June 17, 2025, the recent 53rd anniversary of the Watergate break-in, should remind us of the scandal’s scurrilous aftermath. What was promised to be a new millennium of aggressive, yet punctilious, journalism turned out to be a continuation of the Washington Post‘s reckless, essentially untruthful, Watergate reporting, clearly biased in favor of Democrats.
While Republicans in the wake of Watergate vowed to be beyond reproach, like Caesar’s wife, they were indeed generally rectitudinous but yet continued the same stupidity that ruined the Nixon administration. Because neither side addressed these failures, they persist today.
We have written extensively about the Post‘s fraud during Watergate, but not enough about the Nixon Administration’s idiocy in dealing with what should have been nothing more than an embarrassing dustup.
While the FBI was diligently investigating the Watergate burglary and the Post was sleuthing (however conspiratorially with the DNC), the White House reacted by rigorously keeping itself in the dark. The occupants of the Oval Office assumed that someone within their associated group had done something wrong, but were afraid to pinpoint exactly what it was and who did it.
The White House inner circle could not have been more wrong-footed in its own deliberately restrained inquiry. For instance, it immediately assumed it should go into cover-up mode without knowing what it was covering up. It unwisely chose White House counsel John Dean to be its hub, even though Dean had no relevant experience, and any modest inquiry would have cast a suspicious eye toward him. To be fair, the entire group assumed from the outset that all involved must keep quiet, including among themselves.
One avenue of knowledge the White House, through Dean, shut off was G. Gordon Liddy, the burglary supervisor who, seemingly heroically, refused to talk for six years. But more harmful was the CRP lawyers’ decision not to provide legal representation for wiretap monitor Alfred Baldwin, III. In so doing, the reputedly savvy Republicans lost the opportunity to determine what he was listening to and what burglary team leader James McCord had said and done in Baldwin’s presence. So two key witnesses, who could have provided exculpatory information absolving higher officials, were lost to the Oval Office.
The Nixon Administration would have learned what Democrats later suppressed: that the project was aimed at listening to out-of-town Democrats talking to young ladies about their upcoming tawdry assignations. They would have gained clues that this may well have been a CIA operation run by infiltrating agents, the “retired” CIA agent James McCord working as his cover for the campaign (“CRP”), and White House consultant and “retired” CIA agent Howard Hunt.
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