WATERGATE: Nixon Warned Grand Jury on Pentagon Spy Ring

Newly unsealed grand jury testimony by ex-President Richard Nixon shows he warned prosecutors and grand jurors not to probe an episode from 1971, when he discovered that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been spying on him and national security adviser Henry Kissinger.

“Don’t open that can of worms,” Nixon told his interrogators in June 1975, when he spent roughly eleven hours over two days’ time fielding – and sometimes deflecting – questions put to him by lawyers for the Watergate Special Prosecution Force and two grand jurors flown in from Washington.

And he confided what his predecessor in the Oval Office, Lyndon B. Johnson, lamented during their closed-door meeting at the White House in December 1968, during the transition between their administrations. “He told me, very emotionally, that the greatest mistake he made was after his election in his own right in ’64, in not firing all of the people or virtually all of the people whom he had inherited from the [Kennedy] administration and getting his own people in.”

The Archives also unsealed an undated recording from the spring of 1973 by Haldeman aide Gordon Strachan. Talking with fellow Haldeman staffer Lawrence Higby, Strachan can be heard discussing the role of White House Counsel John Dean in the disbursement of “hush money” to the men arrested at Watergate. The conduits Dean used included Strachan and Nixon campaign aide Fred LaRue. “I took 40 [thousand] to LaRue, because Dean told me to take 40 [thousand] to LaRue,” Strachan said. “It would be, you know, the same night that Dean told me to do it.”

“Silent Coup” by Colodny and Gettlin. There’s an online version in a link up the thread.

The authors, who identified themselves as political liberals, had intended to create a “harmony of the Watergate memoirs”.

They took all of the accounts of Watergate and sought to find the common thread that ran through them all. They asked John Dean to assist them.

There’s a lot of fascinating background details that had been obscured by the larger story, details like the Joint Chief’s spy inside the White House.

Another was the prostitution ring that had been operating from a desk inside the DNC Watergate offices, the very office that the Watergate burglars entered. And the very desk they were tasked with burglarizing.

The authors began noticing problems with Dean’s account of Watergate, where Dean differed from the other accounts. When they questioned Dean about it he rebuffed them.

Eventually they were drawn to the conclusion that the Watergate break in had been orchestrated solely by John Dean for his own purposes.

Dean’s hot blonde wife Mo had a connection to that desk in the DNC headquarters. When she began dating Dean she had been working as a call girl and her picture and contact info were in an ‘escort service’ book in that desk.

Her picture & info had been removed when she hooked up with Dean, but sometime later it was replaced as a sort of prank. When Mo began to get calls again Dean wanted to put an end to it so he devised a plan to retrieve the book. He told the burglars that Nixon had something for them to do and off they went.


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Thanks Hunton Peck. Newly unsealed grand jury testimony by ex-President Richard Nixon shows he warned prosecutors and grand jurors not to probe an episode from 1971, when he discovered that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been spying on him and national security adviser Henry Kissinger. "Don't open that can of worms," Nixon told his interrogators in June 1975... fielding -- and sometimes deflecting -- questions put to him by lawyers for the Watergate Special Prosecution Force and two grand jurors... And he confided what his predecessor in the Oval Office, Lyndon B. Johnson, lamented during their closed-door meeting at the White House in December 1968, during the transition between their administrations. "He told me, very emotionally, that the greatest mistake he made was after his election in his own right in '64, in not firing all of the people or virtually all of the people whom he had inherited from the [Kennedy] administration and getting his own people in." ...an undated recording from the spring of 1973 by Haldeman aide Gordon Strachan. Talking with fellow Haldeman staffer Lawrence Higby, Strachan can be heard discussing the role of White House Counsel John Dean in the disbursement of "hush money" to the men arrested at Watergate. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

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