Posted on 07/07/2007 11:06:40 AM PDT by j24601
WASHINGTON - Fred Thompson gained an image as a tough-minded investigative counsel for the Senate Watergate committee. Yet President Nixon and his top aides viewed the fellow Republican as a willing, if not too bright, ally, according to White House tapes.
Thompson, now preparing a bid for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination, won fame in 1973 for asking a committee witness the bombshell question that revealed Nixon had installed hidden listening devices and taping equipment in the Oval Office.
Those tapes show Thompson played a behind-the-scenes role that was very different from his public image three decades ago. He comes across as a partisan willing to cooperate with the Nixon White House's effort to discredit the committee's star witness.
It was Thompson who tipped off the White House that the Senate committee knew about the tapes. They eventually cinched Nixon's downfall in the scandal resulting from the break-in at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington and the subsequent White House cover-up.
Thompson, then 30, was appointed counsel by his political mentor, Tennessee Sen. Howard Baker, the top Republican on the Senate investigative committee. Thompson had been an assistant U.S. attorney in Nashville, Tenn., and had managed Baker's re-election campaign. Thompson later was a senator himself.
Nixon was disappointed with the selection of Thompson, whom he called "dumb as hell." The president did not think Thompson was skilled enough to interrogate unfriendly witnesses and would be outsmarted by the committee's Democratic counsel.
This assessment comes from audio tapes of White House conversations recently reviewed by The Associated Press at the National Archives in College Park, Md., and transcripts of those discussions that are published in "Abuse of Power: The New Watergate Tapes," by historian Stanley Kutler.
"Oh shit, that kid," Nixon said when told by his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, of Thompson's appointment on Feb. 22, 1973.
"Well, we're stuck with him," Haldeman said.
In a meeting later that day in the Old Executive Office Building, Baker assured Nixon that Thompson was up to the task. "He's tough. He's six feet five inches, a big mean fella," the senator told Nixon.
Publicly, Baker and Thompson presented themselves as dedicated to uncovering the truth. But Baker had secret meetings and conversations with Nixon and his top aides, while Thompson worked cooperatively with the White House and accepted coaching from Nixon's lawyer, J. Fred Buzhardt, the tapes and transcripts show.
"We've got a pretty good rapport with Fred Thompson," Buzhardt told Nixon in an Oval Office meeting on June 6, 1973. The meeting included a discussion of former White House counsel John Dean's upcoming testimony before the committee.
Dean, the committee's star witness, had agreed to tell what he knew about the break-in and cover-up if he was granted immunity against anything incriminating he might say.
Nixon expressed concern that Thompson was not "very smart."
"Not extremely so," Buzhardt agreed.
"But he's friendly," Nixon said.
"But he's friendly," Buzhardt agreed. "We are hoping, though, to work with Thompson and prepare him, if Dean does appear next week, to do a very thorough cross-examination."
Five days later, Buzhardt reported to Nixon that he had primed Thompson for the Dean cross-examination.
"I found Thompson most cooperative, feeling more Republican every day," Buzhardt said. "Uh, perfectly prepared to assist in really doing a cross-examination."
Later in the same conversation, Buzhardt said Thompson was "willing to go, you know, pretty much the distance now. And he said he realized his responsibility was going to have be as a Republican increasingly."
Thompson, who declined comment for this story, described himself in his book, "At That Point in Time," published in 1975, as a Nixon administration "loyalist" who struggled with his role as minority counsel. "I would try to walk a fine line between a good-faith pursuit of the investigation and a good-faith attempt to insure balance and fairness," Thompson wrote.
When Dean began testifying on June 25, he implicated Nixon in the break-in and cover-up. But his testimony had little legal impact because it was his word against the president's.
During Dean's testimony, Baker asked the question that became the embodiment of the Watergate scandal: "What did the president know and when did he know it?" Thompson is sometimes credited with supplying the question to Baker.
The question was widely perceived at the time as an example of Baker's willingness to press for truth at the expense of his party's leader. Historian Kutler, however, said he believes that in the context of Dean's testimony, the question was Baker's attempt to point out that the evidence hinged on one witness's word.
It was not until three weeks later — after the disclosure of the existence of tape recordings that might either corroborate or disprove Dean's testimony — that Baker's question took on new meaning, Kutler said.
At a hearing on July 16, Thompson asked former White House aide Alexander Butterfield: "Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president?"
Butterfield's confirmation of the recordings set off a cascade of events that led to Nixon's resignation 13 months later.
The question made Thompson instantly famous. His political Web site — http://www.imwithfred.com — prominently notes: "Friends in Tennessee still recall seeing the boy they'd grown up with on TV, sitting at the Senate hearing-room dais. He gained national attention for leading the line of inquiry that revealed the audio-taping system in the White House Oval Office."
What rarely is mentioned is that Thompson knew the answer to the question before he asked it. Investigators for the committee had gotten the information out of Butterfield during hours of behind-the-scenes questioning three days earlier, on July 13.
Thompson was not present, but a Republican investigator immediately tracked him down at the Carroll Arms Hotel bar where he was meeting with a reporter. Thompson called Buzhardt over the weekend to tip off the White House that the committee knew about the tapes.
"Legalisms aside, it was inconceivable to me that the White House could withhold the tapes once their existence was made known. I believed it would be in everyone's interest if the White House realized, before making any public statements, the probable position of both the majority and the minority of the Watergate committee," Thompson wrote in his book.
Scott Armstrong, a Democratic investigator for the committee who was part of the Butterfield questioning, said he was outraged by Thompson's tip-off.
"When the prosecutor discovers the smoking the gun, he's going to be shocked to find that the deputy prosecutor called the defendant and said, 'You'd better get rid of that gun,'" Armstrong said in an interview.
The committee chairman, Sen. Sam Ervin, D-N.C., had agreed to allow Thompson to question Butterfield first at the July 16 hearing as a show of bipartisanship because a GOP investigator had elicited the initial information from Butterfield.
"Fred (Thompson) and Baker carried water for the White House, but I have to give them credit — they were watching out for their interests, too," Kutler said. "They weren't going to mindlessly go down the tubes for this guy."
Even better, he was a retreat and defeta Ron Paul supporter.
It looks like the White Witch’s (Chron. of Narnia) minions are terribly afraid of Thompson..
What are you, Nixon’s love child, anyway? Like I said - wage and price controls, where in the Constitution does the President or the Congress have an expressed power to do that? No where. Dirty tricks? Yep, he did them and so did other politicos, and yes he got caught while in office. Watergate? McGovern lost the election by a landslide (23% and all but one state). Mao? Mao was a commie rat-bastard mass murderer with the blood of millions on his hands, and yep Nixon drove a wedge between Russia and China - by selling out the Chinese people, who still have the commie rat-bastards in power. Commie propaganda my royal Irish posterior!
Years ago, I never thought so little of the MSM. It wasn’t that it was different, but I wasn’t paying enough attention. It’s just silly how agenda-driven they are.
I would actually take them a bit more serious if they weren’t so one-sided.
Vague conversations between people who were eventually shown to be “not too bright” themselves are now coming out more than 30 years later in an attempt to discredit a man whose not even announced a Presidential bit yet? Where’s the news in this? Purely a BS hit piece if ever there was one (and full of innuendo and distortions no doubt).
“The newbie troll has been banned”
Howard Dean does this every Saturday.
Might be justified, I just don’t see the point. We can discuss an interesting article - we all sit at the big people table, right?
But then again, I’ve never really been into the whole cat photo thing, so maybe I’m missing the fun of zotting.
Yes, we will be seeing far more of them.
Keep in mind, those elitist pie holes associated with the NYTimes think anyone with a southern drawl is stupid.
IATZ ping
nm, too late
Learn a bit about Scott Armstrong (waste-of-skin) and you will understand this is just an opinion hit piece
.
Boy, this is weak. BTW, how about Hitlery’s college commencement speach. Wasn’t it just swell!!
It is kind of interesting, but I had a chance to talk to John Erlichman in 1975 for about an hour (by myself). I was on a field course in Taos New Mexico at the SMU Research Facility. This was right after he had been convicted, but he was out on appeal. The thing that impressed me most about what he said that happened was that he said that they had over-reacted almost every time to what the MSM was saying. They felt that they were righteous in what they were doing, but that they absolutely distrusted the press (Like Now!) Sometimes we can give the MSM too much credit. When they pass BS, we assume that no one can see it but us. But maybe most of the people in this country are smarter than we give them credit for. I suspect if we just allow the media to make fools of themselves, they will rush to do so.....
What???
Claptrap.
I'm not even going to read it
ZOT
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