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archived: 5 - 11 Jun, 2005 Back Next UPDATED: June 7, 2005 DEEP THROAT TO DOWNING STREET & THE LOSS OF INNOCENCE In August, 1972, I was in Washington. There I met with members of the finance committee of the Democratic National Committee in their offices in the Watergate. While there, I visited the offices formerly occupied by Larry O’Brien and Spencer Oliver where the burglars had placed the bug on the telephone. Spencer Oliver showed me the telephone, and then we were swept away into a meeting. I pleaded with members of the finance committee for McGovern to run an attack ad based on the Watergate break-in. Howard Weinbaum of the finance committee assured me, “We are working on it, and something definitely will be done.” In all, I made two trips to Washington to plead the case for a negative television attack on the Watergate break-in, and both times, I was assured that action would be taken imminently. Pat Caddell, Bill Clinton, Gary Hart and Warren Beatty were involved in the McGovern campaign. Caddell was the pollster. Clinton was the coordinator for Texas. Beatty and Hart were advisors to the candidate. All of these men made major contributions to the campaign of George McGovern. This was my fourth presidential campaign. In 1968, I had worked for RFK, Eugene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey. This time, I was hoping to see McGovern go seriously negative. In my view, he had no choice. He was down deeply in the polls, and Thomas Eagleton had just been blown off the ticket by the revelations about his private medical history. In 1972, the Watergate break-in was the single most disturbing political scandal in my short career. A team of professional “consultants” to the Nixon White House had been caught inside the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, and virtually nothing was being done about it. This violation of the sanctity of the DNC struck me as uniquely criminal and potentially explosive. It would have been, if only McGovern and his bevy of advisors had used it as aggressively as I was proposing – or so I thought at the time. The Nixon campaign was brilliantly financed and orchestrated. They were able to drown out the few pitiful cries about the Watergate fiasco in order to cover up what was truly a glaring incident. The American public were soon mesmerized by tales of Thomas Eagleton hooked up to the electroshock machinery awaiting his next electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) years before, and America moved on in a reeling and staggering stumble towards tyranny. In the aftermath of the election, I was relieved to see that the late, great Senator Sam J. Ervin, Jr. and his trusty staff headed by Rufus Edmisten would head the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities. As the Senate hearings neared, stories by Woodward and Bernstein began to appear in the Washington Post that began to awaken the sleeping nation. A dark and mysterious figure emerged from the fog to stimulate the ire and the imagination of a generation of Americans. Codenamed “Deep Throat,” this mystery man became the trench-coated, cigarette-smoking shadow wearing a fedora who led the American people through the labyrinth of greed, crime, conspiracy and political espionage that became the Watergate scandal. Some critics belittle Watergate. Nixon called it, “a third rate burglary.” They were attempting to trivialize its importance. Billy Graham said that he never understood what it was all about. When tapes were eventually played that had recorded the evangelist in conversation with Nixon while both men were castigating the “Jews,” the Reverend Billy Graham decided to apologize and never to open his mouth again about the Watergate scandal. Watergate represented the systematic break down of the separation of powers within the American government. It catapulted a small and relatively insignificant Senate committee into global prominence, as the people fought back against the monolithic power of a presidency gone certifiably insane. In one telling moment, Dan Rather questioned Tricia Nixon on her way into the White House. Asking her for a comment about the controversy swirling around her father Rather thrust the microphone in front of the eldest of the two imperious Nixon daughters, and she, retorted, “My father was elected to rule this country, and rule it, he will!” Long before the Bush (43) White House was called the “Imperial Presidency,” that dubious appellation was applied to the Nixon era. Nixon was a smooth criminal. He was a pompous, smug, daring and self-assured con man who had risen to the presidency by a long chain of criminality. Raised as a hyper-orthodox Quaker, Nixon had organized a break in when he was a law student at Duke University in order to cheat on his exams. When he served in the Navy in the South Pacific, he had made a fortune by running a casino for the servicemen. Addicted to a life of crime and vice, Nixon realized that his natural habitat would be the US Congress. He was elected in 1946 and swiftly moved up to the Senate where he joined forces with the despicable Joseph McCarthy. Sam Ervin did not tolerate the likes of either McCarthy or Nixon. He helped bring both men down. He made a speech in the Senate criticizing McCarthy, and he led the Watergate investigation. The man who has unmasked himself as Deep Throat is Mark Felt. A rock-ribbed Republican, Felt was poised to succeed his idol, J. Edgar Hoover, as Director of the FBI. When Felt was passed over by Nixon who selected L. Patrick Gray for the job, he determined to even the score. Even the score is exactly what Felt did. “Follow the money,” Felt intoned to Woodward, and that has become the formula for all subsequent investigations into political corruption. We followed the money in the Watergate conspiracy. E. Howard Hunt’s wife was found dead in an airplane with a massive wedge of greenbacks in her handbag. Witness after witness appeared before the Ervin Committee to report stories of briefcases filled with untraceable currency that had flowed like a torrent into the coffers of the Committee to Re-elect the President, (CRP – pronounced, ‘creep’). Eventually the money led to the, “Smoking Gun Tape” when Richard Nixon had proposed that the break-in should be pinned on a group of Texas fund-raisers. Since these men were close associates of George H. W. Bush and certain to incriminate him if they were to be dragged into the broadening scandal, Bush, Sr. became the first cabinet level official to demand that Nixon should resign. The fallout came swiftly. The next day, Barry Goldwater informed Nixon that if it came to a vote in the Senate, the president would definitely be impeached. Nixon resigned. Deep Throat, the Post, Sam Ervin and his team of top ranking investigators led by Rufus Edmisten had saved America from the ignominy of becoming just another banana republic run by a smooth criminal and his coterie of black bag operators, spies, blackmailers, bagmen and paramilitary thugs. America turned away from the precipice of dictatorship and sailed into the sunset, but it was to be a relatively short voyage. In 1980, the smooth criminals were back in power. In 1986, we followed the money once again, and it led us from the unlikely precincts of revolutionary Iran to the para-military Contras and even unto the drug-dealers of Latin America. This time, the conspiracy was being run out of the White House basement by a deeply demented Marine Colonel, Oliver North, who is still engaged in shocking the world by appearing as a cheerleader for American war crimes on Fox Television. Oliver North never saw a war crime he didn’t like, and that is why so many Republicans love him to this very day. Reagan eventually hung his head in shame, when he confessed that he had been asleep during the secret meetings when negotiations between North and the terrorists were approved. North had armed terrorists in exchange for money to arm more terrorists and to fund the drug trade along the way. American tyranny was once again threatening to tear the heart out of the constitution. The Iran-Contra scandal dwarfed Watergate in the enormity, the audacity and the criminality of the enterprise, but America had become jaded. Today, the scandals of the Bush Era have dwarfed Iran-Contra. Enron, 9/11, Halliburton, Chalabi, Jeff Gannon, bribes to television commentators, the abuse of the media, and a general bonfire of the vanities we presumed to be honor, duty and integrity have consumed the public’s awareness of anything resembling scandal. The Downing Street memo that proves that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld - with premeditation and malice aforethought - shaped intelligence in order to make war on Iraq makes both Watergate and Iran-Contra pale by comparison. Although it caused nearly 100 British Labour Members of Parliament to be thrown out of their offices, the Downing Street Memo is still largely unreported in the American media. That is a scandal of monumental proportions, but it will only be told by historians for American journalism has gone missing in action. In his brilliant comment hyperlinked below, Albert Scardino pronounces the days of the anonymous source to be over. Intelligence – in the form of top grade secret information – has been displaced by new forms of propaganda that lullaby the American public into its comfortable patriotic slumber while their constitution burns. Deep Throat – for all of his foibles as a disgruntled Republican apparatchik – will be remembered as a hero of titanic proportions who helped other titans rescue America from the claws of tyranny. We shall never see his like again. RESOURCES
A study in emasculation -
In the US media, a mission to explain has been replaced by a mission to
avoid
Secrets and lies - Are
whistleblowers such as Deep Throat, who unraveled Nixon's presidency,
really such heroes?
'He helped trigger a
healthy skepticism' - The identity of the Watergate source is revealed
Albert Scardino, Watergate
under the bridge - Anonymous disclosure has outlived its usefulness __________________ Since 1968, Michael Carmichael has been a professional political consultant. Beginning as a Student Coordinator for Robert F. Kennedy, he has worked in five US presidential campaigns as well as over 100 major American political campaigns for federal and state offices. In 1985, he founded The Oxford Centre for Public Affairs in the United Kingdom. In 2003, he founded The Planetary Movement Limited, a global public affairs organization based in the United Kingdom. He has appeared as a public affairs expert on the BBC, European Business News, NPR and many European television broadcasts examining American politics and culture. In addition to his column for The Political Junkies, he is a regular contributor to the Moving Planet weblog. See: www.planetarymovement.org and http://planetmove.blogspot.com/
Last Update: 03/23/2006 |
