Fibbing on Paper

Twain was partially correct. A good memory is not required when you lie in print. You can always refresh your memory when you are challenged decades later.

Let me say that most liars don’t bother me in my personal life. Salesmen lie all of the time, but one can simply walk away. Lawyers, doctors, auto mechanics, contractors lie for profit, but they, too, can be avoided. Working people are notorious liars trying to increase their incomes by doing less. People lie to make themselves look important when they feel inferior. People lie to avoid hurting another person’s feeling. Lying is part of human nature; trying to change it is a waste of time. It is the institutional lie and the liars who tell them that should be shunned because their lies are conceived to hurt their enemies but end up hurting everybody.

Back when Watergate was the story to end all stories, I knew that the people at the Washington Post were a pack of liars. It wasn’t because I was on President Nixon’s side, it was because the story never rang true. Even the New York Times initially told the WaPo to let it go. Had I not had such a low opinion of the Washington Post, and the press in general, I still saw that Nixon did nothing more than engage in political dirty tricks. Now, almost four decades later, I ask myself why I saw the truth so clearly while so many others were suckered by liberal liars?

Does anyone else remember the Left’s indignation when they lamented “Nixon lied”? That always made me laugh. The only people protected by a license to lie accusing a politician of lying. The media monopoly on disseminating news and information might be gone, but the press’ monopoly on lying is as strong as ever.

According to the Left, not only did Nixon lie he threatened to uproot the foundations of all that was decent and good. George “Cherry Tree” Washington was heard weeping in heaven because President Nixon told a lie. Never mind that FDR was the biggest god(*)(*)(*)(*)ed liar to ever sit in the White House until Clinton and Hussein moved in, liberals swore that Nixon’s coverup of a third rate break in would bring down the civilized world if he wasn’t stopped. In case you missed it, Democrats/Socialists have been lying through their teeth since FDR and the civilized world is truly on the verge of collapsing thanks to their lies.

NOTE: Bill Clinton lied under oath; a thing no other president ever did. Also note that nobody at the Washington Post ever swore to tell the truth about anything. Everybody was supposed to believe them because they were journalists and journalists never lie.

Parenthetically, propaganda television runs on lawyer shows, cop shows, and doctor shows. There was a time when teacher shows and newspaper shows were mainstays in the propaganda mix. It is telling that teacher and journalist shows have all but disappeared along with respect for those professions in real life.

The only thing that keeps the press alive is a small number of individuals who report and analyze truthfully. Without their contribution there would be no justification for the press’ First Amendment protection. The institution itself is corrupt to the core.

Finally, not one liberal journalist makes it onto any list of journalists and commentators who can be trusted ethically and intellectually. I won’t list the small handful who do qualify because I will surely forget to include one or two good ones. Instead, I give you just one:

The Unraveling Myth of Watergate
Pat Buchanan
May 25, 2012

It was, they said, the crime of the century.

An attempted coup d'etat by Richard Nixon, stopped by two intrepid young reporters from The Washington Post and their dashing and heroic editor.

The 1976 movie, "All the President's Men," retold the story with Robert Redford as Bob Woodward, Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein and Jason Robards in his Oscar-winning role as Ben Bradlee. What did Bradlee really think of Watergate?

In a taped interview in 1990, revealed now in "Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee," Bradlee himself dynamites the myth:

"Watergate ... (has) achieved a place in history ... that it really doesn't deserve. ... The crime itself was really not a great deal. Had it not been for the Nixon resignation, it really would have been a blip in history."

"The Iran-Contra hearing was a much more significant violation of the democratic ethic than anything in Watergate," said Bradlee.

Yet when the Iran-Contra scandal hit the Reagan White House, Bradlee chortled, "We haven't had this much fun since Watergate."

All fun and games at the Post. Yet with Nixon's fall came the fall of South Vietnam, thousands executed, hundreds of thousands of boat people struggling in the South China Sea and a holocaust in Cambodia.

Still, what is most arresting about "Yours in Truth" is the panic that gripped Bob Woodward when Jeff Himmelman, the author and a protégé of Woodward, revealed to him the contents of the Bradlee tapes.

Speaking of "All the President's Men," Bradlee had said, "I have a little problem with Deep Throat," Woodward's famous source, played in the movie by Hal Holbrooke, later revealed to be Mark Felt of the FBI.

Bradlee was deeply skeptical of the Woodward-Felt signals code and all those secret meetings. He told interviewer Barbara Feinman:

"Did that potted palm thing ever happen? ... And meeting in some garage. One meeting in the garage. Fifty meetings in the garage ... there's a residual fear in my soul that that isn't quite straight."

Bradlee spoke about that fear gnawing at him: "I just find the flower in the window difficult to believe and the garage scenes. ...

"If they could prove that Deep Throat never existed ... that would be a devastating blow to Woodward and to the Post. ... It would be devastating, devastating."

When Himmelman showed him the transcript, Woodward "was visibly shaken" and repeated Bradlee's line -- "there's a residual fear in my soul that that isn't quite straight" -- 15 times in 20 minutes.

Woodward tried to get Bradlee to retract. He told Himmelman not to include the statements in his book. He pleaded. He threatened. He failed.

That Woodward became so alarmed and agitated that Bradlee's bullhockey detector had gone off over the dramatized version of "All the President's Men" suggests a fear in more than just one soul here.

A second revelation of Himmelman's is more startling.

During Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein sought to breach the secrecy of the grand jury. The Post lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, had to go to see Judge John Sirica to prevent their being charged with jury tampering.

No breach had occurred, we were assured.

We were deceived.

According to Himmelman, not only did Bernstein try to breach the grand jury, he succeeded. One juror, a woman identified as "Z," had collaborated. Notes of Bernstein's interviews with Z were found in Bradlee's files.

Writes Himmelman: "Carl and Bob, with Ben's explicit permission, lured a grand juror over the line of illegality ..."

This means that either Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee lied to Williams about breaching the grand jury, or the legendary lawyer lied to Sirica, or Sirica was told the truth but let it go, as all were engaged in the same noble cause -- bringing down Nixon.

Who was that grand juror? Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee know, but none is talking and no one is asking. The cover-up continues.

Had one of Nixon's men, with his approval, breached the secrecy of the Watergate grand jury, and lied abut it, that aide would have gone to prison and that would have been an article of impeachment.

Conduct that sent Nixon men to the penitentiary got the Post's men a stern admonition. Welcome to Washington, circa 1972.

With the 40th anniversary of the break-in coming up this June, Himmelman's book, well-written and revelatory of the temper of that time, will receive a wider reading.

As will Max Holland's "Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat," out this spring and the definitive book on why J. Edgar Hoover's deputy betrayed his bureau and sought to destroy the honorable man who ran it, L. Patrick Gray.

With Bernstein's primary source spilling grand jury secrets, and Mark Felt leaking details of the FBI investigation to Woodward, both of the primary sources on which the Washington Post's Pulitzer depended were engaged in criminal misconduct.

At Kay Graham's Post, the end justified the means.

Redford is now backing a new documentary, "All the President's Men Revisited." The Sundance Kid has his work cut out for him.

http://townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/2012/05/25/the_unraveling_myth_of_watergate

 

It keeps getting better. Liberals have to be reeling to see the reputations of both Senator Joseph McCarthy and President Richard Nixon rehabilitated after all these years. In a sense the fun has gone out of telling liberals President Nixon wasn’t a bad guy. Saying anything nice about Nixon used to be a surefire way to cause group apoplexy among Nixon-haters.

The world knows what the Washington Post and Hollywood told everyone about Nixon, now, the world is learning about the people at the WaPo. Those characters come off a lot worse than Nixon.

Here’s another bunch of details younger Americans would never hear about if the media monopoly was still in place. It’s in two parts:

Nixon Emerges a Victor in ‘War on History’ Waged in the Wake of Watergate
By CONRAD BLACK, Special to the Sun | June 14, 2012

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (Woodstein for our purposes) now claim, in a Washington Post piece, that President Nixon was “far worse than we thought,” and accuse him of conducting five “wars”: against the anti-war movement, on the media, against the Democrats, on justice, and on history. In evaluating such a volcanic farrago of pent-up charges, the facts must be arrayed in three tiers: the facts of Woodstein’s activities and revelations; the facts of the Watergate case and related controversies; and the importance of Watergate in an appreciation of the Nixon record.

Woodstein were showered with the prizes and awards the media narcissistically pour on one another to deafening collective self-laudations, and became the pin-up idols of two whole generations of aggressively investigative journalists. Other media outlets were hotly pursuing and uncovering disturbing stories of campaign skulduggery, but the Washington Post, led by Woodstein, under the inspiration of editor Ben Bradlee, confected the Brobdingnagian fraud that Nixon was trying to perpetrate a virtual coup d’état by imposing an “imperial presidency” on the prostrate democracy of America.

Woodstein showed no great enterprise; they stumbled upon a senior official of the FBI angry that he had been passed over as successor to the deceased J. Edgar Hoover. Mark Felt — Deep Throat, as he became known to history — provided almost all of the Post’s investigative initiative in a squalid and envious attack on the nominated heir to Hoover, L. Patrick Gray. The reporters, who were effectively note-takers, and their editor parlayed it into an impeachment controversy, assisted by the uncharacteristic ineptitude of Nixon in dealing with what he would normally have recognized as a potentially serious problem.

(Here’s an indication of the bigotry of the Woodstein school: When Felt was charged by the Carter administration with criminal violation of the privacy of the Weather Underground, Nixon insisted on speaking in his defense at the trial even though he suspected Felt was Deep Throat, and persuaded incoming President Reagan to pardon Felt after he had been convicted — and yet neither Felt in his memoirs, nor Woodstein ever, nor the Left generally, even recognized Nixon’s generous actions. That would have been inconvenient to the demonizing narrative.)

The facts of Watergate have been wildly exaggerated. Neither in financing techniques nor in the gamesmanship with the other side was the Republican campaign of 1972 particularly unusual. And it was puritanical compared with what appears to have been the outright theft of the 1960 election for Kennedy over Nixon by Chicago’s Mayor Daley and Lyndon Johnson. And perhaps the all-time nadir in American presidential-election ethics was achieved in 1968, when Lyndon Johnson tried to salvage the election for his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, with a completely imaginary claim of a peace breakthrough in the Vietnam talks a few days before the election. LBJ announced an enhanced bombing halt and more intensive talks in which the Viet Cong and the Saigon government would be “free to participate” (i.e., Saigon declined to attend since there had been no breakthrough).

In Watergate, Nixon knew nothing of the break-in, nor had he known anything of the earlier break-in at the office of Dr. Fielding, the psychotherapist of the thief and publisher of the Pentagon papers, Daniel Ellsberg. These papers reflected badly on Kennedy and Johnson, but had nothing to do with Nixon, and his opposition to their publication was based on the notion that secret government documents should not be stolen and published when national security is involved.

The congressional treatment of Nixon was an unmitigated outrage. The president’s counsel, John Dean, a slippery weasel who was up to his eyebrows in unauthorized illegal practices, made a plea-bargain deal and then gave perjured evidence against his own client, which would have been completely inadmissible in a law court. The House Judiciary Committee was a mockery. Its counsel, John Doar, a foaming-at-the-mouth partisan on all fours with Bradlee-Woodstein, produced five counts of impeachment, of which four were farcical on a Kafkaesque scale: Articles 2 to 5 of the impeachment alleged that Nixon “endeavored” to misuse the IRS (not that he had actually done so) and had violated his oath of office and the rights of other citizens. (By this last criterion, historically guilty parties would have been numerous and distinguished, including FDR, the Kennedys, and LBJ.) Article 3 impeached him for resisting Congress’s right to 147 tapes; presto, Nixon had no right to try in court to retain tapes of private conversations.

Even that shameful court of rabid House-committee kangaroos voted down the last two counts: that Nixon had usurped Congress’s power to declare war by bombing Cambodia and that he had cheated on his tax returns and improperly charged the government for improvements to his home. (Regarding the latter count: The IRS had revoked Nixon’s tax credit for his vice-presidential papers — an arrangement similar to others that had been made by national officeholders — but refused to return the papers. This was an outright theft, and it required many years to have it undone by the courts. And Nixon eventually secured a court order requiring the government to remove from his property in California the vast eyesore of security apparatus and staff quarters that middle-level officials had installed there.)

The impeachment count worthy of consideration was the charge that Nixon had “made it his policy” and acted “directly and personally through his close subordinates . . . to delay, impede, obstruct, . . . cover up, protect, and conceal,” etc. Most of this was sanctimonious claptrap, and the so-called smoking gun consisted of his allowing subordinates to ask the director and deputy director of the CIA to ask the FBI not to investigate Watergate because it might back into national-security matters. The two officials (Richard Helms and Vernon Walters) said they would follow a presidential order but would otherwise not interfere, and Nixon declined to take it further. This was not an offense, though the idea should never have been considered.

Nixon always claimed he approved payment for normal expenses, the defendants’ families, and legal fees, not for altered testimony, and the tapes are ambiguous. He would probably have won in a fair trial, but not after prosecutors had done an elephant walk through the book of practice and rolled over most of his staff on false plea bargains with Bradlee-Woodstein shrieking from the rooftops of the nation that Nixon had cloven feet and wore horns. There is also the whole question of the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination raised by the tapes; and Nixon had had a conservative view of the national-security privilege of the president throughout his public career, and that issue remains a constitutional gray area. But a lynching was in progress and Nixon had no exercisable rights.

This raises the third assessment of Watergate: its place in the Nixon presidential record. When Nixon entered office in 1969, the country was torn by assassinations and race and anti-war riots, and President Johnson could scarcely visit any part of the country without being beset by demonstrations. Johnson had 550,000 draftees in Vietnam on a flimsy legal pretext, and 200 to 400 were returning in body bags every week. Hanoi would give no incentive at all for an American withdrawal from Vietnam. Johnson offered joint withdrawal of all foreign forces from the South in 1966. Hanoi could have taken this and returned six months after the American departure, but insisted on defeating the United States directly.

Nixon won that war. Nixon had extracted American forces, and the South Vietnamese defeated the North and Viet Cong in the great battle of April and May 1972 with no American ground support, but with heavy air assistance. Nixon sent the peace agreement to the Senate for ratification, though he did not have to constitutionally, to ensure Democratic support for a return to bombing the North Vietnamese when they violated the peace agreement.

Watergate enabled the Democrats to cut off all aid to South Vietnam and ensure American defeat in a war their party entered and had effectively lost, before Nixon salvaged a non-Communist South Vietnam while effecting a complete American withdrawal. They are complicit in the murder of millions of Indochinese, from the Killing Fields of Cambodia to the Boat People of the South China Sea.

 

PART TWO:

The assassinations and the endless race and anti-war riots ended. Nixon opened relations with China, negotiated and signed the greatest arms-control agreement in world history with the USSR, began a Middle East peace process, and ended segregation (thus sparing the country the nightmare of court-ordered race-based school busing, a measure that was opposed by almost all students and parents). He ended the draft, reduced the crime rate, and founded the Environmental Protection Agency. He proposed non-coercive universal health care and welfare, tax, and campaign-finance reform. Nixon’s full term was one of the most successful in U.S. history, which is why he was re-elected by the largest plurality in the country’s history (18 million).

The Watergate affair was sleazy and discreditable, but Nixon was an unusually talented and successful president. The war on history has been conducted by his enemies. There have been indications before of Woodward’s desperation to conserve his status as a dragon-slayer, in particular his outright invention of a conversation with a comatose and heavily guarded William Casey on his hospital deathbed, confessing guilt in the spurious Iran-Contra affair. In sum, Bradlee-Woodstein bloodlessly assassinated the president, routinized the criminalization of policy and partisan differences, grievously wounded the institution of the presidency, and enjoyed and profited from doing so.

— Conrad Black is the author of “Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom,” “Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full,” and, just released, “A Matter of Principle.” He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com. From National Review.

http://www.nysun.com/national/nixon-emerges-a-victor-in-war-on-history-waged/87865/

 

Great thread!

I don't trust the establishment view of Watergate.

How about the controversial Silent Coup?

 

To Anansi the Spider: You’re a man of nice judgement.

 

Interesting article about Mark Felt: The deeper truth about Deep Throat

Was Mark Felt's motivation revenge for not being chosen head of the FBI? Did he use the Post to exact revenge?

 

To Anansi the Spider: Great article. Thanks for sending it over.

This excerpt grabbed me:

Although accurate in what it says about journalism’s place in a democracy, I’ve always believed that a free press should be antagonistic to government —— all government. If it is not there is no legitimate reason to have a free press. Notice that the WaPo and the people who brought down Nixon were after him not government. If truth be told they were champions of big government controlled by Democrats. I rest my case on one observation: The characters the media glorifies would be homeless or in prison when a “free press” does its job.

Ultimately, America is not a democracy although there are forces at work trying to turn it into one. Personally, I despise democracy as did the Founding Fathers. If nothing else democracy is always going towards something worse —— never toward individual liberties, and never, never, never, towards the limited form of government the Founders set in motion.

Thanks again.

 

What I remember most about the Nixon years was inflation, price controls, and war protests.

Except for abuse of power and keeping the war going for political advantage and a contempt for the American people, he was one hell of a prez.