Night Massacre” like Nixon, who ordered the attorney general, Elliot Richardson, and deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus, to fire the special prosecutor Archibald Cox, which they refused to do and instead resigned. Nixon finally got the solicitor general, Robert Bork, to do his dirty work.But Nixon’s desperate act could not stop the wheels of justice from grinding. A new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, sought the release of Nixon’s White House tapes. In his January 6 coup, as if imitating Nixon, Trump demanded the resignation of his previously compliant attorney general, William Barr, when he declined to become involved in the patently illegal fake elector scheme, and tried to replace him with lackeys.Trump’s last-minute attempt to short-circuit his New York trial by invoking presidential immunity was denied on 3 April. In the case over whether Nixon was required to turn over his White House tapes, United States v Nixon, Nixon’s attempt to secure immunity was denied. The US supreme court decided unanimously that his limited privilege in military and diplomatic affairs did not cover and must yield to “the fundamental demands of due process of law in the fair administration of justice”. That decision against Nixon stands as an obstacle to Trump’s claim of total immunity now.The salaciousness of Trump’s crimes in the New York case may distract from the basic reality that the means of his cover-up strongly resemble those employed by Nixon for the same end of influencing a presidential election. For that very reason, Trump’s hush-money case is on a continuum with his other high crimes of subversion.The revelation that Trump conspired to eliminate his Democratic opponent Joe Biden by withholding defensive weapons from Ukraine in exchange for bogus political dirt – which, we now know from the recent congressional testimony of one of the key co-conspirators, Lev Parnas, was fabricated by Russian intelligence – led to Trump’s first impeachment. His conspiracy to stage a coup to prevent the Congress from ratifying the electoral college vote in the 2020 election led to his second.But if Trump is convicted of any of the felony counts in his New York trial his fate will diverge from Nixon’s. When the “smoking gun” tape exposing Nixon’s role in the cover-up was released, Nixon resigned. He was never impeached. He was never officially charged with his crimes. He never faced trial. President Gerald Ford pardoned him. Nixon accepted the pardon, an implicit acceptance of his guilt.If Trump seeks a pardon, he must throw himself on the mercy of the governor of New York, Kathy Hochul. On 1 April, he tweeted on his Truth Social account that she was “asked to leave” the wake of a slain New York City police officer, which she rebutted as a falsehood.Trump’s New York case is, at last, the first time a cover-up to steal the presidency through bribery is on trial. Only superficially is it about Trump’s tawdry and pathetic sex life. The true subject of abuse at the center of the trial is the constitution, his ultimate victim.
    Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More

    More stories

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      A House Republican wants to prove Biden is compromised – but where’s the evidence?

      by

      “This is a very serious investigation,” James Comer, chairman of the US House of Representatives’ oversight committee, told the rightwing channel Newsmax recently. “The allegations and the things that we’re investigating make Watergate look like jaywalking.”The Watergate scandal needed a whistleblower, John Dean, to bring down President Richard Nixon half a century ago. Republican Comer claims that he, too, has a “highly credible” whistleblower who will provide evidence that Joe Biden has been compromised by a foreign power.Such a monumental allegation from such a senior politician would once have been front page news. Even if Republicans were assumed to have partisan motivations, many observers would have begun with the premise that there is no smoke without fire.However, Republicans’ embrace of former president Donald Trump and his bogus conspiracy theories has turned the default response in Washington to one of skepticism. With the identity of the whistleblower still shrouded in mystery, the burden of proof falls on Comer – and he is yet to deliver.Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist, said: “We should always take the whistleblowers seriously but this committee, at least so far, is cheapening the use of whistleblowers because they keep saying that they have found all this evidence for a whistleblower, and I think they even mentioned they might have more, but where is it?”Comer has previously been rebuked by Democratic colleagues for exaggerating the number of whistleblowers that his investigation has. He took his latest claim to national television earlier this month.Appearing on Hannity on the rightwing Fox News network, he said a whistleblower had provided Congress information raising concerns that, during Biden’s vice- presidency under Barack Obama between 2009 and 2017, he was allegedly engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national.He said: “Senator [Chuck] Grassley and I have reviewed this whistleblower disclosure. We find it very credible. We have a lot of questions about whether the FBI even looked into this.”In a fundraising email to supporters, the House oversight committee chairman added: “It is with a heavy heart that I fear our Commander-in-Chief may be compromised by foreign actors, and I’m going to do everything in my power to deliver the whole truth to the American people.”In a letter that used the word “alleged” three times in the opening paragraph, Comer issued a subpoena to FBI director Christopher Wray for a document that, according to the whistleblower, “describes an alleged criminal scheme” involving Biden and a foreign national “relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions” when Biden was vice-president and includes “a precise description” about it.But the FBI this week declined to provide the document. Christopher Dunham, acting assistant director for the FBI’s office of congressional affairs, wrote in a letter to Comer: “The mere existence of such a document would establish little beyond the fact that a confidential human source provided information and the FBI recorded it.“Indeed, the FBI regularly receives information from sources with significant potential biases, motivations, and knowledge, including drug traffickers, members of organized crime, or even terrorists.”Comer has also said he obtained thousands of pages of financial records showing that at least nine members of the Biden family – including the president’s son, Hunter, and brother, James – allegedly exploited the Biden name in their business dealings by accepting money from foreign nationals in China and Romania.The oversight committee chairman followed up with an eagerly hyped press conference this week, stating in an interim report that some Biden family members, associates and their companies received more than $10m from foreign entities between 2015 and 2017.Hunter, a lawyer, received more than $1m from a company controlled by Romanian businessman Gabriel Popoviciu, who was the subject of a criminal investigation and prosecution for corruption in Romania.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut the financial records showed no evidence that Biden himself acted improperly or took any official action because of his family’s business affairs. Nor, despite the claims of “influence peddling”, did they demonstrate actual wrongdoing by the Biden family. The press conference was widely ignored or panned.David Brock, president of Facts First USA, a non-profit watchdog, said afterwards: “The reality is we don’t even have a scandal here, much less Watergate.”Humiliatingly, Comer was even given a rough ride on Fox News. Host Steve Doocy told the Kentucky congressman: “You don’t actually have any facts to that point. You’ve got some circumstantial evidence. And the other thing is, of all those names, the one person who didn’t profit is that – there’s no evidence that Joe Biden did anything illegally.”Republicans are under pressure to deliver after winning the House majority last year and promising to use their subpoena power to investigate foreign entities that did business with the Biden family, with a specific focus on Hunter.The effort coincides with an imminent decision by federal prosecutors over whether to charge Hunter with tax crimes and lying about his drug use when he bought a handgun.Although Hunter never held a position in the White House, his membership on the board of a Ukrainian energy company and his efforts to strike deals in China have raised questions about whether he traded on his father’s public service, including reported references in his emails to the “big guy”. There are no indications that the federal investigation involves the president in any way.The White House has dismissed his investigation as “yet another political stunt”. Spokesperson Ian Sams said: “Congressman Comer has a history of playing fast and loose with the facts and spreading baseless innuendo while refusing to conduct his so-called ‘investigations’ with legitimacy.”Kyle Herrig, executive director of the Congressional Integrity Project, a watchdog monitoring the Republican investigations, suggests that Comer is abusing the term whistleblower.“If they have a whistleblower that’s what he the public would be interested in but, other than them talking about it, I haven’t seen anything materialise from that,” he said.Comer’s office did not respond to a request for comment or further details. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      What does ‘Watergate’ teach us 50 years on?: Politics Weekly America

      by

      More ways to listen

      Apple Podcasts

      Google Podcasts

      Spotify

      RSS Feed

      Download

      50 years ago, police in Washington DC arrested five men for breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. What followed was the unravelling of a web of scandals that ultimately ended Richard Nixon’s presidency. What can today’s January 6 hearings learn from Watergate? And had it happened in today’s political climate, would it have played out the way it did? Jonathan Freedland speaks with Garrett M. Graff, journalist and author of Watergate: A New History

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      Archive: All the President’s Men – Warner Bros, The Nixon White House Tapes – Richard Nixon Presidential Library Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to theguardian.com/supportpodcasts More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Trump’s bid to cling to power ‘beyond even Nixon’s imagination’, Watergate duo say

      by

      Trump’s bid to cling to power ‘beyond Nixon’s imagination’, Watergate duo sayBob Woodward and Carl Bernstein write in new book foreword that bid to overturn election made Trump ‘our first seditious president’ Donald Trump was the first seditious president in US history, surpassing in his efforts to hang on to power beyond even the criminal imagination of Richard Nixon, according to the two political reporters who were instrumental in securing Nixon’s downfall.In a new foreword to their celebrated 1974 book on the Watergate scandal, All the President’s Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein accuse Trump of pursuing his “diabolical instincts” by zeroing in on the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory by Congress on January 6 last year. In the authors’ assessment, Trump’s unleashing of the mob that day, culminating in the violent attack on the US Capitol, amounted to “a deception that exceeded even Nixon’s imagination”.Capitol attack panel to unveil new evidence against Trump at public hearingsRead moreThey write in their foreword, published by the Washington Post, they write: “By legal definition this is clearly sedition … thus Trump became the first seditious president in our history.”Woodward and Bernstein’s comparison of Trump and Nixon carries singular weight, given that as young Washington Post reporters they helped to uncover Nixon’s campaign of political spying and cover-up that led in 1974 to the only resignation of a president in American history. In separate capacities, the two journalists have also reported extensively on the Trump presidency, with Woodward doing so in a series of three books: Fear, Rage and Peril.The timing of their analysis is also potent. It comes just days before the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection stages the first of at least six televised hearings in which they will attempt to show the American people that Trump acted corruptly in his efforts to stop Biden’s certification.Woodward and Bernstein suggest that the two presidents had much in common, despite the almost half a century that stands between them. Nixon’s belief that it was for the greater good that he stayed in power whatever the means was “embraced by Trump”, they write.“A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits,” Nixon told himself in 1969. That informed Trump’s campaign to hold on to power through falsehoods even in the face of defeat.Misinformation also unites the diabolical pair. “Both Nixon and Trump created a conspiratorial world in which the US constitution, laws and fragile democratic traditions were to be manipulated or ignored, political opponents and the media were ‘enemies,’ and there were few or no restraints on the powers entrusted to presidents,” Woodward and Bernstein say in their new foreword.The reporters also explore the differences between the two men, notably that Trump attempted his electoral subversion in public. Pulling no punches, they call the January 6 insurrection “a Trump operation” and predict that the House committee has an abundance of evidence to prove that point in the upcoming hearings.Though Nixon’s criminal misdeeds tend to be remembered through the lens of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel on 17 June 1972, and the cover-up that followed, the authors remind their readers that his core purpose was to subvert that year’s presidential election. They rehearse some of the extreme measures that Nixon’s team of operatives took to derail the presidential campaign of his main Democratic rival, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine.Those measures included writing fake letters on Muskie stationery alleging sexual misconduct by other Democratic candidates and stealing Muskie’s shoes from outside his hotel room where he had left them for polishing in order to spook him out. Muskie ultimately lost the Democratic nomination to the liberal senator George McGovern of South Dakota.Trump, the reporters argue, pursued equally ruthless tactics designed to undermine credibility in the 2020 presidential election. They reached a pitch on January 6 with the violent mob breaking into the Capitol chanting “Hang Mike Pence” against Trump’s vice-president who was proceeding with certification of the election results.In the last analysis, Woodward and Bernstein ask themselves why two such powerful men would embark on parallel efforts to destroy democracy. They have one overriding answer.“Fear of losing and being considered a loser was a common thread for Nixon and Trump,” they write.TopicsDonald TrumpBob WoodwardCarl BernsteinUS Capitol attackUS politicsRichard NixonWatergatenewsReuse this content More

    • 188 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘I’m living in the bubble’: the man who helped bring Nixon down, 50 years on

      by

      ‘I’m living in the bubble’: the man who helped bring Nixon down, 50 years on John Dean speaks on the 1972 Watergate break-in and why he has never been more concerned about US democracy than now“I’ve never escaped Watergate,” says John Dean, as once again he allows the years to melt away, the old faces to crowd in and the secret tapes to whirr in his mind. “There’s just no choice. I’m living in the bubble. It’s become a fact of life.”America has never escaped Watergate either. The biggest political scandal of the 20th century, and the only one to cause a presidential resignation, has become a byword for lost innocence and lost faith in institutions. Along with the Vietnam war, it marked the end of an era in which a president’s words were met with automatic trust rather than default scepticism.Republican primaries offer look into future of Trumpism without TrumpRead moreSuch is the notoriety that the “-gate” suffix has been applied to dozens of controversies, from Sharpiegate (Donald Trump showing a map altered using a black marker pen) to Deflategate (allegations that Tom Brady’s New England Patriots used deflated footballs) to Partygate (British prime minister Boris Johnson’s social gatherings that flouted Covid-19 restrictions).Today the luxury Watergate hotel’s phone number ends in 1972 – the year of the burglary – and callers are greeted by a message that begins: “There’s no need to break in,” as well as recordings of President Richard Nixon. This month’s 50th anniversary of the break-in is being marked by books, exhibitions, TV dramas and a four-part CNN documentary series, Watergate: Blueprint for a Scandal, narrated by Dean himself.In it the man who helped bring Nixon down draws a direct line from the Watergate break-in on 17 June 1972 to the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, taking stock of a half century that has seen the media fragment, the Republican party embrace authoritarian tendencies and presidents become less accountable. Dean has never been more concerned about American democracy than he is now.“I was never worried about the country and the government during Watergate but from the day Trump was nominated, I had a knot in my stomach and, until he left, I never got rid of it,” Dean, 83, tells the Guardian via Zoom from a Washington hotel. “He just discovered late in his presidency the enormous powers he does have as president. He wants them now. He knows he can hurt his enemies and help his friends.”He adds: “Nixon, who was very bright and understood how the government operated and what the levers of power really are was somebody who also could experience shame and accepted the rule of law. When the supreme court ruled against him, that was it. I can’t imagine, in a similar situation, Trump complying with a court order from the supreme court saying turn over your tapes.”Dean was working for the justice department when he was recruited to the Nixon White House. But he soon discovered that John Ehrlichman would remain the president’s top legal adviser. “As White House counsel, I got the title – I didn’t get the job,” Dean says wryly. “It was frankly too good a title at 31 years of age to pass up, although I knew I would be doing the grunt work.”It also did not take Dean long to discover that the Nixon administration was doing things differently. It kept an enemies list. It had approved a September 1971 burglary of the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the defence analyst who leaked the secret history of the Vietnam war known as the Pentagon Papers.Dean himself had to intervene to squash an outlandish plan to firebomb the Brookings Institution, a thinktank in Washington where classified documents leaked by Ellsberg were being stored. “I did not know that the president had authorised the Brookings operation but I thought it was insane, whoever had authorised it,” he says.Dean was out of the country on the day of the Watergate break-in but instantly guessed who was behind it. Five men had been arrested in the bungled operation to bug and steal documents from the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex – a dirty tricks operation aimed at sinking would-be challengers to Nixon in that year’s presidential election.At first the incident seemed comically inept and inconsequential but, when it emerged in court that the lead burglar, James McCord, had worked for the CIA, journalists such as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post sprang into action. Gradually they and others would trace a complex web that connected operatives known as “the plumbers” to the Committee to Re-elect the President (Creep) to senior White House officials and, finally, to Nixon himself.But it was not until after the president won re-election in November 1972 that Dean felt himself sucked into the cover-up, arranging hush money for the Watergate burglars. He recalls: “[White House aide Chuck] Colson brings a recording he’s made of Howard Hunt, who was one of the managers of the burglars, and Hunt wants to be paid and if he doesn’t get paid, people are going to start talking.“I knew enough of the criminal law to know this is either extortion or bribery. Now, my reaction is kind of interesting. I had just gotten married and I said, ‘Holy cow, we’re in trouble!’ So I decided then I’ve got to make the cover-up work and that’s when I dove in with both feet. It was foolish.”He adds: “It’s only later [in March 1973] when Hunt starts extorting me personally for money that I said the same thing’s going to happen to everybody – it’s going to follow us the rest of our lives. There’ll be no end to it and Nixon has got to get out in front of it and we all have got to stand up and account for the mistakes we’ve made.”Dean went to see Nixon in an effort to convince him that the cover-up would destroy his presidency. In later testimony to Congress, Dean explained: “I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency and that if the cancer was not removed that the president himself would be killed by it.”Dean has since been able to listen back to the conversation thanks to Nixon’s secret recording system at the White House. “The quality of the tapes in general is just awful but I’m sitting right over one of the little microphones that had been bored into the desk, so my voice is crystal clear. I can actually hear myself sigh at times, exasperated with the reaction I’m getting.“I took him through every problem he had and, to my amazement, he had an answer for everything I thought was a problem. I can hear my frustration with this man and I’m waiting for his fist to come down on the desk.“Finally, at the end, when it’s clear he is going to do nothing, I say, ‘Well, Mr President, people are going to go to jail for this.’ He says, ‘Like who?’ To bring it home, I say, ‘Like me!’ So he knows his White House counsel thinks he’s on his way to jail. I hope that will turn him but all it does is turn him against me because now I’m radioactive.”What were Dean’s impressions of Nixon the man? “He wasn’t who I thought he was. He clearly wanted to engage in criminal behaviour and he would blame everybody but himself. What surprised me most is he spent a lot of time conspicuously trying to impress me.”On one occasion, Dean recounts, Nixon told him that he was reading a book about President John’s F Kennedy’s ruthless streak. “I’ve often thought he did that to impress upon me that all presidents are ruthless to a degree because I’m the one who had blown up the the plan to firebomb the Brookings Institution. He knew that and he was worried, maybe, I thought presidents shouldn’t do things like that. He was trying to do a little tutorial on me.”Wary that he would be turned into a scapegoat, Dean began cooperating with Senate investigators. At the end of April 1973, with the walls closing in, Nixon aides HR Haldeman and Ehrlichman resigned and Dean himself was forced out.He then publicly turned against Nixon by testifying to the Senate Watergate committee – becoming the first White House official to accuse the president of being directly involved in the cover-up. The blockbuster hearing in June was watched by millions on television. But first Dean got a haircut.“It was a barber I had never been to and it was last-minute. I had done an interview with Walter Cronkite and my hair was curling over my shoulders. I said that is just not a good look; I’d better get that neck cleaned up or my mother will be all over me. In the barbershop, he just put a bowl on my head and cut it so it was much shorter than people were used to: ‘Oh, he’s changing his image!’“The same thing with the glasses. I had actually scratched my cornea. I had worn contacts during the Cronkite interview and noticed I was just blinking madly. I have never really worn contacts since I had that experience.”Dean read from a mammoth prepared statement that took almost the entire first day. “If I had been told in advance I was going to have to read it all, it would not have been 60,000 words. It may have been 6,000 at max. But it’s much easier to write a long statement than it is a short one so I just let it flow. It took eight hours to read it.”Later that year Dean pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, was disbarred and served four months; he was in the witness protection programme so never went to prison. Meanwhile Alexander Butterfield, Nixon’s deputy chief of staff, had testified that there was a recording system in the White House.The supreme court ordered the release of a “smoking gun tape” confirming Dean’s claim that Nixon told aides to order the CIA to shut down the FBI investigation into the burglary. Nixon lost the confidence of fellow Republicans and, facing impeachment, resigned in August 1974. The president gave a final victory sign on the South Lawn before a helicopter spirited him away.Dean, who happened to have his molars removed that day, cannot recall any particular emotion. “I didn’t feel vindication or anything of that nature. We’d been at battle. It’s very lucky that the system worked as it was designed.”He continues: “It’s very hard to look at Watergate without looking through the lens of Trump where it didn’t work, or hasn’t yet. It’s not over. If Trump gets through with zero accountability, then the system is deeply flawed and a lot of that is probably traceable to the Ford pardon.”When President Gerald Ford granted Nixon a full pardon in September 1974, Bernstein exclaimed to Woodward: “You’re not gonna believe it. The son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch!” (Woodward has more recently praised Ford’s act as one of courage.) Dean’s initial reaction was different.“At the time I thought it was right and it was understandable because I knew he couldn’t govern with Watergate hanging over him. Every day would be a new decision as to what he does and doesn’t turn over from the Nixon archive.“It would have consumed his presidency but so I understood it, but in the long run it codified the memo that was prepared then re-prepared during the Clinton presidency, that a sitting president can’t be indicted. Well, a post-president can’t be indicted when he’s pardoned.”Dean went into business for a while and tried to leave Watergate behind but a 1991 book that alleged he and his wife, Maureen, masterminded the cover-up prompted him to take legal action. This led to years of research, immersing himself in the tapes and making peace with the subject. He has written several books, including two about Watergate, and teaches a Watergate-related course for lawyers.He has also been called upon by the media and Congress to provide expert analysis during scandals in the Clinton and Trump administrations. Now a grandfather living in Beverly Hills, California, he quips: “My speciality, I guess, is presidents in deep trouble.”But if something like Watergate happened in the 2020s, he does not believe it would necessarily bring down a president again. “It would be very different today, primarily because of Fox News, which would be mounting a fulsome defence of him. We are far more polarised today than we were. We were polarised during Watergate but not to the degree we are today.”Dean will be watching this week’s January 6 hearings on Capitol Hill intently but reckons that Republicans, at least, face less accountability than they once did. “Trump is a poster boy for authoritarianism and the authoritarian followers just fell in line. They just absolutely did what authoritarian followers do: click their heels, salute, ‘Yes sir!’”That leaves him fearing for the future of American democracy. “Not so much Trump but now the whole Republican party has shifted into this authoritarian stance. Not all the Republicans I know are that way but too many of them now think authoritarianism is just dandy because it works, it’s efficient. Well, Mussolini ran the trains on time, didn’t he – but at some expense.”TopicsWatergateRichard NixonUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Dwight Chapin on his former boss: ‘Richard Nixon was not a crook’

      by

      InterviewDwight Chapin on his former boss: ‘Richard Nixon was not a crook’David Smith in WashingtonThe former secretary to the disgraced president talks about his new memoir and what it was like to go to prison for Nixon He was at the side of the American president on one of the most important diplomatic trips in history, enjoying sumptuous banquets as a guest of Chinese dictator Mao Zedong.Three and a half years later he was in prison after becoming first person to go on trial in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, despite protesting his innocence.Carl Bernstein: ‘Our democracy, before Trump, had ceased to be working well’Read moreBut half a century on, Dwight Chapin is not bitter and does not blame Richard Nixon for his fall from grace. On the contrary, he believes that the jowly-faced 37th president – who resigned in shame in 1974 – was a brilliant man and is still misunderstood.“Richard Nixon was not a crook,” says Chapin via Zoom from his home in Riverside, Connecticut. “Sometimes the term ‘evil’ is used: that’s not what the man was about. In his heart, he was not only a patriot but an incredible public servant. He was in the arena serving the public for half a century.”Challenging baked-in perceptions of Nixon was the main motivation for Chapin, now 81, to write a memoir, The President’s Man, which delves into the thousands of hours they spent together, from small hotels in New Hampshire to the Forbidden City in Beijing.They first met in 1962 when Chapin was a 21-year-old student and Nixon – narrowly defeated for the presidency by John F Kennedy two years earlier – was running for governor of California.Chapin recalls: “Mr Nixon had been a congressman, a senator, vice-president for eight years and then had all that notoriety running against Kennedy, so he was a commanding figure. When he was in a room, you knew it. His presence was very strong.”He worked as a field organiser on the 1962 campaign then as Nixon’s personal aide during his successful run for president in 1968. At the White House he was appointments secretary, with a door that opened into the Oval Office, and deputy assistant to the president, responsible for the planning and logistics of his public appearances.But he does not claim to have been Nixon’s friend. “I knew him so well; but as I have continued to discover through the decades, in many ways I barely knew him at all,” Chapin writes wistfully.Despite his relative youth he served as acting chief of protocol when, 50 years ago this week, Nixon became the first US president to visit China. It was a leap into the cold war unknown: China was closed to the west and the US refused to recognise its communist government.The Washington Post newspaper wrote in an editorial at the time: “If Mr Nixon had revealed he was going to the moon he could not have flabbergasted his world audience more. It is very nearly mind blowing.”Such was the cultural impact that it inspired an opera by John Adams. Chapin reflects: “History should remember the trip as the single most significant and dramatic foreign journey by any American president ever. The world stood still while Nixon went to China.”He writes that Nixon relished the meeting of adversaries as a unique opportunity to demonstrate diplomatic and strategic expertise. “He loved planning this trip. Loved it … Here was Richard Nixon, the leader of the free world, marching off to the darkest, and most mysterious, part of the Communist empire.”Nixon was accompanied by three Americans, including national security adviser Henry Kissinger, during his meetings with Chairman Mao, while Chapin and the rest of the delegation remained at a guest house. “When he got back, the president reported to us that it had gone well,” he recalls. “I would use the word elated.”Not that Chapin had time to be bored. He writes: “The banquets kept coming. At each banquet there were toasts and more toasts and toasts of the toasts. Between banquets there were meetings and tours. Six months earlier I had known nothing about the Forbidden City. At this point, if it had been necessary, I could have conducted a tour myself.”At a banquet in Shanghai, Nixon offered a toast that he had scribbled on one of his yellow legal-sized notepad in his suite, declaring: “This trip was the week that changed the world.”Chapin writes: “In retrospect, yes, it was ‘the week that changed the world’, but as Chairman Mao had proclaimed, ‘A single spark can start a prairie fire’. What a prairie fire of aggressiveness, influence, and trade, reaching around the world, was ignited by that week fifty years ago.“Looking back I have a special appreciation for Nixon’s prophetic prediction that ‘Within fifty years, the United States and China will be adversaries, and we need to be able to talk with one another.’”But today the wisdom of Nixon’s outreach is questioned. China’s rise as a global power has become a defining principle of Joe Biden’s presidency as he warns of a struggle for the 21st century between autocracy and democracy, rival systems competing to show which can better deliver for its people.The communication channel with President Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful leader since Mao, remains open but relations are strained. China is flexing military muscles and threatening Taiwan. The US staged a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics over human rights abuses.Chapin reflects: “Any official American involvement there is missing and you have the the Russians and the Chinese together. I think Nixon would have been handling that differently. Nixon would be thinking of this in a very strategic sense. He would be wanting to do anything besides having a war or conflict and he would be looking for diplomatic answers.”But just four months after the historic China trip, the seeds of Nixon’s – and Chapin’s – downfall were sown.A break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington, which involved wiretapping phones and stealing documents, was traced to officials at Nixon’s re-election campaign committee. Although the president comfortably won re-election later that year, White House attempts to conceal the scandal began to unravel.A key whistleblower was Mark Felt, a senior FBI official who secretly fed information to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Felt was immortalised as “Deep Throat” by their book All the President’s Men, which became a Hollywood film. But five decades later, he is no hero to Chapin.“It’s disgraceful that the number two man at the FBI is leaking material regarding an investigation,” he says, evidently still rankled. “I met with the FBI and I told them the truth and I told them everything and two days later it’s on the front page of the Washington Post because Mark Felt got the report and leaked it.“I have nothing but disdain for somebody that took an oath to the constitution to follow the rules of the land. This leaking by FBI is so outrageous and goes way back into the J Edgar Hoover days. Part of the culture of the old FBI was leaking stuff and I happen to feel that’s wrong. Mark Felt is a real sleazebag and a disgrace to the FBI.”Chapin acknowledges that Nixon “made mistakes” and the White House did not “come clean” early. But he argues this was because the president had not been told exactly what happened or why. “He was treating it like a public relations problem.”As the walls closed in, Chapin was among several staff who, in December 1972, learned that they would be fired. “My eyes welled with tears,” he writes of a decision he found profoundly unfair. “Everyone was expendable. But me? Processing what I had been told was very painful.”Announcing the shake-up two months later, Nixon declared: “There can be no whitewash at the White House.” But despite further purges, there was no escape. A drip-drip of damaging headlines led to high-profile congressional hearings and bombshell testimonies.The courts forced Nixon to surrender tape recordings that confirmed he had tried to use the CIA to divert the FBI investigation – an abuse of presidential power and an obstruction of justice. The “law and order” president had behaved as if he was above the law.Nixon lost the confidence of fellow Republicans and in August 1974, facing almost certain impeachment, became the first and still only US president to resign.Chapin maintains his own innocence, insisting that he had nothing to do with the break-in or cover-up. But his earlier decision to hire an old university friend, Don Segretti, a political dirty trickster who would eventually serve four months in prison, was his undoing.Chapin was indicted on four counts of making false statements to a grand jury, charges that he still adamantly denies. He was found guilty on two counts and spent nine months in a low security federal prison in California.“I was fortunate that I could go to a minimal security place so there were no cells, no doors that slammed,” he recalls. “There was more of an army barracks type situation. Now, I’m not saying it was pleasant because you’re losing your freedom and I was being punished. I always viewed this as a political thing, not that I was a criminal.”Two or three weeks in, Chapin got hassled by two younger inmates. He went to see an older inmate, “Big Mike”, who happened to be keenly interested in politics and used his influence to ensure that Chapin never got bullied again. “When he put out the word, nothing was going to happen to me.”Chapin believes incarceration changed him and proved one of the most valuable learning experiences of his life. “When I was going off to prison, a friend said, ‘Dwight, it can get the best of you, or you can make the most of it.’ That was a wonderful piece of advice. I kept myself very busy. I read constantly.“I was probably in better physical shape than ever in my life. I started a programme for other prisoners that were getting ready to go back out into society. I had a desk and a little office and I helped them write letters and find jobs they could go to. I tried to make myself productive there and that helped make the time go faster.”But did he not feel abandoned and betrayed by Nixon, who was pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, and escaped criminal prosecution?“He couldn’t help me out,” Chapin says. “Richard Nixon was president of the United States. He had to resign so he went through his own hell, different than mine, but equally traumatic, maybe even more traumatic than what I went through, particularly for such a proud man, such a good man.“What he made it possible for me to witness and be a part of so outweighs any of the negatives of Watergate. I’m very proud of what we accomplished and I think he did a great job. There’s no question I was heartbroken, there’s no question I went through hell, but so did he.”Some readers may find Chapin’s praise of Nixon hard to swallow and draw comparisons with the blind loyalty of former aides to another Republican president, Donald Trump. But Bernstein is among those who have observed that while Nixon was a crook, liar and media hater, Trump is infinitely worse: an authoritarian who staged an attempted coup.Chapin, an admirer of Ronald Reagan who seems reluctant to talk about Trump, found his footing when he regained his freedom. He was a magazine publisher, held a senior position at a public relations company and managed his own consulting firm. He has put his prison time behind him and, at 81, written his first book so his children and grandchildren can understand his version of history.“Things happen to people all the time and it’s important that individuals realise that their life is not over,” Chapin reflects. “Time is a great healer, and I try to make the point in my book that I was able to recoup from this.“I was happy it happened to me as a young man and not like with some of the older guys where it was the capstone of their career. For me, it was at the start of my working life and I’ve been able to do many other interesting things with my life since then.”
      The President’s Man is out now
      TopicsBooksRichard NixonWatergateUS politicsinterviewsReuse this content More

    • 88 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Chasing History review: Carl Bernstein’s pre-Watergate world

      by

      Chasing History review: Carl Bernstein’s pre-Watergate worldBefore he helped bring down Richard Nixon, the reporter grew up in a school of hard knocks. His memoir is a treasure Few reporters are synonymous with their craft. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post is one, his former partner, Carl Bernstein, another. Together, they broke open the Watergate scandal, helped send a president’s minions to prison and made Richard Nixon the only man to resign the office. On the big screen, Robert Redford played Woodward. Bernstein got Dustin Hoffman.These days, Bernstein is a CNN analyst and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Chasing History, his sixth book, is a warm and inviting read.Now 77, he writes with the benefit of hindsight and the luxury of self-imposed deadlines. His prose is dry and reflective even as it draws in the reader. This is his look back and valedictory, with a fitting subtitle: “A Kid in the Newsroom.”He describes life before the Post, in pages marked with politics – and haberdashery.“I needed a suit.” So the book begins. Shortly thereafter: “My mother and father, in the early 1950s, had taken me with them to join the sit-ins at Woodward & Lothrop to desegregate its tea room.”“Woodies”, a department store, closed in 1995. In the 50s, rather than testify before the House Un-American Affairs Committee, Bernstein’s mother invoked her right against self-incrimination. His father suffered for past membership in the Communist party. The FBI of J Edgar Hoover was an unwelcome presence in the Bernsteins’ lives.Still in high school, Bernstein worked as a part-time copy boy for the Washington Star. “Now that I’d covered the inauguration of JFK, Mr Adelman’s chemistry class interested me even less,” he confesses.He barely scraped out of high school, flunked out of the University of Maryland and lost his deferment from the Vietnam draft. He found a spot in a national guard unit, removing the possibility of deployment and combat. Chasing History also includes a copy of Bernstein’s college transcript, which advertises a sea of Fs and the capitalized notation: “ACADEMICALLY DISMISSED 1-27-65.”On the other hand, before he was old enough to vote, Bernstein had covered or reported more than most journalists do in a lifetime. The 1960 presidential election, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Kennedy assassination, desegregation and Martin Luther King’s March on Washington. All were part of his remit.The integration of DC’s barber shops, a race-fueled brawl at a high school football game, the death of a newspaper vendor. In a nation in upheaval, all captured Bernstein’s attention.He is one of the last of his breed, a national reporter without a degree. Chasing History reminds us that by the mid-1960s, newsrooms were no longer dominated by working-class inflections. Carbon paper, hot lead typesetting, ink-stained fingers and smocks would also give way, to computers and digitization.The Ivy League emerged as a training ground of choice. Television would outpace print. Rough edges would be smoothed and polished, a premium placed on facts. Hard-knocks, not so much.“A big generational change was occurring in the journalism trade,” Bernstein writes. “Editors wanted college graduates now. My view was that you might be better prepared by graduating from horticultural school than from Yale or Princeton.”The kicker: “At least that way you could write the gardening column.”Emphasis on the word “might”, though. Woodward went to Yale. To this day, they count each other as friends.Chasing History is more about gratitude than grievance. For 10 pages, Bernstein recalls the names of his “young friends”, their “remarkable paths”, his intersection with those who would emerge as “historical footnotes” and his “teachers and mentors”.Lance Morrow, formerly of Time and the Wall Street Journal, makes it on to the dedication page. They were housemates and worked at the Star. Later, their careers flourished. Morrow, according to Bernstein, “occupies a unique place in the journalism of our time” and has been an “incomparable joy” in the author’s life.Likewise, Ben Stein – and his appearance as an economics teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in 1986 – earns more than a passing shoutout. The fact Stein and his father served in the Nixon administration did not dent Bernstein’s fondness. They grew up nextdoor to each other in the DC suburbs. In junior high, the boys founded a “lox-and-bagel/Sunday New York Times delivery service”. The two see each other yearly.Bernstein also pays his respects to David Broder, the late dean of the political press corps. On 23 November 1962, as a copy boy, Bernstein took dictation from Broder, who was in Dallas that fateful Friday afternoon. Years later, Broder provided a useful tip that helped shape the path and coverage of “Woodstein’s” Watergate reporting.One mentor of particular note was George Porter, a Star bureau chief to whom Bernstein refers respectfully as Mr Porter and who regularly gave Bernstein a ride to the office. During the Democratic primaries in 1964, Porter dispatched Bernstein to cover George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor. Wallace never had a chance but his candidacy was newsworthy. Think Donald Trump, prototype.Why the US media ignored Murdoch’s brazen bid to hijack the presidency | Carl BernsteinRead moreLyndon Johnson, a Democrat, was in the White House but Wallace got nearly 30% in Indiana. When Wallace turned to Maryland, Bernstein was there on the ground.It was the first time he’d “seen a demagogue inflame the emotions of American citizens who I’d thought were familiar to me”.Wallace lost but netted 40% and a majority of white votes. In defeat, he blamed Black voters, except he chose a word that began with “N”, and an “incompetent press”, for failing to recognize his appeal. The church, labor unions, Ted Kennedy and “every other Democratic senator from the north” were also subjects of Wallace’s scorn.Chasing History is part-autobiography, part-history lesson. Amid continued turbulence, Bernstein’s memoirs are more than mere reminiscence.
      Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom is published in the US by Henry Holt & Company
      TopicsBooksJournalism booksPolitics booksCarl BernsteinUS press and publishingNewspapers & magazinesUS politicsreviewsReuse this content More

    • 213 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Nixon is much more serious than Trump’: Michael Dobbs and the tale of the White House tapes

      by

      “I love you, as you know,” says Richard Nixon. “Like my brother.”The 37th president is bidding farewell to chief of staff Bob Haldeman in an unexpectedly intimate phone call that, half a century later, lingers in the air like a ghost.Donald Trump had tweets but Nixon had tapes: 3,700 hours of them, secretly recorded by a White House system the East German Stasi might have envied. The conversations were released between 2007 and 2013, an eavesdropping opportunity never likely to be repeated.They have proved a goldmine for Michael Dobbs, a British-born author and journalist whose elegantly written book, King Richard – Nixon and Watergate: An American Tragedy, zooms in on the hundred days that followed Nixon’s second inauguration and led to his downfall.The narrative follows Nixon from room to room, day by day, sometimes minute by minute. It tells how the tapes capture ice cubes tinkling in a glass, Nixon’s voice softening when his 24-year-old daughter Julie calls and, as the world knows, some bilious rants about the media as the Watergate scandal deepens.Why did this famously secretive president leave such an incriminating trace? Nixon never intended for the tapes, made between February 1971 and July 1973, to become public. But he did have an eye on posterity.“It’s a bit like Churchill said: ‘History will be kind to me because I intend to write it myself,’” says Dobbs, 70.“That was Nixon’s idea as well. This is one difference from Trump: [Nixon] really had studied history in some depth, and compared himself to people like Churchill and De Gaulle. He wanted to write memoirs that would justify his place in history and particularly undercut any attempts by uppity aides like [Henry] Kissinger to claim all the credit for his foreign policy initiatives.The tapes force a writer to step into his shoes and to see events from his point of view so you see him destroy himself“So he never imagined that the tapes would become public. He thought they were just going to be his private property that he could draw on for writing his memoirs. Of course, he didn’t really understand that just to go back and listen to these tapes, he’d have to spend his entire retirement trying to decipher them. The tapes became completely out of control in the end.”Lyndon Johnson recorded about 800 hours of phone calls but Nixon took it to a whole new level. Dobbs says: “The difference with Nixon was that he was so ham-fisted and a bit of a klutz that he didn’t know how to turn tape recorders on and off so they invented a system which turned out to be completely diabolic: it would just turn on by itself. It recorded absolutely everything without any sort of input from him, which is what really did him in in the end.”Sometimes Nixon could forget the tapes were running as he and his aides plotted dirty tricks, unleashed crude diatribes or made racist asides. In one, Haldeman suggests that the White House counsel, John Dean, must have been taking out “all his frustrations in just pure, raw, animal, unadulterated sex”.Nixon’s Trump-like loathing of the media includes a boast that he “really stuck ’em in the groin”. It also crops up in a conversation with his special counsel, Chuck Colson, on the eve of his inauguration. Dobbs says: “He’s about to give this speech and he’s gloating with Colson, his hatchet man, about how he’s going to stick it to the Washington Post and drive the Post’s share price down. He generally calls the reporters ‘the bastards’.”At this point, Nixon was riding high after a thumping election victory and with a near-70% approval rating. The break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex, seven months prior, was seemingly behind him despite the efforts of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.“But then, within just a few weeks and months, the whole thing has completely unravelled and you have all these people within the White House at each other’s throats and, as Nixon says, ‘pissing on each other’ and eventually pissing on the president. So it’s an amazing three-month period in which probably one of the most disciplined White House operations in history completely falls apart.”By July 1973, some of Nixon’s advisers were pleading with him to destroy the tapes lest they reveal his part in the Watergate cover-up. He felt they would strengthen his defence. He was wrong.The supreme court ordered the release of a “smoking gun tape” confirming Dean’s testimony that Nixon told aides to order the CIA to shut down the FBI investigation into the burglary. Nixon lost the confidence of fellow Republicans and was forced to resign in August 1974, before he could be impeached.Dobbs reflects: “At a certain point, it becomes Dean’s word against Nixon’s word. There wasn’t sufficient evidence to impeach the president at that point. The only reason that he was forced to resign was because the tapes started coming out and that went all the way to the supreme court. Without the tapes, there would not have been a sufficient basis to force Nixon out of office.”And yet, as Dobbs listened, he also found the tapes that ruined Nixon’s reputation in the moment could yet provide a measure of redemption.“What they do is to force a writer to step into his shoes and to see events from his point of view so you see him destroy himself and destroy his presidency and the pain and agony that he feels.“Unless you’re an absolute dyed-in-the-wool Nixon hater, you have to feel some sympathy for the man, not because you approve of what he did, but just on a personal level.”The president’s conversations with his daughters help humanise him.“You can relate to him the way he talks to Julie, particularly if you’ve listened to the previous tape of him talking to Haldeman. Suddenly he’s switching from being an irascible president who’s barking orders at people to being a loving father.”Then there is that wistful call with Haldeman, who knew the president better than anyone.“Nixon never invited him to a family meal, never shook hands with him, and then suddenly here is Nixon saying, ‘I love you like my brother.’ If you know the background of Nixon’s two brothers dying from tuberculosis when he was a young man, it’s extraordinary.”Dobbs wrote the book during Trump’s scandal-peppered, twice-impeached, one-term presidency. Parallels with Nixon were inescapable: the exploitation of racial resentment, the whipping up of the “silent majority”, the hostility towards the press and east coast elites. But he believes there are key differences too.“Nixon is a much more substantive, serious person than Trump and he had a real sophisticated understanding of history and foreign policy. We don’t know how Trump is going to be treated by historians, 40, 50 years later, but I find Nixon a more empathetic character than Trump.“To some extent, Nixon has succeeded in rehabilitating himself, or at least we have a more nuanced picture of Nixon now. I’m not sure that Trump is going to be rehabilitated, at least among historians.”The author, a dual British-American citizen who has worked for the Guardian and Washington Post, continues: “One distinguishing thing between the two of them is the whole claim that the election was rigged and stolen from Trump. Although Nixon did have a lot of grudges about particularly the 1960 election and felt the Kennedys had stolen it from him, he did not go public with that and he did not try to dispute it in any serious way.“He accepted it because he thought that was one rule of the game. Trump completely threw that rule of the game overboard. Nixon is within the mainstream American presidents. Trump is outside the mainstream.”It remains to be seen whether historians will regard Trump as a Shakespearean figure or conclude he was simply not that psychologically interesting. Dobbs believes Nixon, who rose from poverty to the presidency only to endure catastrophe, does meet the King Lear standard. Along with its theatrical title, the book is divided into four “acts” and has a list of “dramatic personae”.“To call him a Shakespearean tragic hero does not mean that you approve of him or you like him,” Dobbs says. “It means that you’re just struck by this fall from grace and you’ve become aware of the suffering involved. I was more interested in telling the story than to pass judgment.”Exit, pursued by a tape recorder. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      G Gordon Liddy, mastermind of Watergate burglary, dies aged 90

      by

      G Gordon Liddy, a mastermind of the Watergate burglary and a radio talkshow host after emerging from prison, died on Tuesday at age 90.His son, Thomas Liddy, confirmed the death but did reveal the cause, other than to say it was not related to Covid-19.Liddy, a former FBI agent and army veteran, was convicted of conspiracy, burglary and illegal wiretapping for his role in the Watergate burglary, which led to the resignation of Richard Nixon. He spent four years and four months in prison, including more than 100 days in solitary confinement.“I’d do it again for my president,” he said years later.Liddy was outspoken and controversial, both as a political operative under Nixon and as a radio personality. Liddy recommended assassinating political enemies, bombing a left-leaning thinktank and kidnapping war protesters. His White House colleagues ignored such suggestions.One of his ventures – the break-in at Democratic headquarters at the Watergate building in June 1972 – was approved. The burglary went awry, which led to an investigation, a cover-up and Nixon’s resignation in 1974.Liddy also was convicted of conspiracy in the September 1971 burglary of the defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Ellsberg leaked the secret history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers.After his release, Liddy – with his piercing dark eyes, bushy moustache and shaved head – became a popular, provocative and controversial radio talkshow host. He also worked as a security consultant, writer and actor.On air, he offered tips on how to kill federal firearms agents, rode around with car tags saying “H20GATE” (Watergate) and scorned people who cooperated with prosecutors.Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, George Gordon Battle Liddy was a frail boy who grew up in a neighborhood populated mostly by German Americans. From friends and a maid who was a German national, Liddy developed a curiosity about Adolf Hitler and was inspired by listening to Hitler’s radio speeches in the 1930s.“If an entire nation could be changed, lifted out of weakness to extraordinary strength, so could one person,” Liddy wrote in Will, his autobiography.Liddy decided it was critical to face his fears and overcome them. At age 11, he roasted a rat and ate it to overcome his fear of rats. “From now on, rats could fear me as they feared cats,” he wrote.After serving a stint in the army, Liddy graduated from law school at Fordham University and then joined the FBI. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress from New York in 1968 and helped organize Nixon’s presidential campaign in the state.When Nixon took office, Liddy was named a special assistant serving under the treasury secretary David M Kennedy. Liddy later moved to the White House, then to Nixon’s re-election campaign, where his official title was general counsel.Liddy was head of a team of Republican operatives known as “the plumbers”, whose mission was to find leakers of information embarrassing to the Nixon administration. Among Liddy’s specialties were gathering political intelligence and organizing activities to disrupt or discredit Nixon’s Democratic opponents.While recruiting a woman to help carry out one of his schemes, Liddy tried to convince her that no one could force him to reveal her identity or anything else against his will. To convince her, Liddy held his hand over a flaming cigarette lighter. His hand was badly burned. The woman turned down the job.Liddy became known for such offbeat suggestions as kidnapping war protest organizers and taking them to Mexico during the Republican national convention; assassinating the investigative journalist Jack Anderson; and firebombing the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning thinktank in Washington where classified documents leaked by Ellsberg were being stored.Liddy and his fellow operative Howard Hunt, along with the five arrested at Watergate, were indicted on federal charges three months after the June 1972 break-in. Hunt and his recruits pleaded guilty in January 1973, and James McCord and Liddy were found guilty. Nixon resigned on 9 August 1974.After the failed break-in attempt, Liddy recalled telling the White House counsel John Dean: “If someone wants to shoot me, just tell me what corner to stand on, and I’ll be there, OK?” Dean reportedly responded, “I don’t think we’ve gotten there yet, Gordon.”Liddy claimed in an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes that Nixon was “insufficiently ruthless” and should have destroyed tape recordings of his conversations with top aides.Liddy learned to market his reputation as a fearless, if sometimes overzealous, advocate of conservative causes. Liddy’s syndicated radio talkshow, broadcast from Virginia-based WJFK, was long one of the most popular in the country. He wrote bestselling books, acted in TV shows including Miami Vice, was a frequent guest lecturer on college campuses, started a private eye franchise and worked as a security consultant. For a time, he teamed on the lecture circuit with an unlikely partner, the 1960s LSD guru Timothy Leary.Liddy always took pride in his role in Watergate. He once said: “I am proud of the fact that I am the guy who did not talk.” More