The Death Toll of Watergate

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

18 November 12

epublicans are fond of comparing their scandal-mongering - like the current hype over the terrorist assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya - with genuine scandals, like Watergate, which sank Richard Nixon's second term, and Iran-Contra, which marred Ronald Reagan's last two years in office. The GOP's false equivalence represents both an effort to puff up their latest accusations against Democrats and an attempt to minimize the misconduct of those two Republican presidents. For instance, one favorite GOP comment about Benghazi is: "No one died at Watergate. Four brave Americans died in Benghazi."

This apples-and-oranges sophistry misses the point that Watergate and Iran-Contra were complex conspiracies that required intensive investigations to unravel their secrets (many of which remain hidden or in dispute to this day) while the Benghazi affair boils down to an easily resolved question as to why the U.S. intelligence community withheld some of the details in the immediate aftermath of the attack last Sept. 11.

The answers seem to be that the Benghazi consulate had evolved into a CIA base for secret operations and that U.S. intelligence didn't want to tip off the attack's perpetrators regarding how much the agency knew about their identities. So, the word "extremists" replaced specific groups and the CIA affiliation of two slain Americans was withheld.

By contrast, the history of Watergate is still substantially misunderstood even by supposed experts.
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LBJ’s ‘X’ File on Nixon’s ‘Treason’

National security adviser Walt Rostow shows
President Lyndon Johnson a model of a battle
near Khe Sanh in Vietnam.
(National Archives Photo)

March 3, 2012

 

Special Report: In the dusty files of Lyndon Johnson’s presidential library in Austin, Texas, once secret documents and audiotapes tell a dark and tragic story of how Richard Nixon’s team secured the White House in 1968 by sabotaging peace talks that might have ended the Vietnam War four years earlier, Robert Parry reports.


By Robert Parry
On May 14, 1973, Walt W. Rostow, who had been national security adviser during some of the darkest days of the Vietnam War, typed a three-page “memorandum for the record” summarizing a secret file that his former boss, President Lyndon Johnson, had amassed on what may have been Richard Nixon’s dirtiest trick, the sabotaging of Vietnam peace talks to win the 1968 election.

Rostow reflected, too, on what effect LBJ’s public silence may have had on the then-unfolding Watergate scandal. As Rostow composed his memo in spring 1973, President Nixon’s Watergate cover-up was unraveling. Just two weeks earlier, Nixon had fired White House counsel John Dean and accepted the resignations of two top aides, H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman.

Three days after Rostow wrote the memo, the Senate Watergate hearings opened as the U.S. government lurched toward a constitutional crisis. Yet, as he typed, Rostow had a unique perspective on the worsening scandal. He understood the subterranean background to Nixon’s political espionage operations.

Those secret activities surfaced with the arrest of the Watergate burglars in June 1972, but they had begun much earlier. In his memo for the record, Rostow expressed regret that he and other top Johnson aides had chosen – for what they had deemed “the good of the country” – to keep quiet about Nixon’s Vietnam peace-talk sabotage, which Johnson had privately labeled “treason.”  READ MORE

How the Right's Smear Machine Started

Richard Nixon, the 37th President of the United States

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

09 March 12

mericans sometimes wonder how the nation’s political process got so unspeakably nasty with vitriol pouring forth especially from right-wing voices like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Michael Savage, to name just a few. Yet, whenever called on this ugliness, conservatives insist that they are the real victims, picked on by the Left.

This destructive and whiny dynamic has existed at least since the late 1960s when angry passions spilled over from the Vietnam War and grew worse after Richard Nixon exploited Democratic dissension on the war to win the White House in 1968 – and then continued the war for another four nasty years.

As president, Nixon also responded to the fury splintering American society with wedge issues, appealing to the "silent majority" and denouncing anti-war protesters as "bums." He rode that divisive formula to a landslide victory in November 1972 but soon ensnared himself in the Watergate political spying scandal that drove him from office in August 1974.

Out of all that anger emerged an American Right that believed, as an article of faith, that the Democrats and the "liberal press" had turned Nixon’s run-of-the-mill indiscretions in Watergate into a constitutional crisis to undo Nixon’s overwhelming electoral mandate of 1972.

So, over the next two decades – with Nixon in the background egging on Republican politicians – the Right built an attack machine that was designed to defend against "another Watergate" but also was available to destroy the "liberal" enemy.   READ MORE