U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan Out On Long Limb, Making Demands

Left to right. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater

[From article]
Forty-eight hours after Donald Trump wrapped up the Republican nomination with a smashing victory in the Indiana primary, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced that he could not yet support Trump.
In millennial teen-talk, Ryan told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “I’m just not ready to do that at this point. I’m not there right now.”
“[T]he bulk of the burden of unifying the party” falls on Trump, added Ryan. Trump must unify “all wings of the Republican Party, and the conservative movement.” Trump must run a campaign that we can “be proud to support and proud to be a part of.”
Then, maybe, our Hamlet of the House can be persuaded to support the elected nominee of his own party.
Excuse me, but upon what meat has this our Caesar fed?
Ryan is a congressman from Wisconsin. He has never won a statewide election. As number two on Mitt Romney’s ticket, he got waxed by Joe Biden. He was compromise choice as speaker, only after John Boehner went into in his Brer Rabbit “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah” routine.
Who made Ryan the conscience of conservatism?
Who made Ryan keeper of the keys of true Republicanism?
Trump “inherits something … that’s very special to a lot of us,” said Ryan, “the party of Lincoln and Reagan and Jack Kemp.”
But Trump did not “inherit” anything. He won the nomination of the Republican Party in an epic battle in the most wide-open race ever, in which Trump generated the largest turnout and greatest vote totals in the history of Republican primaries.
[. . .]
The hubris here astonishes. A Republican establishment that has been beaten as badly as Carthage in the Third Punic War is now making demands on Scipio Africanus and the victorious Romans.
[. . .]
Someone should instruct Paul Ryan that losers do not make demands. They make requests. They make pleas.
[. . .]
Ryan is saying he is ambivalent over whether he will accept the verdict of the Cleveland convention — of which he is the chairman.
If Ryan holds to his refusal to accept the decision of the Republican majority in the primaries, he should be removed from that role. And if Ryan does not come out of Thursday’s meeting with the Donald, endorsing him, the presumptive nominee should turn to Paul Ryan, and, in two words, tell him, “You’re fired!”
Trump cannot allow the establishment to claw back in the cloakrooms of Capitol Hill what he won on a political battlefield. He cannot allow a discredited establishment to dictate the issues he may run on.
That would be a betrayal of the troops who brought Trump victory after victory in the primaries.
[. . .]


Nelson A. Rockefeller

Paul Ryan is the Nelson Rockefeller of his generation.
In 1960, Gov. Rockefeller refused to challenge Vice President Nixon in the primaries. When Nixon went to Rockefeller’s New York apartment to persuade him to join the ticket, Rocky refused, but demanded concessions in the platform, to which Nixon acceded.
[. . .]

Only the appearance of Sen. Barry Goldwater at the podium to tell conservatives to “grow up. We can take this party back,” halted a suicidal drive to take the nomination away from Nixon.
After Goldwater won the nomination in the 1964 California primary by defeating Rockefeller, Rocky arrived at the San Francisco convention to demand that a plank equating the John Birch Society with the Communist Party and Ku Klux Klan be written into Goldwater’s platform. Hooted and rejected, Rocky went home and refused to endorse the nominee, who went down to a crushing defeat by LBJ.
Nixon, a party loyalist, campaigned across the country for Barry and his doomed party.
In 1968, Nixon got his reward, the nomination, with Goldwater’s support. And Govs. Rockefeller and George Romney, who had done the Paul Ryan thing, never came close.
[. . .]
This is one Private Ryan we cannot save.

http://buchanan.org/blog/promoted-private-ryan-125221

Who Promoted Private Ryan?
Monday - May 9, 2016 at 7:37 pm
Patrick J. Buchanan

Alger Hiss vs. Whittaker Chambers Revisited

Alger Hiss (1950)


Whittaker Chambers

[From article]
Communism was in its ascendancy at the time, and Chambers ascended with it. As a writer and true believer, he sufficiently impressed his superiors that they asked him to go underground in Washington D.C. and organize a high level ring of federal bureaucrats working on behalf of the Soviet Union.
Prominent among those bureaucrats was Hiss. A Harvard Law graduate, Hiss would rise through the ranks to become a special assistant in the State Department, an adviser to President Roosevelt at Yalta, and one of the principal architects of the United Nations. After World War II, he was named president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
[. . .]
Chambers had chosen to change sides in the great ideological conflict of his age and of ours, a conflict he described as “Almighty Man vs Almighty God.” Stalin’s lethal, large-scale purges in the late 1930s helped open Chambers’ eyes.
Upon rejecting the “left’s vision of Man without God,” Chambers came to see Christianity as the one force powerful enough to resist communism.
[. . .]
Chambers felt obliged to let the Roosevelt administration know how thoroughly its ranks had been infested with high-level Soviet agents. He met with Assistant Secretary of State Adolph Berle and shared his information. Berle’s efforts to alert his superiors went nowhere, and Chambers retreated into anonymity for the next nine years.
In 1948, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) came calling. Now settled in as senior editor of Time magazine, Chambers had little desire to expose his own past or to testify against his friend, but his conscience obliged him to do so. Hiss made the ordeal much harder by denying he ever knew Chambers. The media believed Hiss, and President Harry Truman promptly dismissed the case as a “red herring”
Indeed, so well esteemed was Hiss by the media and the liberal establishment that HCUA would have dropped the case altogether had not freshman Congressman Richard Nixon convinced his colleagues that Hiss was lying. For this breach of political etiquette, Nixon would not be forgiven.
[. . .]
Hiss would eventually be convicted of perjury -- the statute of limitations having expired on espionage -- and would serve nearly four years in a federal prison.
[. . .]
It was, not invariably, but in general, the “best people” who were for Alger Hiss and who were prepared to go to any length to protect and defend him. It was the enlightened and the powerful, the clamorous proponents of the open mind and the common man, who snapped their minds shut in a pro-Hiss psychosis, of a kind which, in an individual patient, means the simple failure of the ability to distinguish between reality and unreality, and, in a nation, is a warning of the end.
I came across this paragraph days after the media unloaded on Giuliani for daring to say the obvious about the Harvard Law grad in the White House, namely that he does not love America, at least under any useful definition of the word “love.” When Giuliani followed up, saying, “From the time he was nine years old, he was influenced by Frank Marshall Davis, who was a communist,” he was introducing evidence to people who had long since snapped their minds shut about Obama. Most, even in the media, had likely never even heard of Davis.
[. . .]
As to why our progressive betters respond as they do to the truth tellers in their midst, Chambers nailed that as well:
The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/03/what_whittaker_chambers_tells_us_about_the_age_of_obama.html

March 2, 2015
What Whittaker Chambers Tells Us about the Age of Obama
By Jack Cashill

Brief Bio of Historian Stephen Ambrose

Stephen Ambrose

I read three of his books, Nixon and Eisenhower biographies, and Undaunted, about Lewis and Clark. I met him twice, at one reading at the Museum of Our National Heritage, in  Lexington, MA and one at the Cambridge Public Library. We spoke briefly after each reading. I liked him.

[From biography]
American historian and biographer of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He was a longtime professor of history at the University of New Orleans and the author of many best selling volumes of American popular history.
[. . .]
Ambrose originally wanted to major in pre-medicine, but changed his major to history after hearing the first lecture in a U.S. history class entitled "Representative Americans" in his sophomore year. The course was taught by William B. Hesseltine, whom Ambrose credits with fundamentally shaping his writing and igniting his interest in history
[. . .]
In 1970, while teaching at Kansas State University, Ambrose participated in heckling of Richard Nixon during a speech the president gave on the KSU campus.
[. . .]
In 1964, Ambrose took a position at Johns Hopkins as the Associate Editor of the Eisenhower Papers, a project aimed at organizing, cataloging and publishing Eisenhower's principal papers. From this work and discussions with Eisenhower emerged an article critical of Cornelius Ryan’s The Last Battle, which had depicted Eisenhower as politically naîve, when at the end of World War II he allowed Soviet forces to take Berlin, thus shaping the Cold War that followed.[15] Ambrose expanded this into a book, Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Halt at the Elbe.
[ . . .]
In 1964 Ambrose was commissioned to write the official biography of the former president and five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower.[16] This resulted in a book on Eisenhower's war years (published 1970) and a two-volume full biography (published 1983 and 1984), which are considered "the standard" on the subject.[17] Ambrose also wrote a three-volume biography of Richard Nixon. Although Ambrose was a strong critic of Nixon, the biography is considered fair and just regarding Nixon's presidency.
[. . .]
1998, he received the National Humanities Medal.[2] In 2000, Ambrose received the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the highest honorary award the Department of Defense offers to civilians.[11] In 2001, he was awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Medal for Distinguished Service from the Theodore Roosevelt Association.[20] Ambrose won an Emmy as one of the producers for the mini-series Band of Brothers.[11] Ambrose also received the George Marshall Award, the Abraham Lincoln Literary Award, the Bob Hope Award from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, and the Will Rogers Memorial Award.
[. . .]
In the 1973 ITV television series, The World at War, episode 35, From War to Peace, Ambrose made basic factual errors. He said:
"Manpower losses were almost insignificant; compared to the other combatants, insignificant. Only slightly more than a quarter of a million Americans died during the war. America was the least mobilized of all the nations, of all the major combatants in World War II. Altogether, we had an army and navy and air force of 12 million men out of a total population of 170 million. And of that 12 million, probably less than six million ever got overseas."[27]
While American manpower losses as a percentage of population were insignificant compared to the majority of combatants, his manpower and population estimates were heavily flawed. The population of the United States during the war was 131 million, of which nearly 16.6 million served in the armed forces during World War II, including 241,093 in the Coast Guard, and 243,000 in the Merchant Marine. Military deaths were 405,399.[28] According to U.S. census data, 73 percent of military personnel served abroad during World War II.
[. . .]
After Eisenhower's death in 1969, Ambrose made repeated claims to have had a unique and extraordinarily close relationship with him over the final five years of the former President's life. In an extensive 1998 interview, for instance, Ambrose stated that he spent "a lot of time with Ike, really a lot, hundreds and hundreds of hours." Ambrose claimed he interviewed Eisenhower on a wide range of subjects, and that he had been with him "on a daily basis for a couple years" before his death "doing interviews and talking about his life."[7] The former president's diary and telephone records show that the pair met only three times, for a total of less than five hours.

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Stephen+Ambrose

Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 – October 13, 2002)

New Book: CIA Tried To Kill Nixon Twice; George Will: Watergate Began Long Before Nixon Was Elected

Richard Nixon, Anna Chennault, Henry Kissinger

[From article]
June 17, 1971, was four days after The New York Times began publishing the leaked “Pentagon Papers,” the classified Defense Department history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Nixon worried that further leaks, including documents supposedly in a Brookings safe, would reveal his role in sabotaging negotiations that might have shortened the war. This fear caused Nixon to create the Special Investigations Unit — aka “the plumbers” — and to direct an aide to devise other proposals such as the one concerning Brookings. This aide suggested using the IRS against political adversaries, but added:
“The truth is we don’t have any reliable political friends at IRS. ... We won’t be ... in a position of effective leverage until such time as we have complete and total control of the top three slots at IRS.” Forty years later, the IRS has punished conservative groups, and evidence that might prove its criminality has been destroyed. Happy anniversary.

http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/opinion/op_ed/2014/08/will_illegal_diplomacy_seen_as_spark_for_watergate

Will: Illegal diplomacy seen as spark for Watergate
Thursday, August 7, 2014
By: George F. Will
Boston Herald

* * *


Richard Nixon

[From article]
The CIA plotted twice to assassinate President Richard Nixon during the years before the Watergate scandal because the agency was angered when 'Tricky Dick' turned dovish and began to withdraw troops from Vietnam, according to an explosive book from a longtime Nixon confidant due for release on Monday.
One hit was planned to occur at Nixon's Key Biscayne, Florida vacation house. A second plot to kill him was to culminate during a Miami speech in 1972.
When both plots failed, writes best-selling author Roger Stone in 'Nixon's Secrets: The Rise, Fall and Untold Truth about the President, Watergate, and the Pardon,' the CIA settled for driving Nixon out of office by sabotaging the Watergate break-in.
[. . .]



Their bumbling, which Stone claims as intentional, turned a professional surveillance operation of the Democratic National Committee headquarters into what history would regard as a 'third-rate burglary.'
'When they tried twice to get him killed, that doesn't work,' Stone told MailOnline.
'Then they infiltrate the Watergate break-in, and they sabotage it.'
Liebengood, the Watergate committee lawyer who first told Stone about the assassination plots, had been a longtime aide to Sen. Howard Baker, a moderate Republican who assembled his own dossier on CIA involvement in the Watergate affair.
Baker tried in vain for months to use that information to spark new committee investigations – which Democrats blocked at every turn.
'Baker’s incredible report was in the back of a 600-page book gathering dust at the Library of Congress, missed by the media and largely unknown until today,' Stone claims in his book.
When the senator later looked into the relationship between the president and his CIA director, Richard Helms, he summed it up by remarking that 'Nixon and Helms have so much on each other, neither of them can breathe.'
'Nixon also aggravated the CIA,' Stone told MailOnline, by demanding their records of of the JFK assassination, which he wanted as leverage over the agency.'
The president 'was furious when CIA Director Richard Helms refused to hand over the files,' Stone said.
[. . .]


Yeoman Charles E. Radford

In 1969, he writes in his book, top military brass were even running a spy ring inside the White House because they were 'desperate to know what Nixon and [his national security chief Henry] Kissinger were up to.
'In December 1971, Charles E. Radford, a twenty-seven-year-old navy stenographer assigned to the National Security Council, working closely with both Kissinger
and [his deputy Al] Haig, confessed to sifting through burn bags of top-secret White House documents and delivering these documents to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Thomas H. Moorer,' Stone writes.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2719226/CIA-hatched-two-plots-assassinate-Nixon-sabotaged-Watergate-break-didnt-want-Vietnam-war-end-says-explosive-new-book.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490

The CIA hatched two plots to assassinate Nixon and sabotaged the Watergate break-in because they didn't want the Vietnam war to end, claims explosive new book
CIA and military Joint Chiefs infiltrated the White House and spied on Nixon, the late former president's longtime confidant Roger Stone writes
The agencies wanted room to run in Vietnam but Nixon turned dovish and began a troop withdrawal after his stunning White House victory in 1968
Two separate plans were drawn up to kill him
One, quickly dismissed, was a plot to fire a missile at Nixon's vacation compound in Key Biscayne, Florida
The other involved a staged gunfight at an anti-Vietnam War convention where Nixon was to speak, with an assassin shooting him in the chaos
The CIA obtained a gun and hired an assassin, but he refused to proceed when he found out who his target was
By DAVID MARTOKSO, U.S POLITICAL EDITOR, MAILONLINE
Daily Mail (UK)
PUBLISHED: 15:25 EST, 7 August 2014 | UPDATED: 17:03 EST, 7 August 2014

James Rosen: The Strong Man, John Mitchell, Book Review

[Posted April 2, 2013; Last updated June 20, 2013 5:07 AM ET]

FBI Searched Fox News Washington Bureau Chief's (James Rosen) Emails, Phone Records


Washington Correspondent Fox News

[From article]
James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, bears striking similarities to a sweeping leaks investigation disclosed last week in which federal investigators obtained records over two months of more than 20 telephone lines assigned to the Associated Press.
[. . .]
raise the question of how often journalists have been investigated as closely as Rosen was in 2010.
[. . .]
The Kim case began in June 2009, when Rosen reported that U.S. intelligence officials were warning that North Korea was likely to respond to United Nations sanctions with more nuclear tests. The CIA had learned the information, Rosen wrote, from sources inside North Korea.
[. . .]
FBI investigators used the security-badge data, phone records and e-mail exchanges to build a case that Kim shared the report with Rosen soon after receiving it, court records show.
In the documents, FBI agent Reginald Reyes described in detail how Kim and Rosen moved in and out of the State Department headquarters
[. . .]
The court documents don’t name Rosen, but his identity was confirmed by several officials, and he is the author of the article at the center of the investigation.
[. . .]
Reyes wrote that there was evidence Rosen had broken the law, “at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.”
[. . .]
Reyes explained how Rosen allegedly used a “covert communications plan” and quoted from an e-mail exchange between Rosen and Kim that seems to describe a secret system for passing along information.
In the exchange, Rosen used the alias “Leo” to address Kim and called himself “Alex,”
[. . .]
Rosen instructed Kim to send him coded signals on his Google account
[. . .]
investigators said they needed to go a step further to build their case, seizing two days’ worth of Rosen’s personal e-mails — and all of his e-mail exchanges with Kim.
Privacy protections limit searching or seizing a reporter’s work, but not when there is evidence that the journalist broke the law against unauthorized leaks. A federal judge signed off on the search warrant — agreeing that there was probable cause that Rosen was a co-conspirator.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/a-rare-peek-into-a-justice-department-leak-probe/2013/05/19/0bc473de-be5e-11e2-97d4-a479289a31f9_story.html

A rare peek into a Justice Department leak probe
By Ann E. Marimow,
Published: May 19, 2013
Washington Post
* * *

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/snoops_we_did_it_again_hkPyVwpmrUvhGSL56edezJ

Feds also spied on Fox News reporter
By GEOFF EARLE, Bureau Chief
New York Post
Last Updated: 2:57 AM, May 21, 2013
Posted: 2:35 AM, May 21, 2013





The Strong Man
James Rosen
Doubleday 2008
New York


John Newton Mitchell

This is the first full length biography of John Mitchell, who was the intense focus of journalists when he was Attorney General and afterwards. The footnotes alone show an enormous amount of research. Rosen says there are 500 books about Watergate and related issues and people. The author refers to "'a decade of shocks' that spanned the Kennedy assassination to Nixon's resignation." That would be 1963 to 1974. I put the dates 1960 to 1974 for what I considered to be a national mob war which included the political leadership of the country. He recognizes the flawed records and testimony before panels of Congress and the special prosecutor's office.


Nelson Rockefeller, New York Governor

Mitchell created the idea for municipal bonds with a moral guarantee by states. New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller got a state law passed to permit such bonds. It was adopted by 40 other states after successes in New York. Mitchell was reluctant to be Attorney General saying he thought Washington DC was "Disneyland East."


Erwin Nathaniel Griswold, Dean Harvard Law School, Solicitor General

Erwin N. Griswold, lifelong Democrat, Dean of Harvard Law School and Solicitor General said of Mitchell "I wasn't loyal to the President [Nixon] because I never conceived of my responsibility as representing the president. I conceived of my responsibility as representing the people of the United States. And I think Mitchell rather welcomed that point of view."


George Pratt Shultz, United States Secretary of Labor, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, U.S. Secretary of State, Professor of Economics at MIT and the University of Chicago, Dean of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business,  Bechtel President, Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Robert R. Detlefsen, civil rights historian, said, "contrary to conventional wisdom, contemporary federal affirmative action policy owes far more to the likes of John Mitchell, George Shultz and Richard Nixon than to Lyndon Johnson, a fact that stands in sharp contrast to the typical caricatures . . . one finds in contemporary political folklore."

"What went unmentioned was the huge decrease in the percentage of Southern black children attending segregated schools--from 68 percent in 1968 to 8 percent in 1972--under the leadership of Nixon and Mitchell."


Executive Director, N.A.A.C.P.

It was "Mitchell's Justice [Department] that filed the first federal lawsuits charging cities with manipulation of zoning laws to discriminate on the basis of race. These lawsuits won applause even of Roy Wilkins, the NAACP official better known for telling the press that Mitchell's racial policies made him want to vomit."


Thomas Hinman Moorer, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff

One of many examples of truth being obscured for a generation or more is the spying by the Joint Chiefs of Staff of The Executive Branch. "Nixon asked [Haldemen] what Kissinger--the primary target of spying--had said about the prospect of criminal prosecution. 'What do you do on that?' Kissinger had asked. 'Well,' Ehrlichman responded, 'it's in the hands of the attorney general. . . . Admiral Welander thinks that we should put the yeoman in jail; Admiral Moorer thinks we should put Welander in jail.' Kissinger thought Moorer should go to jail. 'John and I both laughed,' Haldemen told the president. 'As you go up the ladder, everybody's going to crucify the guy under him, and nobody'll take the blame himself.'" Much of this information did not become available until the release of relevant tapes in 21st Century.


Henry Kissinger, Professor, Harvard University, Department of Government, Nobel Peace Prize winner, National Security Advisor, U.S. Secretary of State. 

When he learned about being spied on, "Ehrlichman later wrote, Kissinger exploded in purple rage. '[Nixon] won't fire Moorer!' he shouted. 'They can spy on him and spy on me and betray us and he won't fire them! . . . I assure you,' Kissinger intoned before stalking out, 'all this tolerance will lead to very serious consequences for this administration!' Kissinger was never more prescient."


Richard Milhous Nixon, 37th President of the United States

"By allowing men he distrusted , and who distrusted him, to remain in place in the White House and at the Pentagon, Nixon ensured that the culture of secrecy and paranoia that infused his first term persisted until the Watergate scandal aborted his presidency."


Harry Robbins "Bob" Haldeman, Chief of Staff to the President

After Nixon gave an intense direct order to Richard Kleindienst to not file an appeal of an anti trust case, John Mitchell got the President to reverse his decision. The author says, "Here was one of Mitchell's finest hours as a public servant."


Richard Gordon Kleindeinst, U.S. Attorney General

"In May 1974 [Kleindienst] pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge that he refused to testify 'accurately and fully' before the Senate Judiciary Committee about Nixon's angry telephone call to him in 1971."


James Walter McCord, Jr., CIA Employee, Watergate Burglar

Discussing the breakin at the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, Nixon said, "It doesn't sound like a skillful job. . . . If we didn't know better [we] would have thought it was deliberately botched." According to Len Colodny in his book, Silent Coup, tape was put over the door lock. When it was discovered by the building security he removed it. McCord, working for the CIA,  replaced the tape so that the security guard knew someone was in the offices. It was deliberately botched.


John Wesley Dean, III, White House Counsel

Rosen reports that John "Dean was keenly aware of his mental superiority over the president. In Blind Ambition, Dean wrote that Nixon was lucid and logical only sporadically, and was mostly rambling, forgetful, and disorganized, unable to remember what Dean told him from day to day. In a 1989 interview, Dean recalled much the same of Mitchell: 'He wasn't sharp. . . . He didn't remember a lot of details. . . .  I had to--used to prepare Mitchell to testify, to go up on the Hill. And he wasn't very good. He wasn't a very good witness. He couldn't hold facts. He couldn't hold information."


John Daniel Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs 

John Ehrlichman said Nixon "didn't know what the truth was [. . .] He didn't know what he had said, didn't know what he had done, and the fact was whatever he was saying was truth at that particular moment."  Could this also be true about Barack Obama?


Charles "Chuck" Wendell Colson, Special Counsel to the President

Charles Colson told the House of Representatives that Nixon seemed "genuinely confused by all of the conflicting accounts."


Everette Howard Hunt, Jr., CIA Officer

"The tapes show Dean ran circles around the president, used his superior comprehension of the scandal to shape the topics discussed, options considered, and courses pursued."

"Such was the pinstriped atmosphere of Watergate: Peril appeared most often in the form of smiling friends, colleagues--"


Sam James "Samy" Ervin, Jr., U.S. Senator (D-NC), Chairman, Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities. 

Sam J. Ervin, Jr., 76, (D-NC) was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities. "Challenging Nixon gave Ervin a populist persona that belied his retrograde Southern Democrat record: He had opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, Medicare, and consumer legislation; supported the Vietnam War and the draft; and lobbied in behalf of the infamous segregationist manifesto, the Declaration of Constitutional Principles, which encouraged Southern states to defy the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Blinded by hatred of Nixon and Mitchell, the national press corps was eager to forget all that and was led, as in much else, by Walter Cronkite, who fawned over Ervin as 'this Renaissance man of Washington.'" Today journalists show a similar hatred toward all conservative politicians, especially presidential candidates. Are they misleading voters as thoroughly as the previous generation did during Watergate?


Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr., Journalist, CBS News

Rosen reports that before trial, "How the former attorney general proposed to scale the awesome edifice of allegations erected around him became the subject of consuming media interest." Though there is no media interest in my ordinary life, that phrase describes my situation too, "an awesome edifice of allegations erected around" me.

"Gallup and Harris polls showed John Dean won more favorable reviews than Mitchell [. . .], and that Dean was more likely, despite his pervasive deception of the [Senate] panel, to be seen as 'truthful.'"

"A Baptist minister, sermonizing on 'the moral dilemma of Watergate' admonished Mitchell for violating the 'spiritual law which forbids men to do evil even when they think good will come of it.'"


Daniel Ellsberg, Military Analyst, Rand Corporation, U.S. Department of Defense, Released Pentagon Papers to the New York Times; his psychiatrist's office was bugged by CIA burglars.

Rosen reported this strange confession. "Charles Colson pleaded guilty to one count of plotting to defame Daniel Ellsberg and his lawyers[.]" Is that a crime or a tort? There are a lot of people guilty of that over the past 40 years who plotted to defame me. They were extremely successful.


John Joseph Sirica, Chief Judge, District of Columbia Courts

"By 1970, the year before seniority made him the District of Columbia's chief judge, John Sirica was reportedly the most reversed federal judge in Washington. That dubious achievement, along with his sloppy, biased conduct of U.S. v. Liddy, the original Watergate breakin trial, fueled Mitchell's hopes for securing an acquittal on appeal." I remember how popular Sirica was during this period. None of his misguided actions were reported, at least I never saw any of them. Then again I did not read as carefully or as thoroughly then as I do now.


George Gordon Battle Liddy, Lead Watergate Burglar; I saw him in 1968 multiple times on the Columbia University campus and on the New York City Subway system. I thought he was a professor the way he dressed. Five years later I saw him on television and realized he was doing surveillance on campus of student leaders. 

Rosen reports, Sirica complained "I can't keep track of everything going on," at Mitchell's trial. "At various points, he forgot to excuse a witness; forgot key dates in the case's chronology; permitted forms of cross-examination he later barred, without ever admitting error; proposed, unfathomably that a witness be cross-examined outside the presence of the jury, then withdrew the idea; admitted he 'maybe' allowed the prosecution to pose leading questions to a witness on redirect examination, a flagrant violation of courtroom procedure; admitted he 'may' have improperly allowed the prosecution to make a closing argument to the jury during the questioning of a witness; admitted he 'probably' gave the prosecution 'too much latitude' in questioning a witness; admitted he couldn't always discern the speakers on the Nixon tapes, the trial's most important evidence; mocked Nixon from the bench; and shrugged 'when you have a situation like we have, that has been highly publicized, you just can't have a perfect trial.'"

"Most egregiously, Sirica bent the heresay rules, even by the lax standards of conspiracy cases, to allow John Dean to relate to the jury what he had been told by individuals who were neither defendants in the case nor unindicted coconspirators."

Sirica stated in Court, "It is too bad that Mr. Mitchell didn't say, 'Throw them out of here, get them out fast,' and you wouldn't even be in this courtroom today. It is too bad it didn't happen that way. Anyway, it is not for me to say what should have been done. The jury hasn't heard that and no harm can be done."


Spiro Theodore Agnew, 39th Vice President of the U.S.

Rosen notes, "From the lips of the purportedly neutral umpire presiding over his trial, a defendant could scarcely imagine hearing a more prejudicial remark."


Alexander Meigs Haig, Jr., General U.S. Army, Chief of Staff to the President, U.S. Secretary of State

Rosen reports "Alexander Haig believed Agnew's downfall was part of a 'conspiracy' by Democrats. 'They were already in liaison with the Baltimore investigation,' Haig said. 'They saw the prospect of a converging double-impeachment, and the turnover of the government to the Speaker of the House [Carl Albert], a Democrat--and also a drunk.' Haig recalled that when he was named chief of staff, in April 1973, Democratic lawyer Joe Califano warned: 'Al, don't do it.' Asked why, Califano replied: 'Don't you know we have this guy? We got both of 'em!' Agnew's grand jury probe was not yet publicly known[.]"


Joseph Anthony Califano, Jr., U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare

Rosen cites Robert Novak who "decried the 'false conception . . . that the impeachment of Nixon was unbiased and nonpartisan . . . The efforts by Chairman Rodino to get Nixon were very strong. Nixon made enough mistakes  that he couldn't garner enough Republican support, but you can't imagine how much the Democrats hated Nixon--I think even more than Republicans hated Clinton[.]"


Peter Wallace Rodino, Jr., U.S. Rep. (D-NJ)

Rosen reveals Renata "Adler uncovered the startling fact that the famous Watergate judge, a former boxer, was himself indicted in 1927 on charges of tax evasion and conspiring to fix the famous Dempsey-Tunney 'long count' prizefight; for unknown reasons, the case never went to trial."


Carl Bert Albert, U.S. Rep. (D-OK), Speaker U.S. House of Representatives

"Dick Moore, a friend [of Mitchell's since] 1930, delivered the eulogy: 'He was the strongest man I ever knew,' Moore said. 'It has been said that you can judge a man by the friends he makes--and keeps. By that test John Mitchell was a giant. He made good friends in every phase of his life, in his every field of endeavor . . . indeed, in every one of the fifty states. . . . It is no exaggeration to say that every friend John Mitchell made throughout his lifetime was still his friend the day he died."


Anna Chennault, Journalist, Nixon Campaign Adviser

Rosen quotes Job 4:8: "Those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same." He adds that the intelligence community noticed the efforts of Nixon campaign adviser Anna Chennault, who went to Vietnam during the war to urge them not to cooperate with President Johnson. It was to make Nixon's campaign more likely to succeed. "Thus the enlistment of Yeoman Radford as a thief of Nixon's and Kissinger's documents--selectively leaked by generals and admirals unsympathetic to the administration's foreign policy--and the deployment of Messrs. Hunt and McCord as spies, respectively, inside the Nixon White House and Mitchell's Committee for the Re-election of the President.  These are best seen as institutional responses to the intrigues of 1968, products of the warped political atmosphere created by the protracted war in Vietnam."


Martha Beall Mitchell

"Mitchell's friends and family [wondered]: What was his great mistake in life? Why did so brilliant and accomplished a lawyer, such a warm and witty drinking companion, wind up so disgraced? [. . .] There were those who believed  Mitchell's great mistake was marrying Martha Mitchell and those who believed it was allying himself with Richard Nixon. [. . .] Martha and Nixon [. . .] blamed the other for the downfall of the man they both considered the bedrock of their lives. Of course, the answer was that both were to blame, that it was the twin pressures of Martha and Nixon that brought the strong man down."

When asked "If you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently? MItchell paused [then explained] The year was 1960, [. . .] He was seated in his law office [. . .] when a secretary said he had a visitor, a man named Bobby Kennedy. Mitchell was busy [and kept] the younger man waiting. Kennedy didn't like that. When Mitchell finally saw him, Kennedy said he understood Mitchell was an important man, with contacts in nearly all fifty states. How did he feel about helping to run his brother Jack's presidential campaign? Mitchell demurred. Kennedy was undeterred. He started waving around documents, suggesting it would be in Mitchell's interest--and those of his clients--if he reconsidered. With that Mitchell threw the younger man out of his office. [. . .] 'If I had it all over to do,' Mitchell said with a smile, 'I'd run Jack Kennedy's campaign.'"

Pol Says Johnson and Nixon Linked to JFK Assassination

Just moments before: The presidential motorcade through Dallas a few moments before John F Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, was shot on Friday, November 22, 1963

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2322981/Former-Nixon-aide-claims-evidence-Lyndon-B-Johnson-arranged-John-F-Kennedys-assassination-new-book.html

Former Nixon aide claims he has evidence Lyndon B. Johnson arranged John F. Kennedy's assassination in new book
Roger Stone claims Johnson ‘micro-managed’ Kennedy’s Dallas motorcade, demanding it pass through Dealy Plaza on the afternoon he was shot
He also says that Johnson, instructed Richard Nixon to hire Jack Ruby several years before he shot Lee Harvey Oswald
The revelations are made in is book 'The man who killed Kennedy - the case against LBJ' out later this year
By DAMIAN GHIGLIOTTY
Daily Mail (UK)
PUBLISHED: 08:46 EST, 11 May 2013 | UPDATED: 17:10 EST, 11 May 2013

Misleading Watergate Bits of Information

Even after 39 years journalists continue to spin the facts about Watergate. According to the book, Silent Coup, by Len Colodny and Robert Getlin, John Dean obtained approval for the Watergate break-in from President Nixon and his Attorney, General John N. Mitchell, by telling each of them that the other approved it. The objective according to this perspective was to get an address book from the DNC offices which had Dean's girl friend's name, Maureen Biner, now his wife's, phone number in it. The important campaign strategy was always kept at the candidate's headquarters not the DNC, so it was one of many misleading focuses that the objective was campaign strategy. The US political parties issue so much propaganda it is extremely difficult for voters to know what exactly is going on. Lies, lies and more lies except for the propaganda and lies, is what we all get. Too many voters are fooled by the trash that passes for information. Watergate is one of the many false narratives that made it into the history books. Woodward and Bernstein are celebrated as geniuses who uncovered this scandal. But all they did was write what a disgruntled FBI agent told them revealing FBI documents to them. Woodward was a briefer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff before he was a journalist. He had access to the highest levels of government before he was a reporter. He denied he knew Gen. Alexander Haig. Like Obama, Woodward lives a prominent life based on lies. Some people have no shame.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2241434/Top-secret-Watergate-documents-reveal-new-details-burglars-acted-orders-Nixon-administration.html

Top secret Watergate documents reveal new details on burglars who
acted under orders from Nixon administration
By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
PUBLISHED: 11:32 EST, 1 December 2012 | UPDATED: 13:00 EST, 1 December 2012

Exploding Watergate Myths

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

The Unraveling Myth of Watergate
Pat Buchanan
 May 25, 2012
TownHall.com

Nixon's Accomplishments Ignored

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/283912/nixon-half-way-mount-rushmore-conrad-black

November 24, 2011 4:00 A.M.
Nixon: Half Way to Mount Rushmore
His full term was amazingly successful.
Conrad Black

Politicians Often Lack Social Skills

These descriptions of Nixon are compatible with the description of Nixon in Stephen Ambrose's biography. Ambrose goes further stating that Nixon was clueless about the personal lives of his wife and his daughters. He was all business focused only on politics. Other profilers state that people who succeed in politics like people, and want to help others. What some find difficult to accept is that having these good qualities politicians are often also medacious, greedy, spineless and have a relaxed rectitude.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/23/mitt-romney-john-kerry-and-more-painfully-awkward-politicians.html

The Awkwardness Olympics
Aug 23, 2011 1:00 AM EDT
Daily Beast
Jill Lawrence

War Powers Act, Obama: Nuts

[From article]
"the grand confrontation between the legislative and executive branches over Libya has been an instance of the cowardly fighting the disingenuous."

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/obama_at_war_making_nixon_proud_W2dmBaox8CljHsnlAmimmN

Obama at war: making Nixon proud
Rich Lowry
New York Post
Last Updated: 12:37 AM, June 7, 2011
Posted: 10:21 PM, June 6, 2011

Woodward's False Persona

According to Len Colodny in his book, Silent Coup, Bob Woodward was a briefer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff before he became a journalist. He briefed Alexander Haig and denied he knew the General. When Woodward appeared at Harvard's School of Government to get an award I asked him during a public session why he denied those facts. He became upset and told me that I should get my client's name right. He thought I was a lawyer and that Robert Gettlin ( I called him Rich Gettlin) co-author of Silent Coup was my client. He did not answer the question. There were audible gasps from the audience who worshipped him. Woodward is part of the liberal media-government cabal which for the past 50 years uses propaganda as reporting. Nixon was hounded from office for allegations and for helping persons he thought were loyal to him. Non of the liberal media discuses the infiltration of the Nixon administration to embarrass him from within. Nixon was a threat to the Eastern liberal elites who ran the country since its beginning. Nixon was transferring wealth and political power from them to new interests in the South and Western parts of the country. Watergate was a retaking of power by the Eastern liberal elites.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53395.html

Watergate's 'last chapter'
By JAMES HOHMANN
Politico.com
4/19/11 6:20 AM EDT

Exposing JFK Myths

http://bigjournalism.com/hfontova/2010/10/10/about-those-kennedy-nixon-debates-jfk-lied-cubans-died/

About Those Kennedy-Nixon Debates: JFK Lied, Cubans Died
Posted by Humberto Fontova
BigJournalism.com
Oct 10th 2010 at 8:53 am

Richard Nixon

Richard Nixon

Ed Cox, Republican?

Dicker reports, Ed "Cox [is] the son-in-law of Richard Nixon." (FREDRIC U. DICKER in Albany and MAGGIE HABERMAN in NY, "'Game changer' Levy calls for $$ uprising," New York Post, March 20, 2010) Cox is also the nephew of Archibald Cox Special Watergate Prosecutor and Delegate for Ed Muskie to the Democratic National Convention. To which party does Ed's loyalties lie?

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/game_changer_levy_calls_for_uprising_pS6CrM2NLSzXbjuB4zjHxL

Shannon DeCelle

CHARGE! Dem-turned-GOPer Steve Levy with wife Colleen in front of the Capitol in Albany yesterday as he enters the gov's race.

'Game changer' Levy calls for $$ uprising
By FREDRIC U. DICKER in Albany and MAGGIE HABERMAN in NY
New York Post
Last Updated: 11:42 AM, March 20, 2010
Posted: 2:04 AM, March 20, 2010

Obama Imitates (Flatters) Nixon


"In the Obama White House, arrogance, vanity and hesitation has replaced action. A level of suspicion unseen since the days of Richard Nixon flourishes at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave."

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/verdict_on_one_year_later_nothing_5sp4ZV1RqDRrkRdoOlFq0K

Verdict on O one year later: Nothing doing
Andrea Peyser
New York Post
Last Updated: 5:42 AM, November 2, 2009
Posted: 4:16 AM, November 2, 2009

Trust Me I'm an Expert

Trust Me I'm an Expert

Stanley Kutler says, “Please, I’m a trained historian. I don’t work that way.” And his critics are not trained historians who do work that way? (PATRICIA COHEN, “John Dean’s Role at Issue in Nixon Tapes Feud,” The New York Times, January 31, 2009) Kutler does not answer the substantive charges. He undermines his own position by claiming personal privilege.

Some persons within the Nixon administration were too willing to participate in discrediting the President. Dean, McCord, and others had pivotal positions and did not support the President as others in the administration did. Why were Dean and McCord so anxious to give up their boss? According to Colodny the first break-in (there were two) was to retrieve an address book with Dean’s phone number in it. How does Kutler explain that?

The last thing a “pre-eminent historian” will admit is “I’m wrong.” In some circles, prestige trumps truth. Is this one?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/washington/01kutler.html?_r=1&sq=john%20dean&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=all

John Dean’s Role at Issue in Nixon Tapes Feud
By PATRICIA COHEN
New York Times
Published: January 31, 2009

One More Elitist Politician

One More Elitist Politician

What is the surprise about Caroline Kennedy wanting an appointment to a prestigious position? Is the NY State Governor any less venal than Illinois' Blagojevich? Obama is as much a part of the Kennedy cult as she is. Her "surprise(?)" early support for Obama fits with the fact that Ed Kennedy sponsored Obama's father as as a student at Harvard. Obama was a Kennedy man before he was born. Since Nixon was discredited the eastern liberal establishment retook control of the US Government. Elites run the country. Caroline is a member of the elite liberal establishment. What's the surprise? See how they attacked Gov. Palin?

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1139289

Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?
By Margery Eagan
Boston Herald
Tuesday, December 16, 2008 -

Rewriting History

Rewriting History

Lou Lumenick says, "Nixon's undoing, of course, was the Watergate
break-in - and its extensive coverup - that he had authorized as part
of his campaign for re-election in 1972." (LOU LUMENICK, "Nixon's The
One," New York Post, December 5, 2008) What role do journalists play
in the dumbing down of America?
Nixon vigorously protected his employees trying to cover up the
break-in at the Democratic party headquarters. Nixon did not order the
break-in. John Dean approved that. (Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin,
"Silent Coup," silent coup.com, watergate.com)
Political intelligence and strategy were kept at the candidate's
headquarters. The motive at Watergate was to retrieve an address book,
which had Dean's phone number in it.
Making up facts keeps the electorate ignorant. Film reviews are
not reliable history.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/12052008/entertainment/movies/nixons_the_one_142673.htm

Nixon's The One
By LOU LUMENICK
New York Post
Last updated: 10:59 am
December 5, 2008
Posted: 12:19 am

Roy Bercaw, Editor, ENOUGH ROOM

Celebrating Provocateurs

Celebrating Provocateurs

John Dean is celebrated as a hero exposing wrongdoing by his own political
party members in the Nixon Administration. (Anna Mundow, "Warping the lessons of
Watergate," Boston Globe, September 23, 2007) Some history books portray Dean
and James McCord as infiltrators who deliberately encouraged wrongdoing. Dean
allegedly promoted the first break-in at the Watergate complex to retrieve an
address book with his name in it. McCord was White House security who replaced
the tape on the door of the break-in. Clearly history is written by the victors.
It is no more reliable because Democrats won that battle.

Roy Bercaw, Editor ENOUGH ROOM

Warping the lessons of Watergate
Boston Globe
By Anna Mundow
September 23, 2007

John Dean, who was White House legal counsel to President Richard Nixon,
famously identified "a cancer growing on the presidency" when he testified as
the government's key witness in the Watergate trial. In 2004, in the damning
analysis "Worse Than Watergate" he made a similar diagnosis about the
Bush-Cheney administration, and now "Broken Government" (Viking, $25.95)
examines, with great precision and even greater urgency (in the words of the
subtitle), "how Republican rule destroyed the legislative, executive and
judicial branches."

Dean spoke from his home in California.

Q. Did you plan this indictment of Republican rule as a trilogy?

A. I did not. I started to write about the Bush-Cheney administration in my
weekly column for Findlaw.com, and that evolved into "Worse Than Watergate." I
kept thinking, these people are going to get their act together, but then I
realized this was their act. In "Conservatives Without Conscience" I reported on
research examining why they act as they do. After that, so many people asked me
what damage has been done by this administration. That was the genesis of the
third book, "Broken Government."

Q. Has your writing style changed along the way?

A. No, I guess it's still the lawyer's approach. You never know how much the
judge (or the reader) is going to know, so you try to be explicit without being
insulting and detailed without being dull. I generally have somebody in mind
that I'm writing for, a friend perhaps. Also I try to write books that I want to
read. This is often information that I had been trying to find and I wish
somebody had written the book; then I wouldn't have to.

Q. Was there a critical moment during this administration when you perceived
American democracy to be in danger?

A. When I wrote "Worse Than Watergate" I was deeply troubled by the truly
excessive secrecy of this presidency and the efforts [Vice President] Cheney was
making to keep things secret. I look at it as someone who has been on the
inside. There's a reason for that secrecy; it's because you don't want people to
know what . . . you're doing. It's not because you're trying to gain
presidential powers; it's because you don't want people to know what you're
doing with those powers. When I was writing the postscript to "Worse Than
Watergate" I asked the Kerry campaign, off the record, why they had given Bush
such a free pass on all this secrecy. And they said "It's a process issue." I
said "Right, it's a process issue. Everything that's going on in that town is a
process issue, and you're ignoring it." But they insisted that voters don't like
process issues. I knew the opposite to be true, and I eventually found
groundbreaking, empirical studies carried out by political scientists at [Univ
ersity of] Nebraska that showed how important process is to a large segment of
American voters. You see, people don't need to know what a motion to recommit
is; they understand at a gut level when they're getting screwed by the process.
That was a great revelation and comfort to me.

Q. Why does Watergate still matter to you - and to Dick Cheney?

A. It clearly matters to Cheney because he thinks as a result of Nixon not
staying, fighting, and prevailing, somehow the presidency was weakened. As I
show in "Broken Government" that's just not true; it's a ruse. Reagan took the
presidency way beyond where Nixon ever hoped to take it. A massive amount of the
work of the Senate Watergate Committee was on preventing just what Cheney,
[Karl] Rove et al. have so successfully accomplished. That is, to totally
politicize the process. So it shows that Watergate really had no lasting effect.
I think it established some sort of standard of what was not acceptable - I
don't think those were bad standards - but we've gotten around them. Today, the
lessons of Watergate really come down to "Don't get caught."

Q. In what sense is this a "neo-Nixonian" presidency?

A. In the sense that Nixon gave us what Arthur Schlesinger appropriately labeled
"the imperial presidency," but these people have gone way beyond that Nixonian
standard. They have given us the imperial presidency on steroids. This is
Cheney's legacy, and I have real concerns that a Democratic president would be
unlikely to send all those powers back to Congress. When they're in power, they
too would use these powers.

Q. Of all the problems and abuses you identify, which demands the most urgent
attention?

A. The Democrats have already started to repair the damage in the legislative
branch. With the executive branch, if the expanded powers are not misused it's
not quite as dangerous. To me the most troubling abuse and what should be
focused on in 2008 is what the Republicans have done to the federal judiciary by
making political the nonpolitical branch. It's a conservative Supreme Court
today. It's clear that if Bush were to get another appointee, he would appoint
another legal fundamentalist who would embrace a supreme executive with strong
military inclinations. It's a remarkable authoritarian vision of America that I
don't think the majority of Americans want. The Democrats have the power to
block that.

Q. You're optimistic?

A. I am. I think that if you give Americans the information, they do the right
thing. Just think of an average jury. You put them in a room and 99 percent of
the time they come out with the right judgment. It happens with voters too.

Anna Mundow is a correspondent for the Irish Times. She can be reached via
e-mail at ama1668@hotmail.com.