“Well, who was the a**hole that did this?”
With the recent 40th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation in 1974 about a week ago, there have been a number of articles about Watergate in the media. That’s to be expected.
Predictably, there have also been more “hit piece” articles about Nixon in the media recently – like this one from MSNBC. That’s also to be expected. Nixon and the mainstream media hated each other. The media and the left still hate him with a passion even today, though he’s been dead over 20 years.
One of the typical allegations made by some in the media (and many leftists) is that Nixon ordered the Watergate break-in. It’s strongly implied – but not stated outright – in the MSNBC hit piece linked above.
That allegation has been known to be false for over 40 years. Indeed, proof of that fact is on the famous “smoking gun” tape that sealed Nixon’s fate when it became public on 5 August 1974.
Still, some on the left (like the author of the MSNBC hit piece above) still today refuse to admit the truth about that. They keep trotting out the old canard.
Don’t believe me? Well, decide for yourself. Here’s a link to a transcript of part of that 23 June 1972 conversation between Haldeman and Nixon – from the famous “smoking gun” tape itself.
That conversation clearly shows that Nixon had no clue who ordered the Watergate break-in. Indeed, the title of this article is a direct quote of Nixon’s question to Haldeman asking who had ordered the Watergate break-in. (Other sources give the quotation as “Who was the a**hole who ordered it?”, but after listening to audio from the tape personally I think this source seems more accurate.)
Still don’t believe me? Hell, here’s a link to the audio; listen for yourself. Pay particular attention to the tone of voice in Nixon’s question. It occurs around 4:14 or so in the linked audio.
It seems quite clear to me that the man was incredulous that someone had been so stupid. It also seems clear that he had no prior knowledge of the break-in. YMMV. (It likewise is manifestly obvious that Nixon approved the Watergate cover-up – but for 40+ years that has never been in dispute. It’s also a very different thing than ordering the break-in.)
Nixon had many faults. IMO, he was an unscrupulous bastard and a shameless liar. He clearly conspired with others to obstruct justice. He deserved his fate for attempting to be above the law, and for trying to use the machinery of the Federal government to pervert justice and cover up the Watergate break-in. He was damned lucky to escape prison.
But whatever Nixon’s faults, he was no one’s fool. He certainly wasn’t stupid enough to have ordered Watergate personally – and hard evidence indicates he didn’t. Yet there are some in the media who keep making that false claim.
Sheesh. You’d think that the press could quit lying about the man more than 20 years after his death. The simple truth about Watergate is damning enough.
Category: Historical, Liberals suck, Media
My Grandmother would agree. My spouse will always say that the cover-up is worse than the crime.
Nixon was surely nobody’s fool and he had his druthers. I was only ten when he resigned. It was sad, when I could understand it with my age.
I was 18 when he resigned. I can still clearly remember the TV address on that night. I was sitting on our living room floor and my father was on the couch.
In the middle of the address, I glanced back at my dad and tears were streaming down his face. The tough Irishman couldn’t believe that the president of his adopted country (which he fought for in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy) had come to this.
I also remember a lot of jerks who went to the same college I did who were so overjoyed that Nixon and Agnew had been forced to resign. I just couldn’t find any joy in what happened.
It was a very sad time for America and the rest of the 70s weren’t much better. We still had Carter to look forward to! Sheesh!
Ditto!
Hondo…Thank you. From your article I posit the following, “Nixon had many faults. IMO, he was an unscrupulous bastard and a shameless liar. He clearly conspired with others to obstruct justice. He deserved his fate for attempting to be above the law, and for trying to use the machinery of the Federal government to pervert justice and cover up the Watergate break-in.” All true.
However he sounds like a light weight compared to Obama and his posse. Think about the IRS, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, you name it scandals. Obama, Kerry, Clinton and Holder are all of the same ilk as Nixon in those respects, except I believe the current regime has no shame and no love for America at all. Just MHO.
Hell, Obama has been caught in one bold faced lie after another and it just does not matter. He never broke a sweat telling us day after day, “if you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan.” I just can’t believe what this country has come to. It is so depressing.
MustangCryppie…I feel ya. I am depressed about the country too. I can’t wait for 2016 but at the same time, unless the Republicans get their thumb out of their asses and start finding and vetting a good, solid candidate, we could see as bead or worse than Obama. Personally I think Hillary Clinton has far too much baggage to overcome to get elected. So the DNC may ask here to step aside or maybe take the VP post but God only knows which liberal ass hole that will leave in the race. I shudder to think but in my mind I keep running across, Biden, Kerry, Holder or God forbid…Nancy Pants Bloomberg. Man that makes me sick to even think of those guys in the Oval Office. But since Obama proved to the Democrats, the liberal media of America and the ill-informed voters who will cast for whoever Kim Kardashian likes, that you don’t have to have experience or know anything at all about being President, things could get ugly and I mean butt ugly in this nation fast.
I thought everyone, except the press and John Dean, knew that President Nixon’s Chief Counsel, John Dean set it up, and lied to participants that it was ordered by the president. A team of burglars broke into the Democrat headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington to retrieve the “little black book” records kept there of Democrats who frequently used the call girls of Heidi Rikan, who had connections with the mob, foreign officials not friendly to the US and other nefarious figures.
Best evidence indicates that Liddy was the one to give the final OK for the break-in. Magruder may have told Liddy to execute it, but that’s never been confirmed.
Dean appears to have been trying a bit of CYA in claiming the break-in was approved by Nixon. IMO he was offering something “too good to resist” to the prosecution in an attempt to save his own butt.
The most likely reasons for the break-ins (there were two – they got caught on the 2nd one) appear to have been (1) bugging the DNC HQ, and (2) photographing any docs they could – in particular, any dirt the DNC had linking Nixon to Howard Hughes (reputedly a guy named Meier had given the DNC details of alleged illicit dealings between Nixon and Hughes; in reality the DNC had nothing). The “John Dean’s wife/Rikan callgirl ring” allegation is generally considered bogus and a Liddy flight of fantasy.
Unfortunately, except for Dean and Liddy the principals involved who might know definitively who approved the operation and/or know why it was conducted are all now dead – and Dean and Liddy are not what I’d consider particularly believable (Liddy’s story has changed over time, and Dean is IMO a liar and a sell-out looking out for number one). We’ll thus almost certainly never know what specifically prompted the break-in.
Liddy used to taunt Dean incessantly on his radio show, hoping that Dean would sue him. To my knowledge, Dean never did. FWIW.
Actually Dean did – both directly, and very possibly indirectly a second time through a “stalking horse”.
http://www.aim.org/media-monitor/liddy-wins-john-dean-loses/
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/liddy-case-dismissed/
Dean and his wife also sued the authors and publisher of another book that made a similar accusation. The publisher and one author settled out of court. The other author did not, and similarly won his case.
Thanks Hondo, I never knew that. I used to listen to Liddy’s show a lot, then I went to Alaska and went off the grid for awhile. Before I went to Alaska, I had a girlfriend and she and her family were die hard democrats. They were giving me crap onetime about being a G. Gordon Liddy fan (he’s a felon!), so I posed this question to them. To wit: Let’s say your daughter was at a party late into the night and had been drinking. Let’s say she needed someone to drive her home. Who would you rather drive her home? Ted Kennedy or G. Gordon Liddy? I don’t recall getting an answer. Later, the GMan was in town signing autographs and he graciously signed a glossy photo of himself to “the lovely Henrietta”, who was my gf’s mom.
Yeah, I fight dirty.
The worst part of it all was … it was so unnecessary. Nixon was a lock for re-election anyway. He had one of the highest approval ratings for any President … and he had to go and screw it all up because he was so paranoid and afraid.
Yep. McGovern was doomed to the same fate as Goldwater in 1964. Even if he was correct (arguable), he was 180-out-of-step with the US public of his day and had no chance.
Hell – had Nixon thrown Liddy, the break-in crowd, and everyone else involved to the wolves, IMO he’d have won a bigger landslide. Unfortunately for Nixon, he was loyal enough to his people and friends that that wasn’t an option. And in particular, Mitchell was one of Nixon’s closest friends – and was involved in Watergate up to his elbows.
Ok he didn’t order the break in he just covered it up. So lets talk treason sedition sabotage and the logan act. Tricky dick orderd anna chennault nixons liaison to tell the south vietnam government to refuse ceasefire to help him win 1968 election. Johnson tells gop sen dierksen I have tape of this treason and plays it for him. dierksen tells obj I helped with civil rights bill you owe I will tell nixon to stop.You can read george wills aug 6 column or johnson tapes or google nixon’s treason with south vietnam.
Asswipe No one here is standing up for Nixon being a manipulating douche tool who was lucky not to be locked up.
Your Party the Demmo-craps, LBJ in particular escalated Vietnam and cocked it up.
For all the ranting of you pole smoking Hippie Pieces of Shit, Tricky Dick reduced our involvement and got us out.
I ate a bowl of alphabet soup and shit a better post than that, vwp.
NHSparky…Can I steal that one to use? LMAO.
By the way VWP, if no one has told you lately, you’re a come lately to the party as usual, hemorrhoid. Please get some Preparation H and brush your teeth…twice and don’t forget to scrub your tongue well ass mouth. Everyone here has agreed Nixon was an ass, even me and I voted for him. LBJ cost a lot of lives in Vietnam that didn’t need to be there to start with. Some were my close friends and relatives. So shut your f@cking pie hole about LBJ you c@ck sucker.
Obviously, verywitlesspissedinhispants does not know about LBJ’s ‘I will not seek, nor will I accept the nomination as your president’ speech on TV.
But then, he lies about his own history, so he has to lie about everything else, including Nixon.
I keep hoping some day he’ll choke on those two lefty feet of his that he keeps sticking down his own throat.
As usual, vwp plays fast and loose with the facts – or, alternatively, merely repeats, perhaps inaccurately, garbled talking points someone told him. Or maybe he’s seeing what his fried brain wants to see, whether it’s there or not. Dunno. Who knows how the mind of an incoherent idiot works? Still: LBJ White House tapes relating to that alleged 1968 “treason” he’s talking about exist. However, it seems clear from the transcripts that if some in the Nixon campaign were giving advice to the RVN government, they were doing so by merely telling them (through intermediaries) what anyone with half a brain already knew. Specifically, they were telling them that Humphrey would sell them out, and they’d get a better deal from Nixon. (This occurred AFTER Humphrey had declared he would order a cease-fire in Vietnam. At that point, the handwriting was on the wall for anyone with 3 working brain cells to see.) Logan Act violation? Perhaps – perhaps not. Hard to prove, especially since that “advice” was merely common knowledge. Treason? Um, no. Advising an ally to act in their own best interests hardly meets the Constitutional definition – particularly when that advice is nothing but restating the obvious. In any case, there’s no clear indication that Nixon was himself orchestrating the matter. Despite vwp’s claims, the “Dirksen call” doesn’t seem to include anything about LBJ having Nixon on tape. In fact, the LBJ tape transcripts make it fairly clear that no such tape exists. So I just don’t think vwp has his facts straight. Here’s a couple of quotes from LBJ himself, from some of his tapes: From the Dirksen Conversation: President Johnson: [with Dirksen assenting] Both Thieu and Ky stressed on us the importance of a minimum delay [between a bombing pause and the opening of peace negotiations]. Then we got some of our friends involved, some of it your old China [Lobby] crowd. Here’s the latest information we’ve got: the agent says that they’ve just talked to the boss [Nixon] in New Mexico, and that he says that you must hold out, that . .… Read more »
VWPissant,pray we never meet. I do not like or enjoy your aqttemts at posting truthful post. Joe