Posted on 11/20/2008 10:07:32 AM PST by Hyzenthlay
Hey, give me some of that good stuff you are smoking.
One little problem with your scenario....the left had been after Nixon for years and years. They could not tolerate his anti communism.
They were relentless. Now if he had been a dem.......well then......
The tragedy of this is in the misperception among the public that America was an honorable place before Nixon was President. LBJ ran all kinds of dirty tricks, including holding a blackmail note against the Houston Chronicle in exchange for them silencing any negative press about his administration (in return, a bank merger was allowed to go through).
JFK installed the taping system in the White House.
LBJ taped his communications. Those tapes did not come out until the 1990s.
JFK’s tapes are still sealed from the public. They will have deteriorated into nothing by the time they are “released” to the public.
What a sham. What revisionist history. Disregard those who the left who insist they are telling the truth, the WHOLE truth, and NOTHING BUT the truth.
The break-in was to an office of Daniel Ellsberg, a psychiatrist, in an attempt to get some of his records concerning certain major figures in the Democrat campaign for the Presidency in 1972. Nixon stood to win that race quite easily WITHOUT getting this extra dirt, but he could not slow down what was a major clandestine effort, sometimes known by the acronym CREEP (Committee to Re-Elect the President). These guys were operating at or beyond the scope of their assignment, and made a couple of rookie mistakes. One was timing, another was in not covering their escape route on departure.
Nixon had no prior knowledge of that particular operation, but he was alerted to it almost immediately afterward. Nixon was very intensely loyal to his subordinates, unlike some more recent examples, and once apprised of the situation, moved to take full responsibility for the fallout.
As it turned out, the Democrats had mounted perhaps the least effective candidates EVER for the Presidency and Vice Presidency that year, and the VP candidate, Tom Eagleton, was kicked off the ticket because of questions about his psychiatric history (thus the reason for the break-in in the first place, looking for other weaknesses).
Nixon went through a really terrible media storm as a result of the details of this break-in becoming public after the election, and in a fit of righteousness, the Democrats seized the initiative, demanding retribution (like overturning the whole 1972 election), and churning this into a reason for impeachment. To make sure the Nixon Administratrion was gone for good, the attack moved a little to the side, not so much at Nixon at first, but at his Constitutional successor, Spiro Agnew. Spiro was driven from office under the cover of darkness, with threats of indictment for supposed graft he had engaged in while governor of Maryland.
Spiro buckled under and resigned, opening the door for the House of Representatives to elect a substitute VP, Gerald Ford. Once Spiro was gone, the media and the Democrat termites in the Congress went after Nixon directly.
Subtlety was not in any great evidence. One of the termites going after Nixon was none other than Hillary Rodham, a legislative assistant on the Democrat-controlled committee that was drawing up the articles of impeachment. Some of her recommendations then, if read today, would still make your hair stand on end. NO defense counsel for the President, NO right of discovery by the defendent, just NO.
It is interesting that this same Hillary Rodham, when she was in the running for the nomination as candidate for the Presidency of the United States, patterned her campaign after that of Nixon, INCLUDING the opposition research.
But in the end, her tactics were co-opted by somebody who was just a little more ruthless than she was.
LOL
About the break-in itself, you will get no better account than in G Gordon Liddy’s book “Will.”
“All The President’s Men” is a good place to start - the movie will outline what the Watergate break-in itself was about.
The event itself really did start a hugely cynical streak in American politics. Nixon’s White House viewed anyone who disagreed with them as enemies - hence, the “Enemies’ List”. They used the full power of the White House itself to attack them. They mixed the political arm of the Republican re-election campaign (”The Committee to Re-Elect the President”, or CREEP) with the governing arm of the Executive Branch.
So election activities were discussed in the Oval Office, and the Presidential advisors and Cabinet members made no distinctions between their business on the taxpayers’ dime, and the re-election campaign. The argument was that getting Nixon re-elected was an absolute necessity for the continued well-being of the nation. Nixon had sworn to uphold that during his inauguration, so of course anything he felt he needed to do to get re-elected was constitutionally mandated, pretty much.
Since they knew that a lot of people (including the Supreme Court, seen as Liberal) would disagree with them strenuously, they did use separate funding lines (paid out of money gathered in campaign contributions) to pay for the burglars (the “Plumbers”) that they sent in to burgle the Democratic National Headquarters. (The burgling tactic to try to obtain incriminating evidence to embarrass an Enemy had also been used with the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatist. Ellsberg was a Rand analyst who had snuck secret Pentagon memoes on the Vietnam War, the Pentagon Papers, to the New York Times in 1971.)
Anyway, the White House lied about what they were doing. They felt justified because the press was seen as enemies for not being loyal to the WH. And if the WH’s and the country’s interests were the same, then to criticize or cover WH foibles was unpatriotic and treasonous.
Then when Nixon was caught lying, he lied more, and used the power of the Presidency to block as much investigation as possible.
So then there were impeachment hearings, and Nixon resigned.
And now everyone assumes that the President and his staff will lie to protect what they see as necessary actions. Many people believe that it is his or her right to do so.
Watergate is really the first time in the 20th Century that the facts of Presidential lying were rubbed in the American public’s faces. Lying happened before, and accusations about lying as well, but the Watergate hearings were the first time proof about the lying of a currently sitting President had been brought to the electorate.
You can see how it has repercussions to this day.
All because of a bit of sticky tape on a door latch!
The break-in into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist preceded the break-in into DNC headquarters at the Watergate. Ellsberg was the Dept. of Defense analyst who leaked the classified “official history” of U.S. involvement in Vietnam to the press—the so-called “Pentagon Papers.”
The two burglaries should not be confused, although both were curious in their clear lack of benefit to the Nixon administration. The Pentagon Papers demonstrated Johnson administration mismanagement of Vietnam, which only made Nixon’s resolution of most of the war look that much better.
But Clinton was a professor of Constitutional Law.
Thanks for the clarification. If I could get it confused, think of the challenge it would present to the typical voter or even member of Congress of those days.
FActs can be such stubborn things. Therefore, change the facts so they fit a new version of the “truth”.
Thus it begins.
“One little problem with your scenario....the left had been after Nixon for years and years. They could not tolerate his anti communism.”
Yes that’s obvious.
But the problem with your scenario is that you overlook Nixon deliberately breaking the law in a major way.
He gave them the rope to hang himself.
He dind’t have to lie; he had nothing to do with the break in.
Whoops, that is one messed up sentence. Daniel Ellsberg was not the psychiatrist, he was a patient, and the "plumbers" broke into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist out west in Beverly Hills b/c he had leaked the classified documents which became known as the "Pentagon Papers" (1971) -- that was part of the run-up BEFORE the "Watergate" break-in (in Washington, DC) of June 1972, which was into offices of the DNC -- quite different from Ellsberg's psychiatrist out in Beverly Hills, CA.
Ellsberg had been working at the RAND Corp. on a review of the origins and policies relating to the Vietnam War, and was given access to dozens of volumes worth of sensitive docs to do his study. He decided to release said classified docs via the NY Times in order to undermine support for the war in Vietnam.
The events are related insofar as the Nixon admin. was disgusted by all the leaks of classified materials etc. and formed the "plumbers" unit to combat what was going on with leftists like Ellsberg undermining the war effort, BUT the reasons for the Watergate break-in were quite distinct from anything to do with Ellsberg and the Watergate matter began a year after Ellsberg had released the "Pentagon Papers".....
Clinton studied a broad, I mean abroad.
Yup. One official involved points out that a decision was never made to implement a coverup, since the option of telling the truth was never brought up.
In Nixon's defense (to some extent), it is unlikely he did anything that Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson had not also done. He was just dumb enough to tape the evidence of his crimes.
Not to mention FDR's systematic violation of federal law in the runup to our entry into WWII. There have been numerous books published about this, generally with his criminality portrayed as a good thing.
Which leaves the door open to wonder if it hadn’t been Watergate, would there have been some other “scandal” that would have netted the same result?
“He was just dumb enough to tape the evidence of his crimes.”
Johnson taped his own criminal phone calls. The tapes came out decades later.
Kennedy taped too. But we can’t hear them.
So it is mis-remembering history to claim that they didn’t tape their calls or proclaim that Nixon was dumb because he wasn’t as wise as the others in this regard. The tapes have been withheld from the public. To protect the legacy of the Democrat party. Watergate remains a blackmark on the GOP, not just Nixon’s administration.
I was unaware that Kennedy and Johnson also had tape systems.
Various opinions have been given over the years but many claim that if Nixon had fought the impeachment out in the courts, he would have won.
But, like any political leader outside of the democratic party, he did not think the ordeal involved in salvaging his political career was in America's best interest.
It wouldn’t have been fought out in court: no one could have “arrested” Nixon until after he’d been removed from office.
The fight would have been an impeachment fight in the House, which Nixon probably would have lost, and then a trial in the Senate, which, like Clinton, Nixon might have won if he’d tightened all the screws on the Senate to which he had access. He only needed a third plus one of the Senators to stick with him, which they very well may have done if the alternative were the destruction of the party, as Clinton put to his contemporaries.
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