It took some sleuthing but I finally found a file online of the United States Senate Watergate Committee’s official report. I have to warn you that it’s a massive .pdf file that takes a while to download. You should read it, if not today then at some point in your life. You’ll be staggered by the breadth of the corruption and criminality in the Nixon administration because I can almost guarantee you that you haven’t gotten a full sense of it from the way the Watergate scandal is usually described.
Try changing some of the words below. For Charles Colson, substitute the Russians or Donald Trump Jr. or Julian Assange. For E. Howard Hunt, substitute Roger Stone. For Daniel Ellsberg you can use Hillary Clinton. For Dr. Fielding’s office, try the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.
I think it’s useful to look at things in these terms to see why it isn’t necessary to prove that the Russian hacks changed the outcome of the election to determine that a lot of crimes were committed. No one thinks the Watergate burglaries changed the outcome of the 1972 election, but over sixty people were indicted, scores were convicted, and the president resigned.
Sadly, it was a completely different time. Republicans were much more ideologically diverse and many of them actually cared about good government. And also, the backlash against the corruption passed quickly- once Nixon was gone people shrugged and moved on.
Honestly, my take on Watergate is that it probably triggered the cynicism of the boomer generation, which started out idealistic, then turned narcissistic and hedonistic, and then finally greedy and opportunistic as the Reagan revolution took hold and corporations and the radical Republicans gained power.
Unfortunately, the bipartisan support for an impeachment inquiry- like what was given to the house judiciary committee during Watergate, probably isn’t going to happen. The Republican base and the right wing billionaires that fund the party just doesn’t give a crap about anything besides power for themselves.
I think we should be cautious in avoiding reacting too cynically to the corruption of Congressional Republicans. We simply can’t cede the ground in this area. We need to demand, loudly and daily, bipartisan investigations of Russia’s meddling and Trump’s greedy collusion with that meddling.
If we keep advocating for the right thing to happen we will be highlighting an extremely important issue with major electoral consequences, an issue where more and more evidence will continue to come into the public record as the indictments and cooperating witnesses bring more indictments and cooperating witnesses. If we hold our position, loudly and daily, it will make it difficult for Republicans to maintain their corrupt position.
Sure, let’s always encourage our politicians to do the right thing. At the same time, it appears to me that Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan have crossed some sort of line- admittedly that line is pretty fuzzy, and has been moving over time, but still, in the end, what we have now is not normal. This is not how a functioning democracy is supposed to work. This is not how our constitutional system is supposed to work.
As the tax scam bill showed, I wouldn’t be holding my breadth waiting for the “reasonable” Republicans to show up and save things- odds are low that’s going to happen. The Republican party has been lost to the billionaire oligarchs, and those that serve them- which now apparently includes white nationalists and probably most of corporate America.
It is shocking how few elected Republican officials have taken anything even approaching a decent attitude towards Trump – and of those how many are quitting (Flake) or were just angling for kickbacks (Corker). The only ones I can think of who are going to be left in 2019 are Sasse and a couple of blue-state governors.
You could probably get more Republicans to support a UFO caucus.
It is shocking how few elected Republican officials have taken anything even approaching a decent attitude towards Trump – and of those how many are quitting (Flake) or were just angling for kickbacks (Corker).
Talk is cheap. How those two muppets voted against Trump at all? Both banding together could have stopped that giveaway to the super-rich but they didn’t, did they?
It’s apparent that Congressional Republicans are largely in thrall to Trump. However, if the Republicans were entirely unwilling to respond to public pressure and popular opinion, they would have fully repealed the ACA, for one of a number of examples.
And if the voters were supportive of this year’s governance, the 2017 electoral results in Alabama, Virginia, New Jersey, Maine, Oklahoma and elsewhere would have been different.
We can call attention to the five alarm fire and express optimism that we have what we need to put out that fire at the same time. I’m invested in both projecting alarm and hope. Losing hope is our biggest enemy.
It seems to me republicans see they are in trouble and are committed to burning down the store before they get ejected.
I really wish commenters wouldn’t make vast generalizations about generations. I am a Boomer and during Watergate I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia. I have never been anything like the cartoon caricature of how you’ve portrayed what became of the Boomer generation. It’s definitely true of some of them; we all remember Jerry Rubin. But tens of millions of Boomers have remained faithful to their ’60s ideals and are fighting the good fight.
Yes, the Watergate Commission will never happen again because the GOP has become a degraded, corrupt party and the Internet/media stupidization of the electorate (also a feature of the GOP) has enabled “fake news” and the discrediting of evidence among a significant portion of the electorate not even remotely all Boomers.
I like this because it feeds into my existing beliefs but it will probably make steam come out your ears.
https://www.vox.com/2017/12/20/16772670/baby-boomers-millennials-congress-debt
. . . did.
I presume no polling exists to confirm/refute this, but if it did, I expect at least a plurality of living American boomers would prefer that the advantages we had had been preserved for subsequent generations. (Acknowledging that could just be generational bias resulting in an overly positive assessment of my own.) Very many of us have been consistently against the policy changes which have devastated “The American Dream”.
For just one obvious example (kept fresh in my mind because atrios returns to it regularly): we could get undergraduate and even graduate degrees from public (and even some private) universities without graduating into decades of indentured servitude.
We are not the ones who killed that option. Decades of relentless GOP/”conservative” attack on any/all of “the General Welfare” funded via taxes did.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to say every boomer is an asshole. Yes, there are lots of us that still give a crap, thank goodness. And obviously there are plenty of regional and other factors going on. I’m just not very good at writing essays on comment boards. Being able to write cogent posts on a daily basis takes a real skill- which is one of the things that continues to impress me about Martin and a few other bloggers like him.
I’m a Gen-X-er, and I try to be careful about overgeneralizing about generational cohorts (although I also slip from time to time). Statistically, the Boomers tend to trend more GOP and enthusiastically so relative to the next two younger generational cohorts. However, like everything else, the question is which Boomers are we talking about? My guess is if we’re dealing with Boomers who are white and were born into privileged circumstances (whether long-standing family circumstances or part of the new middle class that the post-war era brought to life), I am going to see them through a different set of lenses than those who came from much less privileged circumstances. And even then, I would not be surprised to find all sorts of fun things in the cross-tabs regarding religious affiliation, etc. that might predict potential differences in party preference, engagement in the hard work necessary to maintain a functioning society, etc. I’m also probably expressing myself a bit less succinctly than I would like, but hopefully everyone gets the drift. One-size-fits-all generalizations are tempting, but often only offer a very incomplete picture of what’s really going on. I like digging deeper – and maybe this is a bit personal, as some of the people who mentored me were Boomers and were some of the most caring progressive people I’ve ever had the fortune to know.
On behalf of myself and at least some of my cohort, I’ll object that you paint with an overbroad brush here:
Sure, you could find individual boomers who followed that arc. But you’re also, I think, conflating us with the aptly named “me generation” that moved into prominence during and following the Reagan years.
That said, I’ll cop to the “cynicism” charge. But “narcissistic and hedonistic”, “greedy and opportunistic”, not so much.
I think Vietnam did the job of triggering “the cynicism of the boomer generation” before Watergate.
Yes, good point. I agree it was a huge contributing factor. There are probably lot’s of other factors as well that screwed things up- like the assassinations of JFK, MLK & Robert Kennedy. I truly believe that if any one of them had not been killed, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in right now.
This time the slush fund that paid for such illegal activity appears to have been financed with Russian money. Or the illegal activity became a way to pay off Russian debt.
Thanks for sharing this report, BooMan. It’s a real service you’ve provided the community here. I bookmarked it.
A fire extinguisher can only be used once. After that, it is empty and cannot be used again.
The point of this analogy is that any particular kind of transgression can only be punished once, the first time it happens, when it is unprecedented. The second and subsequent times it happens, it cannot be punished.
We used our fire extinguisher on Nixon. Then he was pardoned. I said at the time that it would never again be possible to hold any President accountable. John Poindexter showed us how. Trump may not even need a Poindexter.
There is a non-zero probability that Trump’s term in office may end prematurely, for any of a handful of obvious reasons, most of which are things not envisioned in the 1787 Constitution; also possibly by means of events that no one has yet hypothesized. It is also possible that he will serve two full terms.
What is not possible is that he will ever be held accountable for his actions or that he will be discredited in the view of his supporters.
I was listening to a podcast in which Francis Fukuyama was interviewed. Whatever one might think of Fukuyama, the podcast was interesting in how much of the conversation centered around the relative strength of our various institutions, and how some had already been degraded a bit prior to Trump (something going on over a matter of decades), and how vulnerable we could be to a despot who actually knew what he or she was doing. Bottom line – regardless of whether or not impeachment happens in this instance – next two or three decades are going to be crucial for determining if we will still be a relatively liberal democratic nation or one that has joined the ranks of other illiberal nations like Russia, Hungary, and Turkey. There are reasons to be concerned, but not necessarily pessimistic or fatalistic.
I was listening to a podcast in which Francis Fukuyama was interviewed. Whatever one might think of Fukuyama, the podcast was interesting in how much of the conversation centered around the relative strength of our various institutions, and how some had already been degraded a bit prior to Trump (something going on over a matter of decades), …
I suppose Frankie would know since he was part of Bill Kristol’s original PNAC crew.
See this for PNAC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century
And Kristol did give us, along with Paulie Walnuts(aka McCain), The Quittah from Wasilla. Did Frankie talk in that podcast about his own roll in the degradation of our institutions?
Perhaps your best bet is to listen to the podcast here. It runs a little over 50 minutes. It was recorded much earlier this year, so there are some things Fukuyama managed to get wrong in the short term – clearly the Tories aren’t enjoying a commanding presence in the UK, and he seemed to think that at the time that the protests going on in the wake of Dolt 45’s election would not amount to much (special elections and off-year elections have told a considerably different story). Really the conversation with Mounk centers in part on a contradiction (our institutions are designed to be resilient in the face of would be tyrants but they have also in a number of cases been degraded by various forces and interest groups and hence weakened over the last several decades). There is also the question of how we manage to maintain an inclusive politics of identity and re-establish what it means to be American (as the latter appears to have been somewhat degraded as well). I’m not particularly satisfied with either the interviewer or interviewee’s conclusions on that front, but it made for an interesting conversation. The time was well-spent, if for no other reason than the conversation wasn’t just a bunch of soundbites and people shouting at each other – just two individuals trying to get a handle on what’s happening and what might happen down the road in the next couple decades. If that’s not your jam, so be it.
Hey look actual McCarthyism, someone alert Glenn:
No longer a `lonely battle’: How the campaign against the Mueller probe has taken hold
And all this time it supposed to be liberals and the Democratic Party who were the McCarthyites according to our progressive betters. Fancy that.
I have my very own copy of the U.S. Senate Watergate Committee’s official report. It was a birthday present from a friend who knew I was reading everything ever written about Watergate. I haunted the many, many used book stores in the Washington, DC Metropolitan area looking for the different accounts. I didn’t want any of those crooks to get money from the sale of the books. The difference between then and now is that we used to have a majority of Congress people who believed in country over party. Now, the Republicans don’t care about our country–only power.
Also many in Congress right now are complicit, and could lawyer up at any minute.
That’s the other thing. Good point.
–sigh–
US Senate (dot gov)
Those that had been assiduously following the developments in the Watergate break-in correctly read this: somebody in the know was talking. We didn’t know that it was McCord nor how much the one talking knew and had revealed. An educated guess was that it wouldn’t stop with John Mitchell (fmr AG who resigned as head of CRP or Creep within days of the break-in) and the designated (and willing) fall-guy. At least for the few that had paid attention to Martha Mitchell’s late night calls to Helen Thomas. Or one could read the irrefutable develops: 1) L. Patrick Gray’s nomination hearings (promotion from Acting FBI Director to Director) in February-March ’73 had not gone well. The nomination was withdrawn and Gray resigned April 27, 1973. 2) April 30 (or thereabouts) Nixon fired Dean and Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Kleindienst (AG) resigned. 3) Nixon appointed Richardson AG who committed to appoint Archibald Cox as SP and was confirmed on May 25, 1973.
Many of us watched all 319 hours on the nightly PBS rebroadcast. (That’s when PBS was fulfilling its mission and before the GOP got serious about killing it off.)
Republican partisans and diehard Nixon fans went after John Dean every which way they could. Served to give the public the impression that it was a he said v. White House said situation and the truth can’t be known. Until — Alexander Butterfield was in the witness box. That led to months of legal wrangling over the ownership of the WH tape recordings.
There was no continuous MSM feed of fact-free and highly incriminating allegations that had to be withdrawn within hours or days (or even weeks). Most, if not all, of the criminal actors and most of what they had done were within the public domain within a year from the Watergate break-in. SP Cox (and later Jaworski_ weren’t running around setting up perjury traps, leaking speculation, and had access to secret recordings of those under investigation. At every point from the break-in, new revelations were authentic, evidence of criminal activities, and fit as a part of the whole. Activities that so far in this country requires official power to perpetrate. (Give Trump&Co time to get there and then perhaps you’ll have the Watergate II that you so desperately want.)
If there were enough investigation of voter suppression just by the Trump mechanisms as shown through Trump Organization emails (suppression not bogus advertising, actual suppression), there would be enough evidence to convict a bunch of people without bothering the national security agencies to fess up to what they knew when. (That’s really been the issue with the evidence before the Mueller investigation had subpoena powers.) National security goes through their pretend 4th amendment powers to get the data. Mueller goes and gets a subpoena and a warrant with probable cause.
Of course if you want to hear a long, loud scream, use the President’s warrantless wiretapping surveillance powers against him. Even though they have been unconstitutional for 15 years.
There is a bit of that whole constitutional dance that was pioneered during the Nixon administration and implemented by Cheney.
Booman writes:
Booman…I think that we would be “staggered” by the breadth of corruption and criminality in (and surrounding) every administration since Eisenhower’s, from the post-assassination years onward. That information is simply not available. Not publicy, anyway. Why? Because Nixon was seriously not playing ball with the Deep State. That’s why. Plus of course the distinct possibility that he was coming apart at the seams both mentally and emotionally.
Why is Trump getting the same treatment?
Ditto.
End of story.
If Trump does indeed begin to “play ball” with the controllers…another distinct possibility, given the ouster of Bannon and also given the recent (gradual but quite plain to see) change in the slant of the mass media…then we are in for another 3 (and quite possibly 7) years of Trump.
Watch.
Trump is moving towards a detente with the Deep State and the the Deep State is accepting his efforts in that direction.
Watch.
AG
Arthur brings us a take on the events that led to Nixon’s resignation which is sympathetic to Dick. Nixon was courageously taking on the intelligence agencies, eh?
Then how do we explain why Nixon, his White House senior staffers, multiple Cabinet members and other Administration leaders employed top leaders in the intelligence agencies in Nixon’s attempted cover-ups of all the lawbreaking and unethical activities of the “plumbers”? How do we explain the fact that multiple former staffers for what Arthur calls the “Deep State” were involved in the planning and execution of the plumbers’ activities?
For fuck’s sake, a motivating factor for Mark Felt in his decision to leak vital information to Woodward was that he was outraged by the fact that the FBI was being misused to assist Nixon’s cover-up attempts.
This stuff is well-known by anyone who is operating in good faith. Arthur Gilroy has deteriorated to this point that he has become a full-time Trump-enabling troll. He wants to create facts and distort words. Some in this community may consider this response an example of feeding the troll. But there are times when the lies and distortions are so outrageous that it becomes important to call them out.
It also becomes important to understand the motivations behind Arthur Gilroy’s bad faith. Arthur is an evangelist for Ron Paul. Ron Paul has advocated for the sort of tax cuts which Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress just jammed through. Arthur Gilroy has railed against the Federal government for many years here. Arthur opposes strong Federal civil and voting rights laws. Arthur has called for the destruction of Federal social welfare programs.
Arthur has stopped railing against military imperialism and escalating Defense spending now that Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress has managed to reverse the Defense spending cuts that President Obama managed to achieve.
Arthur concludes here by brightly contemplating Trump overcoming his massive scandals so that he can maintain power until 2024. Use your common sense about what he is up to in this community.
Yes. Please use your good sense about what I am up to in this community.
Exactly where did I say that Nixon was “courageously” taking on the intelligence agencies?
I wrote:
He wasn’t being “courageous,” centerfielddj. He was well on the way to being a batshit crazy paranoid. Plus…the labels “Deep State” and “the intelligence agencies” are not necessarily synonyms. There are opposing factions within both, and “Deep State” covers a lot more ground than does “the intelligence agencies.”
Further…
I have no idea why…or even if…Mark Felt was “Deep Throat.” You say “This stuff is well-known by anyone who is operating in good faith.” Apparently “operating in good faith” means to you that taking as gospel whatever information is allowed to dribble out through the media to mollify the rubes. We don’t even have the full scoop on the assassination years, let alone Watergate. I believe nothing that I cannot verify myself, especially nothing about the machinations of the DC shadow world
But you continue your attempts to label me as some kind of far-right troll who is trying to undercut the saintly efforts of the Democratic Party to rid the world of Republicans and other traitors to the idea of democracy as defined by…by you and the other neocenrist DemRats here.
I think that maybe you have it backwards. It sounds to me like it is you who is the troll, not me. But no matter. Your arguments about my aims make so little sense to anyone with good reading comprehension who actually reads my stuff that they could have been written by an early AI bot. You know, like the primitive ones that used to prowl dKos? One dimensional and totally simplistic.
So…dribble on, centristfield. I’ll be here, no matter what you say.
Speaking my mind.
Bet on it.
AG
“Apparently ‘operating in good faith’ means to you the taking as gospel whatever information is allowed to dribble out through the media to mollify the rubes.”
No “that” there. Sorry…I did not proofread well.
Much as there is no apparent “there” there in your own paranoid rantings about.
Just DNC-style business as usual.
Boilerplate, mainstream, bipartisan, uniparty, neocentrist bullshit.
DC swamp business as usual.
Yawn…
AG
As fraudulent as I consider Arthur to be, I’ll admit to being surprised that he is unable or unwilling to even fake a response to the substantial policy positions with which he’s been confronted.
So, the facts stand unrebutted: Arthur is an evangelist for Ron Paul. Ron Paul has advocated for the sort of tax cuts which Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress just jammed through. Arthur Gilroy has railed against the Federal government for many years here. Arthur opposes strong Federal civil and voting rights laws. Arthur has called for the destruction of Federal social welfare programs.
Arthur has stopped railing against military imperialism and escalating Defense spending now that Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress has managed to reverse the Defense spending cuts that President Obama managed to achieve.
I feel no need to respond in any way to fake accusations. The smart ones will figure it out; the dumb ones will traipse along.
Just like the Trump election.
As above, so below.
You are using right-wing tactics on a supposed left-wing blog. “Accuse, accuse, accuse. It makes no difference how accurate the accusations may or may not be; the rubes will agree to repetition because they aren’t smart enough to figure out the truth(s) of the matter themselves.”
Gotta hand it to you though, centristfield. Like I said elsewhere here, the movement now in the culture is toward the tactics that won the election for Trump.
“If you can’t beat ’em; join ’em.”
Or at least emulate them.
Nice work.
AG
They’re not accusations. These are your positions. You’ve stated them specifically and unrepentantly. They’re also Ron Paul’s policy positions. You’ve been refreshingly honest here when you’ve owned them personally, when you’ve defended them personally.
Now you’re cowardly running away from them? That’s brand new.
I was mistaken in my assessment of what was likely to have been Mark Felt’s prime motivation for leaking information to journalists during the investigation of the Watergate break-in.