Tag: watergate

Watergate’s Continuing Legacy: Dishonest Media and Clueless Republicans

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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The Truth About Watergate

Last week, Bill Murray was on the Joe Rogan Experience. Their conversation eventually wended to Murray’s departed friend and Saturday Night Live co-star John Belushi. Murray discussed Bob Woodward’s book about Belushi — Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi — and said it was a tsunami of fabrications. Murray even posited that since Bob Woodward’s journalism played an integral role in the demise of the Richard Nixon administration, it’s entirely possible that unseen forces were at work to depose Nixon.

I wrote a book about Watergate — The Truth About Watergate: A Tale of Extraordinary Lies and Liars — in which I demonstrate that the Tom Brady of journalism, Bob Woodward, is an unabashed liar and ethical eunuch. If he were Pinocchio, his nose would have a length that rivaled the elevation of the Chrysler Building.

Woodward was born in 1943, and he came of age in Wheaton, Illinois, a conservative, prosperous, and pious enclave on the outskirts of Chicago. Wheaton was a W.A.S.P. Xanadu: 94 percent of its denizens were white and Protestant churches were generously sprinkled throughout the hamlet. Republicans also outnumbered Democrats by a margin of four to one. Woodward’s father was a talented trial lawyer, who would be awarded a county circuit judgeship.

Outwardly, Woodward grew up in an idyllic environment. “Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril,” Oscar Wilde said of art, and Wilde’s statement was equally applicable to the Woodward household: His mother had an affair with a Sears’ executive, which ruptured the family. Twelve-year-old Woodward was the eldest of three siblings when his father was awarded custody of the three children. His father remarried a divorcee who had three children, and the couple eventually had a daughter. So the Woodward household mutated from Father Knows Best into The Brady Bunch. 

Woodward has depicted himself as an outsider of sorts throughout his high school years. But he was elected class president during his sophomore year, and he was one of four commencement speakers for his graduating class. He followed in the conservative wake of his father, and his commencement speech was gleaned from The Conscience of a Conservative, a book written by ultra conservative Barry Goldwater.

After Woodward graduated from Wheaton Community High School, he skipped into Yale University on a Navy R.O.T.C. scholarship. He doubled down on his dedication to the status quo when he entered Book and Snake, one of Yale’s secret societies. At Yale, Woodward majored in English and history. A Yale history professor described his conservative bent as “crypto-fascist.” 

Though Woodward eschewed the peace, love, and brown rice of the 1960s, he revealed in an interview after his celebrity that he had become disenchanted with the Vietnam War and thought of seeking sanctuary in Canada. But Woodward’s recollections about his collegiate misgivings on Vietnam diverge from the memories of his high school sweetheart and first wife: When the authors of Silent Coup inquired if Woodward had ever talked about evading his R.O.T.C. commitment to the Navy in Canada, she responded with a resounding, “Heavens no!” She also depicted him as “ruthless” and “extremely ambitious.”

Following Woodward’s graduation from Yale, his R.O.T.C. scholarship mandated a six-year hitch in the Navy — four years of active duty and two years in the naval reserve. He was a communications officer who had a “top-secret crypto” security clearance when he served on the USS Wright and then the USS Fox.

After his four-year tenure in the Navy, he was assigned to the Pentagon, where he served a fifth year of active duty, working for the Chief of Naval Operations. His responsibilities included briefing Alexander Haig. The official Watergate narrative, sanctified by the government, ablates Woodward briefing Haig at the White House in 1969 and 1970. And Woodward’s Big Lie throughout Watergate was that he didn’t meet Alexander Haig until 1973. But his Big Lie is trumped by three sources who maintain that he had, indeed, briefed Haig: The Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Thomas Moorer, Nixon’s Secretary of Defense, and also an aide to the Secretary of Defense. Woodward’s Big Lie has seismic implications, which are discussed in The Truth About Watergate.

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Would Liberals Have Cheered Nixon’s Resignation Fifty Years Ago If They Knew The CIA Was Behind It?

Fifty years ago, on August 9, 1974, Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace on the threshold of impeachment as a result of the Watergate scandal.

Two years earlier, five men, including a salaried security coordinator for President Nixon’s re-election committee, were arrested for breaking into and illegally wiretapping the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters in the Washington, D.C., Watergate Hotel.

Later that year, reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of The Washington Post discovered a higher-echelon conspiracy surrounding the incident and then published a book, All the President’s Men, that established them as heroes for having uncovered the corruption in the Nixon administration, which supposedly helped to restore the rule of law to government.

Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting prompted establishment of a Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (the “Watergate Committee”), headed by Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC), which garnered testimony from, among others, former White House Legal Counsel John Dean.

He testified that the Watergate break-in had been approved by former Attorney General John Mitchell with the knowledge of White House advisers John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, and that President Nixon had been aware of the cover-up and tried to order the FBI to halt the investigation.

To this day, most history textbooks repeat the official story about Watergate in which Nixon and his staffers are the villains, and Woodward and Bernstein and the Senate Committee, are the heroes.

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Watergate at 50: Revelations From Newly Declassified Evidence

“The one duty we owe to history,” said Oscar Wilde, “is to rewrite it.” By this admirable standard, no non-fiction writer of the 20th century fulfilled his duty to history – to the record of our times – more fully, more brilliantly, than Jim Hougan.

When Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA was first published by Random House in November 1984 – more than a decade after the resignation and pardon of Richard Nixon – it presented such a large volume of new and revelatory information about a subject so widely considered exhausted that the book was greeted with the staggered astonishment typically reserved for apparitions.

“If even half of this is true,” wrote J. Anthony Lukas in the New York Times Book Review, “Secret Agenda will add an important new dimension to our understanding of Watergate.” Lukas’ was an important voice. A Pulitzer Prize-winner, he had covered Watergate for the New York Times Magazine and wrote Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years in 1976. This critically acclaimed book was the first comprehensive account of Watergate. “But,” Lukas added, “it may be months before reporters can sort through this material, check Mr. Hougan’s sources and decide which of these revelations is solid gold, which dross.”

Now, 40 years after Secret Agenda appeared, the verdict is in. While some of Hougan’s analytic conclusions have come under challenge – including by me, an avowed acolyte of the author – the wealth of new facts and documentation he presented has stood the test of time. Where once it seemed impossible to reckon with the contribution Secret Agenda made to Watergate, it is now impossible to reckon with Watergate, even after the release of thousands more tapes and documents, without reference to Hougan.

Introducing his findings, Hougan described Secret Agenda as “an attempt to correct the record … and to suggest avenues of further investigation.” Several authors over the ensuing decades, including me, took him up on that challenge, and a couple of epic lawsuits unfolded, with the result that the book’s central thrusts were only strengthened.

Reckoning with Secret Agenda is hardly an academic matter. If Hougan and the other Watergate revisionists are correct, then the scandal that toppled Richard Nixon from power was about much more than a third-rate burglary attempt, the wiretapping of the opposing party, or even a series of covert crimes ordered by a paranoid president. Secret Agenda and its progeny force us, instead, to conceive of Watergate as a Cold War-era power struggle between a duly elected president and the national security state, with Nixon as much a victim in the affair as he was a perpetrator. In a time when legions of Americans believe in the existence of a “deep state,” getting the history of Watergate right takes on new urgency.

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