Posted on 11/20/2008 10:07:32 AM PST by Hyzenthlay
wow, that entire book is online there!
READ IT!!
http://www.nixonera.com/etexts/silentcoup/contents.asp
They did hate Nixon and would have wanted to get him. But what Nixon did was really stupid; and was unnecessary.
I was a mere child back then myself ( I am now 41) and after doing the research I have done I still can not understand why the break in was done at all since Nixon was going to win in a landslide anyway.... it seemed so childish to do so. Unless it was done as a means to trap him later on. Which of course worked either way you look at it.
Nixon was a good President. When you look at things Presidents have gotten away with since it makes the entire Watergate situation much ado about nothing.
If you are interested in the "break-in” I suggest you read Silent Coup by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin. You only need read the section titled “Golden Boy” to better understand.
If you are then interested in the "cover-up" I suggest you read Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
I found the facts about the break-in far more interesting that the misleading information about the cover-up.
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1998/11/25/kennedy.tapes/
Kennedy White House tapes offer new insight
By Bill Delaney/CNN
BOSTON (November 24, 1998)
The Kennedy Library has released 37 hours of tape recordings of meetings, memos, phone calls and dictation of President John F. Kennedy, including four hours of tape long held by Kennedy secretary Evelyn Lincoln...
Weekend Edition Saturday, November 15, 2003 · Forty years ago next week, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas and Lyndon B. Johnson suddenly became president. One of the first things Johnson did when he moved into the Oval Office was install a secret tape-recording system. Kennedy had made clandestine tapes of his White House conversations, but Johnson took the practice to a vast new level, taping hundreds of hours of discourse, including more than 9,000 phone calls...
Even the stink about Senator Joseph McCarthy was misrepresented too.
It’s been used by domestic Communists to denouce the government ever since. But there were seditious traitors working on behalf of the Soviets, some knowingly, some were Red Dupes who did not know who was pulling their strings.
I loathe the media.
As I say, Nixon was used to paint a “culture of corruption” on the right. And the New Left gained a foothold in the Democrat party (they went from riots in the streets to occupying the White House and Congress now).
It is because of what Nixon did in the scandal that leads me to believe that he could have been tripped up lying about some other ordeal if it had not been this one. The original scandal was over something during the re-election campaign. And then it took 9months to get the public to care. There was plenty of time in 4 years to get the public riled about something or the other and as I said, what was the possibility that Nixon would have been caught using these tactics to cover up that hypothetical transgression?
When we look at the Clintons, they “got away with it” because those who knew held their tongues. If we look at the Monica Lewinsky case, we see bribery to get people to lie under oath, intimidation, perjury, suborning perjury, and with the unrelated subsequent 9-11 investigation, destruction of evidence (from the National Archives). Just because the Clintons were not convicted does not mean that they were innocent. Their tactics were not used in an isolated case. It was a pattern of behavior.
I agree with everything that you wrote. Democrats are generally much more corrupt and get away with it.
LBJ and the Clintons come to mind.
And as I remember; JFK basically won a close election with election fraud help in Chicago.
Why did the five men break into the DNC headquarters in the first place? This seems to be the one detail that's the fuzziest... strangely, none of the things I read mentioned 'why', and I highly doubt that five grown men would break into a building just for the heck of it.That's the part which remains a mystery -- Nixon wound up winning the election by a mile, with McGovern getting just 16 electoral college votes (I think that count is right). Possibly the earlier poll numbers and reelection outlook was not nearly as good, and Nixon (being Nixon) wanted to hang on (as he saw it) by whatever means necessary. As Dean said (in the transcripts of the tapes), the first proposed dirty tricks plan was much more elaborate and also mostly illegal; look also into the Ellsberg break-in.
Thanks, the local libraries were of no help, I’d have to reserve it through some loan system and I’d have to wait weeks to months, and the local used bookstores are the kind you only go to if you want to find 50 copies each of the entire NYT bestseller list from the past 5 years.
Thanks, everyone, you guys have REALLY made things a lot clearer for me. I’ve got the link to Silent Coup bookmarked, All the President’s Men on my Netflix list, and Liddy’s book written down to look for next time I’m near a library.
PS. What I find ridiculous about the Clintons is that they’re about as innocent as OJ - everyone I know firmly believes that Bill was screwing around with Monica and lying about it (LOL, I remember being brushed off by my parents as a kid when I asked about why people wanted to impeach Clinton), and that both of them were involved in varying degrees of deeper, darker, and even less ethical things.
> The break in was an attempt to find out who was leaking bogus info about Nixon to the press from the DNC
How could someone in the DNC leak info about Nixon? Are you saying he was trying to find someone in his administration that was working for the DNC? How else would they know?
It is pretty well understood that the break-in was about finding dirt on the DNC, stuff we can do today without breaking the law. The coverup, as is so often the case with many scandals since, made matters worse for Nixon. You can argue that the retribution was vastly overblown, but you’re going to have a hard time convincing me that break-in was done for “good” reasons. It was illegal, ignoble, and morally suspect.
Why defend Nixon so? If you look at his record, he was a very liberal Republican, and if he was running for office today he would look a lot like RINO John McCain, and maybe to the left of even him. Need I remind you that the NEA and EPA as well as affirmative action got their start from Nixon?
bookmark
All the Presidents Men is a lying bunch of bs trash.
Read Silent Coup as mentioned by others. VERY eye-opening, and VERY well documented, etc. One thing that I recall that was interesting from the book is that Woodward worked in communications under an Admiral Moorer. (Records prove it - but neither will admit to it!)
Somewhere on my bookcase I have a more-recent article (well - early 2000’s I would guess - LOL) that had Moorer in trouble for selling/buying military hardware (helicopters, planes, etc.) that wasn’t demilled and/or through the proper channels. It sparked my interest in that he was quouted in the article as saying something like “It is unbelievable - ludicrious - that I would be involved in the sales of illegal military arms.....”.
That quote sounded real familiar and I went to the chapters in Silent Coup and it had a quote that went something like: “It is unbelievable - ludicrious - that I would be involved in undermining the Executive Office of the United States of America....” (As I recall - the military along with Haig were pissed at Nixon and Kissinger for doing all their secret negotiations, etc. and not keeping the military in the loop.)
Not sure of the exact quotes, but the two words describing it (something like “unbelievable” and “ludicrious”) were the same words he had used 25 years eariler!
Some of Nixon’s later books touched a very little bit on Watergate as I recall - not sure which one(s) though.
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