Woodward and Bernstein: 40 years after Watergate, Nixon was far worse than we thought

[proud2BlibKansan]

As Sen. Sam Ervin completed his 20-year Senate career in 1974 and issued his final report as chairman of the Senate Watergate committee, he posed the question: “What was Watergate?”

Countless answers have been offered in the 40 years since June 17, 1972, when a team of burglars wearing business suits and rubber gloves was arrested at 2:30 a.m. at the headquarters of the Democratic Party in the Watergate office building in Washington. Four days afterward, the Nixon White House offered its answer: “Certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it was,” press secretary Ronald Ziegler scoffed, dismissing the incident as a “third-rate burglary.”

History proved that it was anything but. Two years later, Richard Nixon would become the first and only U.S. president to resign, his role in the criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice — the Watergate coverup — definitively established.

Another answer has since persisted, often unchallenged: the notion that the coverup was worse than the crime. This idea minimizes the scale and reach of Nixon’s criminal actions.

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

[MadHound]

1. The greatest mistake made concerning Watergate,

Was to discontinue the investigations and prosecutions once Nixon resigned. Sure, they got big, bad Nixon to fade into obscurity, but they left his minions, people like Cheney, Rumsfeld and so many others, free to continue their march to power.

[WillyT]

4. Yep... And Ford's Pardon Of Nixon Destroyed The Notion Of 'A Government Of Laws, Not Men'...

[coalition_unwilling]

8. IMO, it was Ford's unconditional pardon of Nixon coupled with his

heavily conditional 'amnesty' of Vietnam draft resisters and evaders that said it all. In fact, the latter group were not 'pardoned' at all, but instead forced to affirm principles with which many disagreed if they wished to re-enter the U.S.

Watergate would never have happened without Vietnam, so Ford's pusillanimity with regard to draft evaders and resisters ratified that Nixon could get away with obstructing justice but draft resisters would have to live with the consequence of their actions or renounce their principles.

Ford's pardon probably cost Ford the election in 1976, though. Note I did not say 're-election'

[proud2BlibKansan]

5. Amen

Cheney learned how to get away with it when Nixon got caught.

[Tom Ripley]

17. But...but...but...Gerry The Errandboy saved the country!!!

That sonofabitch should have died in prison

[jwirr]

19. Exactly. If we had been told the whole truth back then we might have been able to stop what is

happening now. No one had to pay for these crimes except Nixon and then he only lost his job. They saw no reason to stop their plans just find some gulible idiot like raygun to carry on and take the blame if they get caught. W was another gulible idiot. We are really run by this shadow government started back then.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

2. Nixon's October surprise was far worse than Watergate

http://consortiumnews.com/2012/03/03/lbjs-x-file-on-nixons-treason/

"...On May 14, 1973, Walt W. Rostow, who had been national security adviser during some of the darkest days of the Vietnam War, typed a three-page “memorandum for the record” summarizing a secret file that his former boss, President Lyndon Johnson, had amassed on what may have been Richard Nixon’s dirtiest trick, the sabotaging of Vietnam peace talks to win the 1968 election. ..."

LBJ didn't go public with it for fear it would forever taint the U.S. Presidency. And then Watergate broke so Nixon was forced out anyway. Nixon had the blood of thousands on his hands, all for political power, ego, and ideology. He was the worst piece of shit ever to come along.

[regnaD kciN]

6. And there's more than that...

Remember that much of the motivation for the break-ins was to get some never-disclosed but explosive information of "the Bay of Pigs." Since it's very unlikely that Nixon would have been covering-up potentially embarrassing information about the Kennedy administration, most believe that "Bay of Pigs" was code for something else. A recent book on the subject (whose author I currently can't remember) asserts that it was Nixon's leading role during the last days of the Eisenhower administration in recruiting a covert force to attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro. This suggests that Nixon himself might have been largely responsible for recruiting what LBJ went on to describe as "a goddamn Murder, Inc." made up of Cuban exiles. And if it had come out that said Cuban expatriates, as was looking increasingly likely as people began to debunk the Warren Report, were behind the JFK assassination...well, it wouldn't be good for Nixon if it turned out that he, however unwittingly, put together the group that murdered his main political enemy, a sitting U.S. president. I'm sure it wouldn't have taken much more that that revelation to get people to start wondering whether it really was unwitting, or whether they really acted without direction from the people who put them together in the first place.

[coalition_unwilling]

10. Speaking of 'pieces of shit,' McNamara understood as early as 1965 that

we could not win a military victory in Vietnam but said absolutely zilch, nada, to LBJ or his national security team and allowed the fighting to continue. If McNamra knew we were doomed in Vietnam, Rostow probably did too.

Not to defend Nixon, but there's pieces of shit and then there's pieces of shit. Hard to say which is worse.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

12. Knowing you cannot win the war and doing nothing is pretty bad

Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and LBJ gradually got us into a mess we could not win, from advisers who actually were combatants to full blown warfare. But I think there's a moral difference, even when engaged in an immoral war, in proceeding with a hopeless war when you believe in the domino theory for the good of the country, however misguided, and secretly trying to prolong the war and the dying for the purpose of winning an election, especially when you told the American people a bald-faced lie that you had a secret plan to end the war and they were expecting you to end it if elected. Publicly telling the people you were going to end it if they made you President while privately doing everything to prolong it is reprehensible. The latter behavior is truly cynical. But maybe it's just me.

[coalition_unwilling]

18. I understand your point (I think). The record is mixed on JFK and those who preceded

him, however. I'm not sure JFK "knew" we could not win. But McNamara did "know" we could not win and still let the war go on. That's pretty reprehensible.

FWIW, Nixon's 'secret plan' to end the Vietnam War was to expand it secretly to Cambodia and Laos without congressional approval. That became part of the proposed articles of impeachment against him, IIRC, although I'm not sure they were approved by the Judiciary Committee. Definitely also reprehensible. Nixon and Kissinger's back channel use of Claire Chennault (to which you initially referred) borders on 'treason' no matter how one defines it.

[PCIntern]

3. Younger folks may not realize that the difference

Between Nixon and those who followed from the republican party is that Nixon was brilliant and the rest of them are or were simply bright, senile, or disturbed/impaired/dull. It is tragic that the full breadth of the malfeasance and criminality was not conveyed by those who knew it at the time within the MSM. And believe me, they knew...they knew.

[regnaD kciN]

7. And it's especially tragic...

...that Nixon's disciples wound up becoming the main leaders of Dim Son's administration, and thus were able to happily guide a bumbling, arrogant idiot along the same path. It meant that 2001-2008 became essentially the worst of the Nixon and Reagan administrations combined.

I wonder how many of these same people are positioning themselves to become trusted, important "advisers" to a potential President Romney?

[turtlerescue1]

9. Too many of the players then are still

playing now.

That is the most terrifying aspect.

[Spazito]

11. Very interesting read...

The dirty tricks from the Nixon era have been carried on by Rove, among others, whose contemporaries were Lee Atwater and Donald Segretti, Rove having worked with both back in his early years of being a POS.

Thanks for posting this, it was a very good read.

[UTUSN]

13. Hissyspit's comment in LBN on this topic is priceless:

[FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"][font size=5]"Hey, Woodward. George W. Bush was far worse than you thought, too."[/font][/FONT]

[citysyde]

14. Fantastic article! I think there might be a...

book coming out of this, hopefully before the elections this year.

So many other Republican POS's all involved in this.

[citysyde]

15. Amazing quotes from that sociopath!

He went on: “People don’t trust these Eastern establishment people. He’s Harvard. He’s a Jew. You know, and he’s an arrogant intellectual.”

..........
Nixon’s anti-Semitic rages were well-known to those who worked most closely with him, including some aides who were Jewish. As we reported in our 1976 book, “The Final Days,” he would tell his deputies, including Kissinger, that “the Jewish cabal is out to get me."

.

[michaelcobb]

16. Tapes reveal more serious Nixon crimes. Wallace shooting.

He conspired to have McGovern campaign material planted in the apartment of Arthur Bremmer the guy who shot GGeorge Wallace's apartment. The FBI beat his hanchman to the scene.