Speaker 1: They wanted you to believe it was an open and
shut conspiracy. Nixon was involved and he tried to cover
it up, but what if he was framed? Follow me
down the rabbit Hole about Watergate. Hello, friends, and welcome
back to the rabbit Hole. I'm your host Danny, and
today we are talking about Watergate. Thank you John for
requesting this episode. We decided to do this episode this
week because we covered Cuba last week and there was
a lot of CIA agents that were involved in both things.
So I thought, you know what, let's go ahead and
do Watergate this week. Before we get started, I love
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up your reserves and you're not spending a fortune. So
fifty dollars a month totally worth it. The Watergate scandal
was a political scandal involving the administration of President Richard
Nixon in nineteen seventy two. On June seventeenth, nineteen seventy two,
operatives associated with Nixon's re election campaign were caught burglarizing
and planting listing devices in the Democratic National Committee headquarters
in the Watergate Complex in Washington, d C. But this
scandal starts well before then. In nineteen sixty eight, Richard
Nixon was elected the thirty seventh president. With this election,
he promised to end the war in Vietnam honorably. This
directly opposed Linton Johnson, who was the president prior to him,
and the Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey, who was still for
the war. We were in the Vietnam War for the
same reason we were trying to sabotage Cuba to prevent
the spread of Communists during the Cold War. Many Americans
were against the war because we shouldn't be fighting another
country's war. They also didn't like the draft and the
fact that the war seemed to drag on and on
with really no clear progress and like no clear direction.
Not to mention that many Americans question why the US
would align themselves with the corrupt and undemocratic South Vietnamese government.
It seemed like a costly and unwinnable conflict with no
clear objective. It doesn't help that the public was lied
to with the Gulf of Tonkin incident in order to
justify entering the war, which we talked about in the
very first episode of this podcast. Although many of them
didn't actually know that was a conspiracy at the time,
eventually it would come out that it was a conspiracy
and it was proved that all those people that didn't
believe the Gulf of Tonkin incident were correct. In order
to end the war, Nixon secretly launched Operation Menu. This
was a covert tactical bombing campaign conducted in eastern Cambodia
from March nineteen sixty nine to May nineteen seventy. This
operation was part of both the Vietnam and the Cambodian
Civil War. Targets of these attacks were sanctuaries and base
areas of the People's Army of Vietnam, the North Vietnamese Army,
and the forces of the Vietcong. Many of the places
they bombed were used for resupply, training, and resting between
campaigns across the border in South Vietnam, so it wasn't
like they were ready for an attack. In information released
much later, it seems like Operation Menu was authorized prior
to Nixon getting into office. It was authorized by Johnson. However,
Nixon authorized, for the first time the use of long
range B fifty two heavy bombers to carpet bomb Cambodia.
Operation Freedom dialmediately followed Operation Menu, which expanded the B
fifty two bombing to a much larger area of Cambodia.
All this was to remain a secret. However, nineteen sixty nine,
The New York Times exposed the bombing. That's when Nixon
ordered the wiretapping of reporters and suspected leakers. The FBI
had some issues bugging some targets, but Nixon's domestic policy
chief John Erlickman directly arranged the wire tapping. All of
this was done illegally because they were trying to identify
government leakers. The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act
of nineteen sixty nine required law enforcement to obtain a
warrant for wire taps, but allowed exceptions for national security investigations.
So the Nixon administration decided that these journalists, for to
be exact, were a threat to national security. That doesn't
change the fact that these wire taps were illegal. This
was a huge abuse of surveillance power. He should not
have been doing this. And in fact, over and over
it felt like they continued to do these illegal wire taps.
And we'll talk about it as we go throughout the episode.
They were doing these illegal wire taps under the veil
of like national security, when really they were just like
taking people's rights away. But because the FBI had failed,
Nixon was not happy with them, so he hired the
New York Police detectives Jack Caulfield and Anthony Ulazwicks as
private investigators. In nineteen seventy, the New York Times started
publishing the Pentagon Papers, officially titled Report of the Office
of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force. This top
secret report was commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara
in nineteen sixty seven. There were about seven thousand pages
in this report that were leaked by analysts Daniel Ellsberg,
which exposed government deception about the war's progress. At first,
Nixon seemed unbothered by the whole thing because this report
was created before his presidency, and therefore wouldn't really look
bad on him. It really looked bad for Lynton Johnson,
but like it didn't look bad for Nixon. But Henry
Kissinger got involved. He was the National Security Advisor and
was pissed that his mentee, Daniel Ellsberg would release these documents.
But also he had these backchannel communications with like other
country that he was trying to do some like backside deals, right,
so he didn't want them to think that we couldn't
keep a secret. When these Pentagon papers were being leaked
and it seemed like they were top secret or they
were top secret documents, and they were being leaked by
reporters all around the US, it looks like we don't
know how to keep our top secret documents top secret.
Kissinger did everything in his power to push Nixon into
a frenzy about this situation, causing the Attorney General John
Mitchell to file a restraining order against The Times holding
the papers publication. But this didn't stop the dissemination of
the information. The Times couldn't do it, so the Washington
Post began to publish the papers instead. The New York
Times case ended up in the Supreme Court who ruled
against Nixon. Following the Supreme Court ruling, Nixon ordered his
aid to stop all leaks by any means necessary. This
was like a huge deal. Now, all of a sudden,
we've got leaks, and we need to figure out where
they're coming from. He was especially worried about the files
at Brookings Institution on the Chenault affair. Anna Chenault served
as the chairwoman on the Republican Women for Nixon Committee
during the nineteen sixty eight election. Prior to Hubert Humphrey
running as the Democratic nominee for president, Lyndon Johnson was
running for reelection. He announced in March of sixty eight
that he would be withdrawing from the election. He also
announced his partial halt to the bombings of North Vietnam
and stated his willingness to open peace talks with North
Vietnam on ending the war. These peace talks started in
May of nineteen sixty eight in Paris. This was before
Nixon was elected. Nixon sought to sabotage this peace treaty.
This peace treaty had already been in the works for
about a year prior to the announcement from Johnson. Because
Henry Kissinger was working in the background to try to
end the war. The condition Ho Chi Minh had in
nineteen sixty seven was that the US stopped bombing North Vietnam.
In sixty six, Johnson wasn't willing to do that, but
in sixty eight his tune had changed and he was
willing to stop the bombing. This peace deal would have
looked very different for the Democrats and probably would have
lost Nixon the nineteen sixty eight election. Well, Anna Chanault
was friends with the South Vietnamese ambassador and had even
introduced him to Nixon in July of nineteen sixty eight.
The South Vietnamese president did not want the Paris peace
talks to be successful, and the Paris peace deal was
looking like it was going to work. Chanault worked as
a messenger from the Republican Party to the South Vietnamese ambassador,
feeding him the information that would make them favor the
Republican Party offering an even better peace deal if they
would object to the American offer to cease bombing in
North Vietnam altogether. So, through Chanlt and the ambassador, Nixon
convinced the South Vietnamese president to sabotage the peace talks.
All the while Chanault's film was attached by both the
SEA and the FBI, and the NSA was intercepting South
Vietnamese diplomatic cables back and forth, like from the ambassador
here in America back to Vietnam. So anything the ambassador
sent to the President, they were being intercepted by the NSA.
They all knew exactly what was happening, and there was
evidence of this being held at the Brookings Institution with
the Pentagon papers being leaked in Operation Menu being leaked.
Nixon was super nervous about the Chanal affair being leaked
as well. He urged his aids to quote get in
and get those files, blow the safe and get it
end quote. So they planned to burglarize the Brookings Institution
and get the files. Nixon's aid hired retired CIA agent E.
Howard Hunt to help. As talked about last week, Hunt
helped to arrange the nineteen fifty four Guatemalan COUPDETA and
the nineteen sixty one Baya Pigs invasion, so Hunt really
knew what he was doing. The plot escalated into a
planned fire bombing with burglars posing as firefighters, but White
House counsel John Deane halted the operation of course, like
leave it to an attorney to ruin all the fun.
Hunt didn't give up though. The team just like shifted
their efforts to the leaker of the Pentagon papers, Daniel Ellsberg.
I Howard Hunt teamed up with aides Bud Crow and
David Young in the new Special Investigation Unit, and former
FBI agent G. Gordon Lyddy also joined the team. Lyddy
named the team Odessa, after the Nazi group. He was
very very into Nazism. Actually, throughout all the research that
I did, he kept trying to name things after like
Nazi groups or Nazi invasions, like different Nazi things. He
was probably Nazi himself. But they were ultimately called the plumbers.
To stop all the leaks that were happening focused on Elsberg,
they decided to burglarize the office of Elsberg's psychiatrists to
find compromising material. This burglary reportedly failed, but I think
that might have been a lot. I'm not sure. It
goes back and forth because some people say it failed,
other people say that they did get some information. So
Hunt had hired a bey of pigs, collaborator and a
couple Cuban exiles to help with this burglary. He said
they couldn't find any files and staged the break in
as an addicts rampage with the psychiatrist said Elsburg's health
file in his office appeared to have been fingered. However,
some other people say that there was no file on
Elsburg at all. Liddy suspected that Hunt had his Cuban
guys photographed the files and then sent them to the
CIA instead of giving them to Nixon and his team.
But because the office burglary was a failure, they planned
to burglarize the home of the psychiatrist or Elsberg instead,
but that plan was stopped, which they really should have
just started with the burglary of Daniel Elsberg's house instead
of going to a psychiatrist's office. Next, they plotted to
discredit Elsburg by drugging him with LSD at a Washington gala.
How very ink ultra of them, but the approval for
this plot actually came too late, so that they never
did drug him. They were involved in a number of
other projects. The plumbers were assessing the investigation into Ted
Kennedy's accident, which Nixon was pretty nervous that Ted Kennedy
might come in as like a ringer for the Democratic Party.
So he was very curious about Ted Kennedy and like
what was going on there, assessing if Hoover should be
made to leave the FBI, and forging a cable to
link JFK to the nineteen sixty three assassination of the
South Vietnamese president, because why not blame the assassinated president
on assassinating a president? And they helped to discover the
Pentagon was surveilling the White House via a leaker on
the National Security Council, which just added paranoia to the
already paranoid Nixon. The Plumbers schemes are often called the
White House Horrors because of all the things they did
or they planned to do, and most of them being unsuccessful.
With this deception in Washington and the paranoia, the nineteen
seventy two re election campaign came with a lot of anxiety.
Jack Colfield, one of the New York Police Department's detectives
that Nixon had hired as a PI, proposed a private
sector intelligence operation against the Democrats, Operation Sandwich, where they
get their names for these things, I have no idea
with this operation. They wanted to gather information of the
Democrats' financial status and sexual activities. The operation wasn't only
to target the Democratic Party, but they also wanted to
target the anti Vietnam War movement and the rivals within
Nixon's own Republican Party. This operation sounded too moderate and
they doubted Calfield's competence, so control was actually handed to G.
Gordon Lyddy, who abandoned all of those options in favor
for his own plan, Operation Gymstone. Lyddy was general counsel
for the Committee for the re Election of the President,
so they called this CRP or like creep is what
most people dubbed it, and was put in that position
because he was quote our man in charge of dirty
tricks end quote. As explained by the deputy campaign manager,
this operation proposed a series of plans, with each having
their own code. So Operation Diamond involved kidnapping and drugging
likely protesters and holding them in Mexico. He wanted members
of organized crime to be tasked with this operation. That
way they could kind of like keep their hands clean,
but the Attorney General didn't like love that idea. Operation
Emerald was the plot to have a spy airliner trail
the Democratic nominee. Operation Turquoise was a plan to sabotage
the air conditioning at the Democratic National Convention. Operation Ruby
involved planting spies in the campaign of the Democratic primary
contenders and then the eventual winners campaign. That didn't work.
From what I understand, they tried it, but they could
not infiltrate the campaigns. Operation Sapphire involved a vote with
sex workers to entrap Democrats at the convention so the
Democratic National Convention was held in Miami that year, but
his plot was rejected as unrealistic and expensive by the
Attorney General. Operation Cole was the clandestine funding of the
candidacy of black women Shirley Chisholm to help her campaign
and in turn force the other candidates to pay more
attention to her and to criticize her more. They never
thought that she would actually like win, but by the
other Democrats criticizing her, they would lose the Black vote
because they're like, oh, you're openly criticizing the only black
woman that's running for presidency. To this operation, the AG
told Lyddy quote, you can forget about that. Nelson Rockefeller
is already taking care of that nicely end quote. In
February nineteen seventy two, John Mitchell resigned from being the
Attorney General to become the director of the reelection campaign
for Nixon. When Lyddy proposed burglarizing and bugging the office
of Larry O'Brien at the Democratic National Committee's headquarters situated
in the Watergate Complex, it said that Mitchell approved it. However,
other people say he didn't. I mean, Mitchell came out
and said he didn't approve it, but it is said
officially he approved it because burglarizing had worked so well
for them in the past. They're like, yeah, we're gonna
do it again. It hasn't worked. And actually they didn't
only suggest the DNC headquarters to be bugged. They also
suggested the suites of top Democrats during the Miami convention
in the campaign headquarters of the eventual nominee. Mitchell suggested
also bringing into Las Vegas Sun publisher's office, Hey greenspun,
But they didn't end up doing that. So at first
they're like, Okay, let's bug the suites down in Miami.
But Mitchell actually made like a funny joke and was like,
as long as you remove the bugs from the suites.
Before the Republicans get down there because the Republicans are
gonna go right after the Democrats left to have their
National Committee down there too. So ultimately they decided to
bug Larry O'Brien's office because then eventually whoever their candidate
would be would move into that office and they would
have all this information. Ideally, that's not what happened. The
plumbers recruited their Cuban friends once again for the break in.
They planned the DNC break in for Memorial Day weekend,
probably because they knew that everyone would be out that weekend,
and Bernard Barker, a former CIA operative who helped Hunt
during the Bay of Pigs invasion and who also helped
with the break in of Ellsberg Psychiatrist's office, was called
in once again by Hunt for this burglary, along with
Verheo Gonzalez, a locksmith and Cuban exile involved in the
anti Castro activities, Aoheneo Martinez, also a Cuban exile involved
in anti Castro activities, James W. McCord Junior, a security
coordinator for the re election campaign and a former FBI
and CIA agent, and Frank Sturgis, a former agent who
helped Castro during the Cuban Revolution. The first break in
attempt happened on May twenty sixth, nineteen seventy two, when
Hunt and seven others posed as executives in a banquet
room located beneath the watergate. The issue arose when Martinez
and Hunt got stuck in the banquet room overnight because
they couldn't pick the lock. They tried again the next night,
but failed also because Gonzalez didn't have all the right
tools apparently, so he actually needed to go all the
way back to Miami to retrieve his tools that he
needed to pick the locks, which I feel like they
should have told him that he's gonna be picking locks
before he came anyway, So they had no success up
till that point trying to pick locks. So they came
back the next night, May twenty eighth once again and
actually got in that time, so they had a successful
break in. They took pictures of the convention security files,
and McCord bugged the phones of a staffer and of
O'Brien's secretary. However, McCord couldn't pick up one of the
wire transmitters with his remote receiver. The wire tap of
the staffer's phone worked but O'Brien secretary's wiretap did not work,
but in the following weeks they recorded hundreds of calls.
Although there were many sexual conversations had most of the
information gathered was basically just dismissed. Because they didn't get
the information that they wanted from the break in, they
were directed to break in again and photograph all the
documents in the office. Prior to doing this, former FBI
agent Alfred Baldwin the third, who was monitoring the wire
taps from across the street at the Howard Johnson's Hotel,
disguised himself as the nephew of a former DNC chairman,
John Bailey to get a tour of the floor. Then
Lyddy informed Hunt to break in. The break in would
be reattempted, so the team checked into the watergate the
night of June sixteenth. For the other break in, they
had put tape on the latches to prevent the doors
from locking. Obviously they did not have success picking locks,
but for this break in, like they decided okay, they
decided to do the same thing. But it was so
weird because instead of taping the locks vertically up and
down to where nobody would be able to see the
tape on the locks, they taped them horizontally to where
the tape went around the door and anybody could have
seen that the door was taped. At about one am,
Frank Willis, the security guard, started his shift. While doing
his rounds, he noticed the tape on the garage door.
He took it off, assuming basically like a worker had
just left it. He didn't really think much of it, right.
Willis then left the watergate to go have some food
at the Howard Johnson's next door with the last intern
who was on the DNC floor in the offices that night.
In turn left He's like, hey man, you want to
go get some food. The two of them leave to
go get food. Cool. Now they have free rein to
break into the DNC offices, but noticing the tape was
removed didn't stop the plumbers from continuing their break in.
So obviously the security guard had done his job. Good
for him. But now these burglars are still going to
break in. So they reopened the door and then McCord
he taped the locks again the exact same way it
was taped prior, and at the DNC office, they opted
to remove the door from its hinges instead of just
picking the lock. Why wouldn't that take more time? None
of it makes a lot of sense. At about one
fifty am, Willis returns from his meal and noticed that
the garage door had been taped again, and he called
the police. This time. He was like, something's weird about this. Baldwin,
who was the spotter, noticed a car had pulled up
to the building, but it was an unmarked police car,
so he didn't tell the team that this was here,
kind of just like ignored it. He only contacted Hunt
when the officers were in the building and were turning
lights on on different floors, and Hunt was thinking that
it was probably just the security guard, so he just
ignored the warning and they continued doing what they were doing.
This time. Their goal was to take a picture of
every single document in the DNC office and to put
that second wiretap in. The police continued moving through the
building until they noticed the tape on the doors on
the sixth floor, and that's when they began searching the
DNC offices. McCord and four others surrendered to the police
under false names, while Hunt and Lyddy escaped, telling Baldwin
to do the same it seemed kind of like a
small burglary at first glance, They're like, oh, just some
guys breaking in here. But the FBI launched an investigation anyway,
because that's their job getting a tip. Bob Woodward, a
journalist with the Washington Post, went to the courthouse to
cover the stories of this burglary, and he got to
just notice something strange about it. First, they were arrested
with more than thirty five hundred dollars in cash and
high end surveillance and electronic equipment. The money was one
hundred dollar bills in sequential order, which is odd. And
one of the guys actually worked for the CIA, and
that was odd too. This suggested that the burglary wasn't
just any ordinary crime, but that it might be political espionage.
That's when Woodward and another Washington Post journalist, Carl Bernstein,
began connecting the burglars to people working for Nixon's re
election campaign, The Committee to re Elect the President often
mocked his creep like we said. They followed the money
and discovered that campaign funds were being used for illegal
political spying, money was being laundered through multiple accounts, and
that the break in was part of a broader campaign
of sabotage against political opponents. They were getting this information
from a secret source inside the government. They never said
who the source was. I mean it came out years
years later. For a long time, they allowed everyone to
believe that it was a Nixon staffer. This source, nicknamed
Deep Throat, secretly confirmed details and guided the reporters, giving
hints like the investigation reached high levels of the government
and that officials were trying to block the FBI investigation.
The reporting from Woodward and Benstein kept this burglary in
the news in relevant, especially during a time when news
came and went pretty fast, and all these other news
sources kind of thought it was just this minor break in. Yeah,
they probably talked about it, but it wasn't something they
were keeping in the news. Well, the Washington Post continued
to post about it because Woodward and Bernstein had this
source that kept giving them information. They kept publishing new revelations,
forcing national attention on this burglary that was considered minor
to so many others. They had uncovered evidence that the
Nixon administration had paid hush money to the burglars, attempted
to block the FBI investigation use federal agencies like the
CIA to interfere with law enforcement and destroy evidence. It
was the work of Woodward and Bernstein that helped to
prompt the Senate Watergate Committee, hearings, a special prosecutor investigation,
and court cases against administration officials. Just weeks after Nixon
was sworn into office for his second term in nineteen
seventy three, the Senate voted to establish a committee to
investigate Watergate. The rest of that year, the Watergate scandal
was everywhere. The break in of Ellsberg's psychiatrists came out,
and the fact that Nixon recorded everything that was happening
in his office came out, and resignations were happening everywhere.
Staffers resigning, people were freaking out. There was just a
lot of pressure to impeach Nixon, and a lot of
fingers were pointed at Nixon. He had made the investigation
incredibly difficult, claiming a constitutional separation of powers and refused
to allow his aids to testify. However, executive privilege doesn't
extend to cover criminal behavior, and it was even threatened
that the Sergeant at arms would arrest the aids that
refused to testify. Nixon swore he knew nothing of the
break in, even giving a speech where he famously said, quote,
I am not a crook end quote, although his aids
testified that he did have prior knowledge to the break in.
John Dean, who was the White House counsel, told investigators
that he had discussed the Watergate cover up with Nixon
at least thirty five times. Learning of the presidential tapes,
these recordings of everything that was happening in the Oval
Office that Nixon had been recording himself. They were requested
by a committee who thought that like these tapes would
be the smoking gun. If they could just get these tapes,
they get to the bottom of everything. Nixon, for the
longest time, refused to actually give these tapes over and
tell the Supreme Court rule that he had to, And
it wasn't long after that that the committee approved three
articles of impeachment against Nixon, obstruction of justice, abusive power,
and contempt of Congress. However, before the House could vote
on the impeachment, Nixon became the first US president to
resign from office on August eighth, nineteen seventy four, making
Vice President Gerald Ford the President of the United States.
But what if this was all an elaborate plan to
get the president out of office. It seems far fetched
and odd, but there's a lot of evidence here. This
break in happens in June of nineteen seventy two, during
the election year. The information being put out by Woodward
and Bernstein, who were instrumental in keeping this in the
press and prompting the Senate to create a committee, was
coming out before the election, and Nixon still won the
election by a landslide, one of the biggest landslides in
presidential history. Like when people talk about landslides and elections besides,
like Ronald Reagan, Nixon's one of those that everyone talks about.
He was the popular candidate to win presidency, and yet
he was forced to resign or get impeached just two
years in due to this scandal. The scandal run almost
entirely by the CIA, because the Cuban Americans had been
recruited by the CIA for several things up to that point,
mostly to do with Cuba. Hunt was CIA. James McCord
was CIA. The only person in this whole thing that
wasn't CIA was Gordon Lyddy, who was FBI, and he
was only FBI because he got a favor. The break
in seemed just like way too risky for the reward. Right,
they did have one wire tap, they had pictures of
some of the documents. They weren't really getting anything from
the wiretap that they did have, So what made them
think that getting pictures of all the other documents and
getting the wire tap in the other phone would actually
work this time? They would actually get a smoking gun?
What was the point? I mean, honestly, up until this point,
people debate that all the time, we still don't know
why they were actually in the office. They went back
into the DNC office after failing the first time and
being somewhat successful the second time, in hopes to get
pictures of all documentation and get the second wire tap
up and working. This time, plus the first time they
had gotten away with the break in, but this time
it all seemed like so sloppy, almost like they wanted
to get caught, from the way that they taped the
doors open where you could literally see the tape, to
the way they didn't listen to their lookout they took
the door off the hinges the way. They immediately surrendered
to law enforcement and pleaded guilty. They didn't call in
any favors from the FBI, the CIA, or anybody to
sweep this under the rug. They didn't call CREEP, they
called nobody. They just like waited as if they were
supposed to take the fall for this, like they were
supposed to get caught. But let's back up a little
bit here. Lyddy had showed up at CREEP in December
of nineteen seventy one, after basically being kicked out of
his other post, announced that he had been promised at
least half a million dollars for his Gymstone plan. Jed MacGruber,
who was the interim director of CREEP, waiting for Mitchell
to resign as Attorney General and then come head up CREEP.
He basically told Liddy he doesn't control the money, he
can't authorize any amount of money for this intelligence plan.
That they needed to go to John Mitchell and get
the authorization. John Mitchell at the time was still the AG.
So they go over there. He ends up receiving like
a quarter million dollars and Mitchell says, do your thing. Allegedly. Eventually,
obviously part of the plan was approved because they did
break into the Watergate. It's unclear who actually approved it.
Magruder swears Mitchell did. However, Mitchell and there was like
a third guy in the meeting who I guess was
a loyalist to Mitchell says that he didn't approve it.
I don't know, goes back and forth. But after the
arrest of the five burglars at Watergate, only the members
of CREEP knew of this plan. Neither Nixon nor any
of his senior staff had ever met Liddy, nor had
they had any idea of his plan up to this point,
but the CIA did. Liddy was fired from CREEP after
the arrests, but was later indicted for his role along
with the five burglars and Howard Hunt. And though he
had been the mastermind behind the intelligence plan to begin with,
he was not the guy behind the cover up. So yes,
Gordon Liddy planned this break in. However, when the break
in fell apart, the cover up came. The cover up
happened because John Dean, the president's lawyer, took matters into
his own hands, the same John dene that would eventually
go on to try to save himself during this cover
up and be like, oh, yeah, I talked to Nixon
about this plan, like thirty five different times that John Dean.
Dean joined the Nixon staff in nineteen seventy and was
relatively unimportant because of his title White House counsel, he
got away with a lot of things, mostly under the
radar because no one was really paying any attention to him.
He not only recruited Liddy to prepare his Gemstone Plan,
but was also present in the Attorney General's office when
the plan was presented. He then took on responsibility of
the cover up to try to not have this burglary
tie back to Nixon and his senior staffers, when in
reality he was also just trying to cover his own butt.
He was later disbarred for his actions, which included encouraging
others to commit perjury, destroying evidence retrieved from Hunt's safe,
embezzling four thousand dollars of campaign funds to pay for
his honeymoon, and authorizing the distribution of hush money to
the burglars. All the things that the reporters were saying
were Nixon's things that Nixon was doing, that Nixon's re
election campaign was doing, which ties it to Nixon, It
was actually John Dean the entire time doing all of
those things. So this whole cover up was really just
to save his own ass. All the while, you have
Mark Felt, the associate director of the FBI, feeding information
to the journalists Woodward Bernstein under the source name Deep Throat,
of the whole event, making it look like Nixon was
behind it, when in fact it was Dean who put
the wheels in motion and who had been laundering and
embezzling funds. Then, when the cover up collapsed in nineteen
seventy three, Dean was the first person to run to
the prosecution looking for immunity in exchange for information. He
was like, I know all the information, just make sure
I don't go to jail. Actually, he ended up not
going to jail. He was going to testify against other
creep officials, but when no immunity offer was put on
the table, he changed his story to accusing Nixon's closest
aids of supporting his cover up plans. Finally, he had
a friend get in contact with the Senate Irvin Committee,
who did finally give him immunity in exchange for testimony
against his former colleagues, causing him to become this like
star witness and portraying himself as this whistleblower instead of
the mastermind, which is how the FBI saw him and
what he actually was. But even to this day, he
still maintains this like innocence about him. He like writes
books and he does all these things because he's like, no, no, no,
I was the whistleblower. I was the guy that told
everybody what was going on, told everybody about this cover Dude,
you were behind the cover up. As mentioned before, the
FBI's associate director, Mark Felt was the source for the
journalist's information. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein weren't just lucky.
They weren't just randomly picked by the FBI's associate director.
It was planned out that they would be the guys
to get this information out. So Bob Woodward attended Yale
on an an ROTC scholarship and was a member of
the Book and Snakes Secret Society. He then was commissioned
into the Navy, where he was a communication officer. There
were some rumors that he was an intelligence officer, but
he actually specifically said no, I was never an intello
like I promise, so take that as you may. When
he got out of the Navy in August, nineteen seventy,
he was admitted to Harvard Law School, but chose not
to attend and instead applied to the Washington Post. While
taking graduate courses in Shakespeare in international relations, he was
dropped from the Post for not having enough experience, but
after a year at another paper, he was hired back
at the Post. Baby reporter. This guy like did not
have very much experience. One year of experience somewhere else,
new baby journalist. This same guy just so happened to
be assigned to the Watergate Burglery alongside another noviicge reporter,
Carl Bernstein. Bernstein's background isn't as a parent like with Wood,
where we're like, okay, you were in the Navy. You
had the secret society background, like there's a lot of
secret societies at Yale, Like you've got a lot going on.
Carl was a little more subtle. He was a journalist
for his school paper than like a local paper. After
high school, however, the local paper wanted him to have
a degree, so he went to the University of Maryland
College Park, where he was a reporter for the school's
paper there as well, but he was dismissed for having
bad grades. He then went on to become a full
time reporter for a paper in New Jersey, where he
won a prize in an investigative reporting. He left New
Jersey and began working for the Washington Post in nineteen
sixty six, so he had been at the Post longer
than Wouldward. The only thing that I can point to
for Bernstein is that he was born to a secular
Jewish family, which I hate to say, like it's because
he's a Jew, But that's kind of like the only
thing in his background that we've got going for us
as to why they would choose him. His parents were
activists and they were part of the Communist Party USA
in the nineteen forties, so that could also play a role.
But again, Woodward's background is a little bit more imperent
as to why they would choose him. Maybe Bernstein just
got lucky, but I doubt it. Either way, these young
guys were chosen to cover this. Not only that, they
were also chosen to be given the information from the
secret source from the FBI, Like, what are the odds
of that? Right? The FBI and CIA needed this information
to stay relevant to stir the pot. They probably thought
that by doing this before the election, that Nixon wouldn't
get elected, which was not the case, and they probably
thought that by doing all this before the election, Nixon
wouldn't get elected, then it's no problem at all. But
because he did win and by such a landslide, like
he was so popular, they needed to continue to run
his name through the mud. They needed to get him
out of office. And what better way to sway the
court of public opinion than to use the paper, the
people's source of news, the propaganda machine. This is where
everybody's getting all their news. People aren't second guessing what
the government's pushing them. I mean, maybe a little bit
now because JFK has been assassinated, but not to the
point that we do today. The reputation of these journalists
moving forward was that they were two of the best
journalists in the industry, but they didn't find any leads
for themselves, Like they were literally handed every single piece
of information and then they just like wrote about it.
They didn't give officials any information that they didn't already have,
and in fact, they're only reporting on what they had
already known because officials were giving it to them. And
that's all the information they got from deep throat I
mean deep throat would say like, hey, follow the money,
or you need to dig a little bit further into this,
and they would and then they'd write about it. But
by the FBI giving this information or like little nuggets
of information, they basically guaranteed that Woodward and Bernstein would
report about it. And because Watergate was so big, they
kept posting it, kept posting it, kept putting it out
in the newspaper. But why would the intelligence complex be
involved in this? Because they didn't like Nixon. There was
a huge strain on the relationship between the intelligence community
and the Nixon administration, and it was no secret that
there was all this beef in Washington. Nixon knew this
because all the leaks that had happened during his first
term as president. He was on edge because of information
leaking to the press. He knew much of the federal
bureaucracy was politically hostile to him. The issues with the
FBI started when Hoover died in nineteen seventy two. I
would okay, I wouldn't say they started then, but that's
when things really ramped up. The FBI had been run
by Jagor Hoover for decades from nineteen thirty five until
his death in nineteen seventy two. After his death, the
FBI was going through this leadership uncertainty. During this time,
the Nixon administration attempted to influence investigations. It makes me
wonder if they were testing, like who would be loyal
to them and was going to put that person into leadership,
which is why they're trying to influence investigations. But also
some people point to this as the reason that Mark
felt was spilling information to the Post. Mark wanted to
be the director of the FBI and was passed up,
so he was trying to point the finger at Nixon
for Watergate, which is why Woodward allowed everyone to believe
that his source was a Nixon staffer. The thing about
this is that it seems more opportunistic instead of like
the real reason behind the sabotaging of the sitting president. Yes,
it was a bonus that he got to take out
some of his own frustrations of getting passed over for
the director, but not the main reason they were doing it.
Other people believe Mark got involved in this way because
he wanted to protect the FBI's independence, their investigations and
the Nixon and Nixon's administration was overstepping, so they decided
to frame him. Again, seems more opportunistic and not the
real reason, because so many presidents have gotten involved in
investigations when they absolutely should not have, and the FBI
didn't feel the need to frame them in the same
way only Nixon. So yes, maybe part of the reason,
but again I don't think that's the whole reason. Some
of the media reasons the intelligence community may have had
it out for him is because he was trying to
centralize foreign policy decision making inside the White House instead
of relying heavily on the traditional intelligence bureaucracy. They limited
information share with some agencies, conducted diplomacy through secret channels,
and used the National Security Council staff more heavily than
ever before, which is where Henry Kissinger was well. The
CIA and the FBI don't only answer to the president,
They answer to the deep state and the people above
the president. They work for more people than just whoever
runs the country. So Nixon shutting them out created this
issue for the deep state for everyone else that's also
relying on this information. They didn't have access to the
information that they used to during the Watergate scandal. The
White House attempted to limit the scope of the FBI
inquiry as part of the cover up. They wanted to
use a CIA to tell the FBI the matter involved
national security. Of course, they didn't realize this was a
joint effort involving both the CIA and the FBI. But
another reason that I learned about when I talked to
Jeff Shepherd on this topic is that Nixon was doing
a lot in communities throughout the US. He was really
uniting people, and that is really dangerous when you're trying
to usher in a new world order, when you're trying
to create chaos to get people to want the government more.
He was creating this unity, and I'm wondering if that
was another reason that they were like, he's gotta go.
It's interesting to me that for years they tried to
say the conspiracy was that Nixon was involved, and then
tried to cover up his involvement. But the true conspiracy
is that Nixon was never involved and was actually framed
to look guilty and resigned from his second term with
everyone believing that he was guilty. Nixon pissed off the
wrong people, and he paid for it. Now I'm not
trying to say that he was like a saint or anything.
He messed up in a lot of ways, but maybe
Watergate was not one of them. But that's up to you.
What do you think was Nixon involved or was he framed?
You can leave a comment on YouTube or Spotify and
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