Speaker 1: Want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingana Show. Gonna
take another little break from the World Wars from the
World War One series with Tom's seven seven seven, and
we concentrate a little bit on a something from my
lifetime that, I mean, you know, this might be one
of the first political things I remember my parents talking about. Yeah,
I mean I was real little, but I think this
may have been it. But Watergate Richard Nixon nineteen seventy three.
So what's up.
Speaker 2: The issue with Watergate? It's there's a historical aspect to it,
like a profoundly historical aspect, as well as a political one.
And it's particularly timely today on grounds of what's underway
with mister Trump and what has been underway with them,
and the degree was Trump really is the error to
mister Nixon can't be overstated. People misunderstand when I say that,
I'm not saying that Trump is has anything approaching the
intellect and Nixon, or that his significance and historical capacities
is analogous. But what he he really, he truly is
the heir to the Silent Majority coalition, what remains of it,
and the manner in which the deep State works I
don't think anybody denies any more that the deep state
is an actual feature of government. That's basically a kind
of shorthand polemical or colloquial way of talking about I mean,
you know, Burnham's managerial state. It shouldn't be controversial with
people that it exists, okay, But institutions at scale, particularly
institutions of government, they behave in predictable ways, okay. And
the forces are rating as mister Trump as it were,
basically identical, all right. And the reasons for his disqualification
from public office, you know, and is his removal from office,
and now with subsequent dis qualification by by extra legal
and extra constitutional means, you know, it owes to the
same phenomena, if not the same set of circumstances and conditions. Obviously, However,
in Nixon's case, you know, we're dealing with the origins
of of what the hostility to Nixon was, and that's
more complicated than what may superficially appear. You know, what
put Nixon on the map as a national political figure,
independent of his association with Eisenhower was was the fact
that he demanded elder Hiss be prosecuted. Okay, Elder Hiss
has probably kind of fallen out out of you know,
living memory. I mean probably this happened like almost a
generation agoing now, Okay, but Elder hist was undoubtedly a
Soviet asset that they can't be denied, even though to
this day there was a book as recently as two
thousand that claimed that this was some sort of elaborate
slander of his, you know, owing to owing to some
hostility that you know, the East Coast establishments such that
you know, it existed mid century, you know, and it
was profoundly powerful. And still that's another thing that can't
be overstated. And what we're going to get into about Nixon.
The degree to which the local of American power, political power,
and financial power, the degree to which that was concentrated
on the East Coast, they can't be overstated. As recently
as the seventies and eighties, you the kind of the
kind of what remained of the old ruling cast, you know,
kind of looked looked with disdain, you know at the
Midwest and the West Coast is is not really in
the game politically, and as you know, not packing not
having the pedigree to challenge for public office. Okay, and
to that the fact that somebody like Nixon was was
totally at odds with with their values, at least in
terms of the coalition that that he came to lead.
You know, when you have a you have this situation
has developed with Watergate. But in the case of Hiss himself,
you know, like I said, he uh his he was uh,
he was he was truly like American gentry. He was
one of five children. Both parents came from these sort
of form of these truly aristocratic Baltimore families who could
trace their roots to the mid eighteenth century. His is
interestingly his his uh. The name was an angler, it
was it was an anglicization of Hess. His sounded more anglophone.
His paternal great great grandfather had emigrated from Germany. And
I believe that was his only like non non anglophone ancestor, which,
of course, you know, when those circles like was uh
was cosmetically problematic. Has said something of a tragic upbringing.
His father, the family never had any money, you know,
they lived in genteel poverty, as it were, you know,
like a lot of people of that kind of cast
and station did. By the by the early twentieth century,
despite the fact that they were retained kind of like
their social registered type, you know, credibility and political clout.
His father, Charles his he tried a number of different
business ventures, you know, some which fared better than others.
He did fairly well as a UH as the head
of a dry goods importing firm, becoming becoming a top
executive and and majority shareholder. This came to an end
and around nineteen oh seven has lost most of the
family's fortune that he's so kind of diligently accrued, and
he committed suicide by cutting his throat with a razor
of all means, I mean, really really kind of awful stuff.
His UH wife was now a widow, you know, with
these five children, and she subsequently had to rely on
you know, her family's money and basically hand out from
people to survive. And UH Alger Hisss, who was only
two years old at this time, presumably has made it
had a big impact on his life, you know, being
this guy who had this kind of outsized heritage. But
he lived up. But he grew up you know, in
a fag of his household, in relative poverty. Fast forward
to UH his adult life. The UH ended up at
Harvard Law School. It was a projy of Felix Frankfurter,
you know, which became a kind of ingress into the
the New Deal regime. Early on, Frankfurter had written a
book on the Sacho and Vanzetti case. Soacho and Vanzetti,
we're communist a Jason anarchists who were who were convicted
of terrorism and executed in the New York Electric Share.
They were kind of the this was kind of the
Rosenberg case before the Rosenberg case. And Frankfurter he wrote
an entire treaties claiming that these men were convicted unjustly
for no particular factual reason, just kind of because and
uh and uh, and his was kind of the what
was kind of this like goyish prince who Frankfurt or
king to really like. Okay, his subsequently stirred as a
clerk to Alverer Wendelholms Junior. So he was kind of
covering all his bases, okay, you know, with the tribe
as well as with his own people. You know, ended
up in this hot shot Boston law firm and later
uh later in New York firm then known as Cotton.
Frank Franklin, Wright and Gordon. I don't keep up with
the East Coast silk stocking law firms. I have no
idea what it is today, but it does still exist
in some legacy capacity. His was a he was a
radical new dealer, became a government attorney, served briefly the
Justice Department, and he got a plumb position with the
Night Committee, which, despite the presence of people like his,
was doing God's work. You know. They investigated war profiteering
cost overruns and you know, the pocketing of these overruns
by people in the arments industry and in the financial
sector who had you know, funded these these massive out
ways to fight World War One. And a lot of
the for clarity, the Ny Committee was not Nora was
Ny himself. Some some some some kind of radical. A
lot of these people were, you know, like those who
later became America First types, you know, but this was, uh,
the way the way radicals left radicals obviously, I mean,
the way they fell on the usual of World War
One is interesting. You know, they basically towed the Soviet
line that you know, this was an imperialist war that
was you know, came about only to the intrigues of
capitalists and war profiteers, and in the case of the
Great War, as we've been covering somewhat and we'll get
more into that, that that actually wasn't totaled too far off,
you know. I mean, like we've talked about the uh
the degree to which high finance quite literally had Wilson
by the short hairs and essentially demanded the demand did
he not allow, you know, a default on these massive
unsecured lines of credit that had been extended to the
British crown. The degree to which that was an essential
approximate cause of American intervention, they really can't be overstated.
But either as it may, during the same period his uh,
he he defended a lot of labor organizers and adjacent
institutions against challenges of their legitimacy, either of political nature
or of a or or or a criminal one. He uh,
it became very insinuated into the Agricultural Adjustment administration, which
uh was for whatever reason, strongly connected to a lot
of radical elements, more than a few of whom were uh,
we're communists. I believe that oh to the outsized power
of agribusiness in America than is now as well as
the fact that kind of the bane, the bane of
Marxist Leninists, you know, be them vanguardists or people who
favored a broad front strategy with the conspicuous absence of
of of agriculturally situated you know, people and institutions within
their ranks. But he uh, most notably his kind of
shining moment with the Night Committee was uh when DuPont
Chemical or Dupon Industrial I think it was known at
the time. He got the opportunity in nineteen thirty four
to thirty five as an investigator and his official title
was legal assistant to the Night Committee. But he was
able to badger these do these big shot dupat executives
and officials on cross examination and Bernard Baruk, a chairman
of the War Industry's board under Wilson and a key
and a key personage in the administration is waging of
the war itself. He really he really dragged him over
the raked him over the coals, as it were, and
and just dragged him, you know, before the republic audience.
He was rewarded and his younger brother Donald, they were
rewarded with a posting under Cordell Hull in the State Department.
His was the direct assistant to Assistant Secretary of State
Francis Sire, who was Wilson's son in law incidentally and
uh as well as special assistant to the Director of
the Office for Far Eastern Affairs during the war years
thirty nine to forty four. Specifically, his was an assistant
to Stanley Hornbeck, who again was insinuated into the Far
Eastern Affairs as a special advisor to Crodel Hall himself.
So his was a man who was very well situated
to impact policy at a very high level. You know,
he wasn't some nobody. He wasn't some. He wasn't some. Uh,
he wasn't he wasn't some. He wasn't some you know,
uh legacy up whose family no longer going a fortune.
So we were more of the kind of plum jobs
that he could like afford gross reason things. I mean,
he he had real power. Okay, those who would contest
that light rebuttal is that as the war came to
an end, but not only not only did his attend
to the US State Department delegation at Yalta, you know
where quite literally the Soviet Union was was was afforded,
you know, half of the political map of Europe. But he, uh,
he was. He was named director of the Office of
Special Political Affairs in ninety forty four. This with in
this office was specifically and purposefully organized to plan for
post war international organizations, first among the United Nations. Okay,
his his himself was instrumental in the drafting of the
United Nations Charter and the negotiations that went into that. Okay,
I don't think I need to I don't think I
need to continue to list his accomplishments and resume to
convey that, you know, he was somebody who had real cloud.
Long story short, when it came to light based on
a whole testimony that you know, hits had been a
Soviet asset for many years, you know, and this was
this was that arguably the zena of what came to
be known as the McCarthy era. The fact that Nixon
was his primary antagonist. You know. McCarthy, I believe, was
a well intentioned individual, and people forget too. What brought
down McCarthy was Roy Cones, uh, you know, to be
delicate about it, his uh persuasion and his exploitation of
his office to get special treatment for David Shine who
if he was not actively involved in a homosexual affair
with him, Shine was quite obviously the object of Cone's affection.
That's what brought down McCarthy. It wasn't that McCarthy was
going after innocent people, or it confabulated some some imaginary
narrative of communist under the bed, or whatever the current
claim is of court history. But regardless, even before all
of that, McCarthy, McCarthy had a reputation as something of
a yokel you know, he was from Wisconsin, whose representatives
and senators didn't get a lot of respect. He was
a notorious alcoholic. It was a lot easier to dismiss
somebody like McCarthy than it was somebody like Nixon, okay,
who even his enemies admitted was an obvious, you know,
savant and you know, a consummately serious individual. And Nixon
had studied the FBI record to the point practically of memorization.
You know, his what he presented against his was air tight.
And the establishment from whence his emerged never forgave Nixon,
you know, I know, in the Oliver Stone film and things,
which in some ways it is a very good film,
the biopic of Nixon, Nixon kind of presented, you know,
at the throughout the film and particularly at the height
of Watergate and his fall from grace, as this man
kind of you know, tormented by phantasms and seeing these
sort of establishment antagonists, you know, in the shadows, who
may or may not have even really existed. That's a
complete mischaracterization. The East Coast establishment hated Nixon, you know,
the New Dealers hated Nixon. They they hated him. They
hated him in a way that not even people who
suffered from trunk arrangement syndrome hate Trump, you know, like
they This cannot be overstated. Okay, So if you want
to understand, we're gonna we're gonna get into the career
Nixon and and and the circumstances of water Eat in
a minute. But this cannot be overstated, Okay, in the
degree to which, in part the Watergate scandal was revenged
for Elger Hiss, that must be considered. Otherwise everything subsequent
is missing a key component of the evidentiary record and
the causal nexus. Okay. Now, I believe also what's key
to understanding the attack not just on Nixon, but executive
power generally after World War Two the only historian mainstream
his story, and I know who addresses this specifically is
Paul Johnson, who I have mixed feelings about. He's written
some very good He's done some very good work. He
also tends to resort to kind of shrill, neo countage
kind of canards, particularly discussing, you know, US foreign policy
and things like that. And he's got a tremendous blind
spot about why the fortune is the American right precipitously
and totally deteriorated after Nurmer. But that had aside, he
brings up the point of what exactly brought down Johnson,
you know, Lyndon Daines Johnson. Now Johnson at one time
had a very strong mandate. The Vietnam War until tet
and we'll get into that. In the moment, too, was
fairly popular Johnson's, uh, Johnson pursuing zealously, you know, the
civil rights crusade and doing so in a way that
on other on other policy initiatives would have been viewed
probably as overreach. But because you know, the the East
coast power center of the country as well as you
know radicals all on Sundry who identified with those values,
you know, they viewed it as you know, unnecessary evil,
you know, for the chief executive, you know, to kind
of like bypass legislative solutions and even you know this,
and even even the machinery of the judiciary in order
to kind of force outcomes. That's why Johnson was doing
what he was doing in that regard. You know, Johnson
kind of the soul of a pick. Okay, he was
not a good man, but you know, the degree to
which he was basically cow telling to an establishment that
he knew had nothing but disdain for him, it's got
to be considered. And you know Johnson, Johnson was kind
of the consummate. Uh, They've probably never been a man
who was more skilled at backroom dealing. And the achievement
of consensus on a key policy initiative is across the partisan
divide in Congress, like it's really remarkable. But Johnson was
also a redneck Southerner, okay, and he said he said,
and know on certain terms like literally he's quoted saying,
I don't not believe that the nation would unite definitively
behind any Southerner. And when asked why, he said, well,
the metropolitan press would never permit it. Okay, what he's
UPHI what he was euphemizing when he said, Metropolitan press,
take from that what you will. I think people know
the history of this country as well as some aspects
of the present dilemma, should be able to see through
that pretty clearly. It increasingly became a narrative in the
national media that what Johnson was doing in Vietnam specifically
was dangerous. Now, mind you, in living memory, there was
the Roosevelt administration where Roosevelt had literally incarcerated Germans, Italians
and Japanese and concentration camps. He'd shut down national media,
absorbing all coverage and reporting on the war into the
number and authority of the Office of War Information. He
had people arrested without formal charges for criticizing the war effort,
under auspices of national security exigencies like the idea that
the idea that LBJ was somehow acting against precedent in
time of war was preposterous and obviously two you know,
uh Kennedy and and Johnson's predecessor of Eisenhower. You know,
not only was Eisenhower, not only was Eisenhower the equivalent
of a five star of which there's you know, only
been three. He very much ran the oval office like
a five star general, would you know. So this kind
of sudden, this kind of sudden declaration that an imperial
executive was afoot. That's and that's on American It was
a it didn't make a lot of sense upon a
superficial analysis, but there was a basic revolt against authority
that had been brewing, and a lot of that had
to do with Again, despite the fact that Johnson was
very much cow towing to a minority, elite opinion with
the Civil Rights Act and the and and all of
sixty four and all the kind of incidental and adjacent
efforts towards forced integration and you know, social engineering, it
didn't matter. And the president being the country's only nationally
elected representative and being a prime symbol of government, and
you know, kind of the great power that's expressly coded
into Article two as the kind of new political culture
post nineteen thirty three, you know, ossified.
Speaker 1: It.
Speaker 2: Uh, the deep state was no longer willing to abide
an executive who acted like a chief executive. This uh
became more pronounced when Johnson. When Johnson resigned under under pressure.
But you know, there was something of the Uh, there's
something of the same treatment in Nixon and Johnson. Ironically,
I mean even again, you know, the the Elger his
question was an essential cause, if not the sole approximate
cause of, you know, the hostility in Nixon by the
national press and the deep state. But again it was
Nixon status's outsider, you know. Ninety sixty two Nixon ran
for governor of California, and Nixon was a Californian. And uh,
I believe that this is why he had a very
pacific centric, if view of Jewish strategic matters. And I
highly recommend that not just as memoirs, but the books
he wrote on Grand strategy in the epoch after he
left office. It indicates a very strong understanding of the
key strategic implications of not just military force deployments, particularly
of a strategic nuclear category in the Far East, but
he had an understanding of the outside power in global
economic terms that the orient would have. And this kind
of thing was totally alien to the East Coast establishment.
Among other things, they looked at Nixon as like upstart,
okie trash, punching above his weight. These East Coast reporters
during the campaign for the nineteen sixty two governorship. They
out now just poked fun at Nixon. They made fun
of his clothes, They made fun of the way he talked,
you know, they made fun of his alleged awkwardness, you know,
and kind of lack of in our arsenal manners. That's
the famous, the famous sound bite where Nixon says to
the press afterwards, just think how much you're going to
be missing you want to Nixon to kick around any more, gentlemen,
because this is my last press conference. That was his
concession announcement in sixty two.
Speaker 1: Well, did how much should this carry over from the
nineteen sixty campaign?
Speaker 2: That was part of it? Definitely, But I mean he
he his concession there. I mean, Nixon actually looked like
a gentleman in nineteen sixty in a lot of ways,
especially especially he never gave up till the end. But
there was a lot of dirty pool in that election,
and probably in absolute terms, like in real numbers terms,
it was probably too close to all the kind of
full the kind of full front of assault on Nixon
by the East Coast press amidst uh that kind of
presentation that you know, the national audience had been afforded,
would have would have been somewhat unseemly. I make the
point about sixty two because in a lot of ways,
like the perverbial mask dropped what prompted Nixon's comeback. It know,
as we've talked about, you know, the catastrophic defeat of
very Goldwater. You know, Goldwater himself was a bizarre placeholder,
but it wasn't just going to a lack of personages
who could interface effectively with kind of the the era
of new media, you know, is that like we've talked
about Kennedy's literal eulogy to Taft and profiles and courage,
you know, post Nuremberg, and there was no more American right.
It was it was it was for all practical purposes,
illegal in policy terms and and ethical and optical terms.
It was just unthinkable, you know, to have an America
First party. So what was the Republican Party. Well, you know,
they got behind Ike because like who could you know,
who could who could disdain Ike? You know, I'm speaking
within the bounded rationale, the perception of the time, obviously,
so they picked Goldwater. You know, again, here's this gadfly,
here's this gadfly proto libertarian who goes around you know,
basically like reciting manifestos about why we need to abolish
the I R S. You know, he was. It's a
bizarre choice, you know, but again it owed to the
fact that there was now there was now an official
opposition that was precluded from even acting as oh as
an official opposition in formal terms. Of course, despite the
hostility to despite the hostility that Johnson, You've got to
understand that the uh, the left, radical establishment and the
deep state, their idea was that by forcing Johnson to
step down, that the heir apparent would be Bobby Kennedy. Okay,
the camelot myth was still alive, and well Kennedy, believe
it or not, he had there was actionally some crossover
appeal with Wallace voters, and not just ethnic Irish guys.
Because the hoy ploy don't they don't really think deeply
in policy terms. It didn't matter that like Kennedy was
basically this like radical you know, they he was viewed
as kind of like this he was he was. He
was viewed as kind of like as pugnacious, you know,
like young, like white ethnic type guy who was like
a man of the people. Like however, was guided that
might have been. But the point is he was their
ace in the hole, you know, and he was bizarrely murdered,
you know, by Sir Hans, Sirhan, and that threw everything
into chaos. That made lbj's vice president, Hubert Humphrey the uh,
the front runner. And uh, he was an experienced campaigner,
and he might have uh, you know, he experienced like
literally all day. If LBJ had given him, you know,
the loyal support that you know, some what are you
had the right to expect. And in particular, had you know,
kind of greased the skids for him to advocate withdrawal
from Vietnam, he would have probably had a good chance.
But Johnson was understandably better by now. And Johnson's Johnson's
Johnson's nose, And if you listen, you can find it
on youtubef you listen to Johnson's discussions with Senator Everett
Dirkson from this time. It's really revealing. Johnson's basically like,
fuck you, I'm gonna burn it down. You know, I'm
gonna burn I'm gonna burn the proverbial house down. I
don't care if the Republicans take over. I'd like to
see him take over after what you did to me,
like see you later, you know, fuck you very much.
Speaker 1: In addition, and you can see you can see him
saying it just like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, one hundred percent. And uh in
addition at sixty eight, obviously, you know, was was Wallace's run,
and uh, as a result, you know, uh, Nixon won
fairly comfortably. It was, uh, Nixon got Nixon got close
to thirty He got thirty one nixt Nixon pulled thirty
one million, seven hundred, ten thousand and seventy votes, the
Humphreys thirty million, eight hundred ninety thousand and fifty five.
Wallace posted, uh, just under nine million, five hundred thousand.
So an electoral in the electoral votes was three h
two Nickson one end. He went home free forty six Wallas.
The uh the so, I mean it doesn't sound like
a huge margin, Okay, but in in actual terms, like
Nixon's victory was, I mean, it was, it was, it was.
It was a definite, It was a definitive statement. Okay. However,
Wallace's spoiler campaign it meant that Nixon was a minority victor.
In absolute terms that came out to forty three point
four percent of the popular vote, which was the lowest
percentage of an elected president since Wilson won the ninety
twelve election. People forget Woodrow. Wilson ran in a four
man race. He ran against incumbent President Willimar Taft, He
ran against Teddy Roosevelt who was on the Progressive or
Bullamouse Party, and he ran against Eugene depths like the
Socialist Party. Okay, it was also there was a low
poll count to only sixty one percent of registered voters
turned out. So the refrain, the refrain of media became
oh Nixon, Nixon. Only Nixon only got twenty seven percent
of all voters. You know what kind of it mandates
that he's not legitimate. And they bandied this over and
over and over and over again. You know, Nixon is
not a legitimate president. Nixon, Nixon. He didn't carry a
single big city, you know, like Nix. Nixon's are racist,
you know, like Nixon. These Wallace voters, you know, they
only did what they did to like, you know, elect Nixon.
And you know, we know what they are. You know,
they're they're those Southern people. And we just went on
and on and on and on and on, you know,
like it was like I said, it was it did
think about the think about the campaign against Trump. You know,
this was like this was like the one point zero version, okay,
just this constant effort to undermine the legitimacy of Nixon's
presidency at every turn. And I said, to the applications
of this, you know, Nixon takes the oath of office
in nineteen sixty nine. In nineteen sixty eight, over eleven
thousand Americans were KIA and tens of thousands wounded. You know,
the Soviet Union was had not yet achieved parody, but
uh it it had. It had it had a nuclear
arsenal that could absolutely devastate Europe, the United States and
the general war. Okay, and the technological gap was was
rapidly closing as revery of deeper parodies. You know, relations
between pet King and Mosquea were deteriorating, but the Communist
block and not get fractured. I mean, uh, aiming to
undermine a wartime president in this regard as unthinkable and
just I mean to take it back from it to Johnson.
When you think about Kronka going at TV and saying
the Vietnam War was lost, you know, and and attacking
the unwillingness the John's administration to open the decision making
process to public scrutiny and time of war like imagine
if imagine if in World War Two, imagine after Casserine Pass,
you know, when when the American Expeditionary Force met the
Wehrmacht in North Africa, like they were humiliatingly wiped out.
Like imagine after that happened, Walter Winchel went in the
radio and said, the war is lost. Mister Roosevelt is
a liar, you know, like I mean you imagine that,
like you would have been immediately arrested, that never would
have been tolerated. You know, this, this, this is truly
insane that this was allowed to happen. And you know, people,
even people not ideologically inclined particularly, simply looked at it as, oh, well,
that that's just politics as usual. You know, it's it's
it's incredible, it's the most it was kind of the
second Revolution in my opinion, after the nineteen thirty three
New Deal Revolution. But because I missed this context that
Nixon quite literally told his staff the press is the enemy.
He was quota is saying that to Hallered him and
I believe the news is concerned nobody in the press
of a friend. They're all enemies the uh, you know
that the men, as Paul Johnson relayed, the men and
the movement that broke Linton Johnson's authority and broke his
back in political terms in sixty eight, they turned their
gun sights proverbically on Nixon. And on top of that,
they had even more powerful allies because they had people
with long memories. So we're quite literally the friends of
alger Hits. You know.
Speaker 1: It.
Speaker 2: Uh, they'll say it became it became something of a
understand too that agree to which this was like a
sea change and kind of the course of American thought.
It was an issue of first impression for the American
media or for any other you know, kind of deep
state actor or adjacent power based don't want to diminish
the presidency. Like to that point, really the only opposition
to a strong chief executive, particularly at war, had come
from Congress and specifically the Senate, you know, like FDR
who whateveryone thinks of him, and we certainly have nothing
likes to say to him in these quarter about him
in these quarters, he was highly quotable he said, the
only way to do anything in American government is to
bypass the Senate. And like people truckled when he said that,
but he was being a dealy serious, you know. Uh
Wendell Willicky, you know, who was his one time opponent,
apparently apparently said apparently said to Roosevelt like subsequent that
he He's like, look, okay, I understand, I quote devoted
my life to saving America from the Senate under FDR. Obviously,
but even Truman, the press, academia, the entire commentariat, especially
in foreign policy matters, they were firmly behind the presidents.
The view of Congress as being full of opportunists. He's
kind of parasitic career is you know, like men who
were possicly looking to obscure the reality of policy and
favorite cheap polemic, you know, and uh to basically just
you know, kind of like guarantee their own permanent incumbency,
you know, the uh, the even the New Republic. This
was in nineteen fifty three, which was you know, when
Truman was approaching kind of isn't the dear of of
of approval in the court of public opinion, you know,
because the Korean War was an incredibly unpopular war, especially
the dragon. One of the things the New Republic, uh
was quoted saying, Oh, the gravitation and power into the
ends of Congress at the expense of the executive is
a phenomenon so fatuous as to be incredible if the
facts were not so patent. That's the New Republic, you know,
which in the fifties was dividing its time between screaming
that everybody in America is racist and and talking about
how great the Soviet Union is. You know what this wasn't.
This wasn't the Wall Street Journal, and it wasn't a
bunch of John Bircher's and it wasn't a bunch of
you know, like dissident America firsters who you know, had
uh had hoped to see Robert Taff become the president.
This was this is like literally a bunch of reds
like saying this. Eisenhower repeatedly invoked executive privilege and on
all kinds of matters to deny information about government activities
to the House and American Activities Committee, and uh, he
was universally applauded by media. There was a there was
a universal consensus that there was no right to know
what went on in the inner councils of foreign policy
and uh, the machinery of war and peace. You know,
it was to take fast hole for people to think
they had a right to know about that, you know,
owing to the national security implications and the fact that
this is not something that is up for debate. You know,
you can't you can't reduce war and peace questions, particularly
owing to the complexity of the Cold War as it were,
you know, to to catch phrases or you know, bump
or stereo polemic as it were. You know, like it
was absurd to suggest that there's auld be any transparency
on matters of national security and the decision to wage war.
And I mean this was uh, this was this was
you know, a decade. This was fifteen to This attended
fifteen years before Johnson's unceremonious, de facto removal from office
and obviously you know, the subsequent and more fervent treatment Nixon.
So just for context, you know, like we're not talking
about like decades here. It was really you know, Kennedy's dictum.
Also part of this was him i think, trying to
show a strong face contra Cruise chief. But h Kennedy
literally stated in ninety sixty is the president alone and
must make the major decisions on our foreign policy. And
that was what was demanded, you know, not just not
just by the the electorate, but also you know, the
media establishment in and then angel security establishment. You know,
particularly when executive decision ismm in that capacity included the
decision to kill ten to millions of people and you know,
a general nuclear war.
Speaker 1: So this.
Speaker 2: It wasn't nobody really talked this way about Article two
or about the presidency itself until the Golf of Tonkin.
And I know that people have bad feelings about the
Golf of Tonkin, and I'm not saying they shouldn't, but
for context, and I want to go too far fuel
in this topic because it's highly tangential to the mean subject.
There's always abfuscation when you're talking about the decision to
go to war and how it's presented to the public.
I mean, even the best of conditions as it were,
but post Nuremberg, when it quite literally was declared that
war as an answrument a national policy is illegal. There's
this kind of tortured logic that was engaged in in
executive policy circles. About what constituted to cause us belly
and this kind of commitment to euphemizing the fact that
war was underway at all. Everything was a police action
or an intervention necessary to offset a communist violationist sovereignty.
It became this kind of like literal like lawyer ball
by which everybody in the executive chain of command tried
to find a way to not admit that war was underway. Okay,
the Gulba Taguan resolution has to be understood within that context,
all right. Even that said, that was not the right
way to proceed, and there was a collective security arrangement
that was dedicated to the defense of South Vietnam. But
such that it was, the decision was made to procure
the war mandate within the parameters of this narrative. Okay,
But that was a starting point for criticism of what
became known not just punitively and kind of colloquial terms
of on the op ed pages, became too loom conceptually
in people's minds as this real and dangerous phenomena the
Imperial executive. It was the Gulvatagan resolution and discussion around
it that really represents the kind of see change in
how executive authority. He was viewed okay, such that any
one moment can be identified as the point at which
things have changed. Now. What Nixon did to protect is
an ascent administration. His senior White House advisors were Bob
Haldeman and John Erlckman, both of whom are villainized to
various degrees. Even my people should know better. Hallman, Erlckman
and Henry Kissinger were kind of the key to the
Knicks administration and advisory capacities. Kissinger's role in this regard
is interesting, not just because he and Nixon were one
my opinion on how they waged the Cold War and
their vision for resolving it, quite literally ending it, it
could not have come about that that that that pattern
of conceptual variables could not have come about without the
participation of both men. It's a It's an instance of
kind of a shared strategic vision, the nuances of which
were so myriad. It's rare that there could be a
true meeting of that minds in their regard, but that
someone explains the bond between Kissinger and Nixon. It wasn't
a bond of friendship, but beyond that, Kissinger developed an
outsized influence in the Nixon White House. I don't even
mean that punitively, but I mean the reason why the
evil Watergate Kissinger sort of joined Hollmen and Erlicman as
in kind of the true inner circle, Like that's why
whatever you can say to Hollerman and erlic Man, these
guys were incredibly competent people and they were rapidly devoted
to Nixon. That is true. Backing that up, if you
want to think about this in football terms as like
this the secondary of the Nixon White House Knixon speech
writers and you know, sort of media element. It was
William Sapphire, Pat Buchanan, Ray Price, and David Gergen and
Lee Hubner. This was arguably the best like media speech
writer team ever assembled until until Reagan. Okay, so I
mean this this was a crack administration team that only
had Nixon. Nixon and Kissinger developed the first true kind
of clear geo strategic geopolitical strategy for America. So size
how or left office. But one would think that this
is kind of the ultimate pr machine, you know, like
what could go wrong? You know Nixon? Also, I mean
if you listened to the Nickson tapes as well as
you know, read Kissinger's memoirs, both which I highly recommend
to people. Nixon had a clearer view of the Vietnam War.
He viewed it as a short term problem. He didn't
really view it as a quagmire. The things that truly
mattered was solidifying in NATO, solidifying specifically, you know, the
Atlantis syst alliance with the UK, which at that time
appeared to be in potential jeopardy, and specifically breaking pay
case away from Moscow and fracturing, you know, kind of
the key the key alliance structure of the Communist block,
This idea of Vietnam the unwinnable war, that's revisionism of
a punitive sort. Creighton Abrams, who was a brilliant combat commander,
you know, had replaced Westmorland. The US Army had very
much abandoned what had, you know, the kind of strategic
hamlet orientation in favor of annihilating the People's Army of
Vietnam to fairly great effect. Effective deployment of massive firepower
to neutralize the andes the enemy, had the widening of
the war to deprive the enemy of key tactical havens
that basically unrestricted bombing in North Vietnam two prevent you know,
effective utilization of of their own combined arms brought to bear,
which is most exemplified by Linebacker two stopping in the
Eastern offensive in its tracks. But you know, Nixon, Nixon,
the idea of Nixon as this president kind of in
the in thesane, the scenario is LBJ, you know, pouring
over the map a Caisson, the scale model of Caisson,
having no idea how to proceed in the war, you know,
being kind of being kind of entrapped and and it
duped at every opportunity, you know, by the enemy. That
that was not the case at all. Even before a
single shot was fired between the People's Republic of China
and the Soviet Union, Nixon was adamant that friendly relations
with China could be brought about by intelligent diplomacy, that
China could be decoupled from Russia, and at the end,
the Soviet Communist Party could be fatally undermined without a
general war. And indeed all this came to bear, and
in terms of the raw, in terms of the raw
successes Nixon's administration, I folloso the things that I think
are inarguable again well, imposing unsustainable or what would have
been unsustainable attrition on the North Vietnamese mix. It scaled
down the US military presence from its peak when he
took office at just enter fire to fifty thousand men.
The twenty four thousand spending decline from twenty five billion
a year under Johnson when Johnson left office to less
than three billion. A lot of this had to do
with more intelligent allocation of resources in Southeast Asia, like
in the Battle theater, directly military as well as infrastructural
and ancillary. Flexible use of firepower and deployment being used
in Cambodia in seventy lows in seventy one, and again
too the relentless strategic bombing in North Vietnam in nineteen
seventy two, which all of which kept kept the leadership
Cadre and Hanoi off balance, especially as the death of
Ho Chi Minh people forget too. Nixon zealously pursued peace
negotiations with Hanoi. He didn't have a great deal of
optimism that a conventional peace treaty could be achieved, you
know where by the status quo would be unconditionally reinstated.
But within the context of what became the sound of
Soviets split. He realized that, you know, even before, even
before the state visited China, even before it became apparent
the degree to which the respective political cultures were no
longer aligned in any meaningful way, you know, any any
kind of guarantee from China that it would hedge against.
You know, the Soviets client in North Vietnam was a
victory in this regard, and it was National Security Memorandum fourteen,
which was issued in UH on a February fourth, nineteen
sixty nine. The UH outlined uh Nixon's view that was
imperative to the Court China. This was backed up the
following September, after the Son of Soviet Border War that
brought the irrespective countries back from the brink. Nixon secretly
communicated to A Breshnev that an event of a general
war between the Soviet Union and China where the Soviet
Union struck first, the United States intervened on behalf of
the People's Republic at China. Kissinger said that this was
the most ballsy move and I think it's in the
most darren step but of the Knickson presidency, which it was.
And even though Kissinger didn't say this. I guarantee you
that Kissinger himself, you know, like leaked this, uh, the
secret communicate to the Chinese. And I'm sure, I'm absolutely
positive that that's one of the things that finessed the
opening of negotiations when Nicks and a Kissenger went to visit.
You know, it's uh. Nix had made the point at
that time a quarter of the world's people lived in
communists China, and whether or not they had the ability
and the gumption and the ambition theyve bec was superpower
in their own right, it didn't matter because if they
could be turned against the Warsaw Pact, it would mean
that there was an overwhelming world consensus against an enemy
in Moscow which had purported to you know, essentially be
the lead year of the Global South as we think
of it today. You know, so from the top down,
this was brilliant power of politics, sight unseen since Bismarck
in my opinion, but was ultimately put the paper on
as regards the peace agreement in Vietnam, and again this
is uh, this is basically forgotten history today going to
the fact that it was on cere want to see
abandoned quite literally to Shane Nixon, which is which is unconstonable.
January twenty second, nineteen seventy three, Rogers, Secretary of State
Rodgers and uh laid uptae his UH Vietnamese counterpart. It
made it possible for America to fully disengage from Vietnam.
It demanded that North Vietnam recognized the sovereign together the
Republic of Vietnam, and an event when he direct attacked
America would America would pursue a massive retaliation to substantially
that threat. The agreement reserve the right to maintain carrier
battle groups and Vietnamese will territorial waters, and call upon
the aircraft station in Taiwan and Thailand towards that purpose.
Presumably it's only include included conventional forces, but I believe
it was left deliberately ambiguous. To say this was a
formidable feat of extrication from an active conflict while maintaining
credible threat potential would be a gross understatement. So this
was you know, this is I. I click these things.
I take these things off, not because I'm some kind
of Nixon a hagiographer, but it's important to set the
record straight. You know that this idea that the Nicks
administration was some failed administration or Nixon with this kind
of like weird paranoid eye just sort of presiding over
this Vietnam quagmire. You know, nobody else can point to
a policy resume that's successful other than other than Reagan,
in my opinion, and in my opinion writing and capitalized
more on circumstance than you know, he was the key
variable in any of the outcomes from which his administration
is so benefited. In fact, I'd argue that I'd argue
that the collapse of the Warsaw Pact the nineteen eighty
nine know directly to the accounishments of Nixon and Kissinger
that are under discussion here. So what was Watergate and
why did it happen? I mean, like we just discussed
all of the uh, all the kind of all the
kind of key factors were in place to attack the
Nixon presidency. You know what caused them to?
Speaker 1: Can you talk about can you talk about the nineteen
seventy two election, because it was yeah, okay, sorry, no.
Speaker 2: It's all right. You know, like we talked about a
minute ago before, before of the Tangent, there was this
idea that there was this claim, you know, that the
Nixon presidency wasn't really legitimate. You know, it was a
three way race, record low voter turnout. You know, the
claim was by Nixon's enemies and the establishment. This was
sort of an accident of fate. But really what really
truly tipped the balance.
Speaker 3: Was a.
Speaker 2: Was a couple of things, these disasters of the early
nineteen seventies. Despite the fact that the Draft was not
long for this earth, and Nixon made that clear. Plus
anybody who kind of understood warrant piece questions could see
that the Draft was temporarily expanded and its net, so
to speak, was widened, owing to the invasion of Cambodia,
which was sold by a hostle media as the violation of,
you know, the sovereignty of Cambodia, and Nixon widening the war,
presumably for imperialist reasons. Cambodia was a haven for the
National Liberation Front and a key operational base for the enemy.
To not assault it prior to them entering negotiations for
extrication from the conflict would have been grossly negligent, but
the way it was presented it led directly to this
mass wave of campus protests which then culminated in disasters
like you know, they be killing of students at Kent
State and things like this that kind of breathed like
new life into the the ulification of Nixon. Now, what
this also did was it led the Democrats. There's there
was there was a there was more than a small
component delusion. Hear could that reminds me? That's not unlike
the way that the New York Times insisted like Hillary
Clinton was a good candidate. The Democrats became convinced that
there's gonna be this youth uprising that would bring down
Nixon at the polls. You know, like youth culture never
impacts president outcomes that way, electoral outcomes. The media insisted
that like Nixon was in deep trouble going into the
ninety seventy two election, they nominated George McGovern, who truly
was a radical. He was Students for a Democratic Society
types love McGovern. His platform was literally an immediate and
total withdrawal from Vietnam and just like an abandonment of
of it as a as an contested theater. A uh,
A dramatic increase in the welfare state, you know, a
dramatic increase and enforced integration and social engineering in this regard.
When Nixon's staff, you know, air Linkman and Company told
Nixon that McGovern was going to be the nominee, Nixon said, like,
we've got this in the bag then, like this is
a joke, right, But in the the ideological bent of
I mean, the Washington Post, New York Times, you know, Time,
news Week, the big three TV networks, they literally they
literally insisting that Geordan McGovern's gonna run away with this
election because he's gonna he's gonna get amnesty for the draft,
you know, and you know he's gonna he's gonna he's
gonna stand up for you know, like women's aborting rights,
and the whole country is behind him. And what happened.
Nixon literally swept the entire country, like like he swept
the entire country. McGovern carried Massachusetts and the Issuer of Columbia.
I mean to say, like he went down in flames,
like doesn't even It was absurd. And that's something I
pointed out to be able too, especially because lately a
lot of my contents centered around Vietnam. I have to
correct people a lot who claim, like, oh, when American
soldiers can make from Vietnam. Everybody spit on them and
said you beb killer. That didn't happen. It just didn't.
Like Carter. When Lieutenant Kelly was a brought up on charges,
you know, lay preacher, you know, liberal Jimmy Carter, he
demanded people stand with Kelly and said, you know, drive
with your headlights on during the day to show that
Georgia supports Lieutenant Kelly by this idea that like the
country hated Vietnam vets or like loved Ho Chi Minh,
or that that's garbage. You know, there was a minority
of a vanguard minority who were prone to those kinds
of annects, but everybody hated them, you know. And these
outfits like SDS and these I'm getting old but ahead
of myself, but you know, as the seventies got underway,
like these radical outfits and these terror organizations that popped up,
including like the SLA and the people who uh you know,
the Clanners and and Harold Cogny's National Socialists shout it
out with and in Jonesborough. These organizations were funded by
big NGOs, if not by the Warsaw Pact. Like there's
not people weren't like spontaneously, you know, weren't spontaneously you know,
taking up the cause of the Soviet Union or of
you know, Maoism or whatever like. That's not that's not
at all accurate depiction of the state of the country.
And seventy two proved that. But much like twenty sixteen,
the deep state in the media, staleis meant like when
utterly berserk and like decided like this can never be
allowed to happen again. I can't remember who it was.
It might have been, It might have been the it
was some big media mogul. It wasn't the guy at
the Washington Post like o count and you I can't
but he literally said after the election, apparently in seventy two,
this can never be allowed to happen again, you know.
Speaker 1: Now the.
Speaker 2: And it could it couldn't be said either because you know,
not just because the not just because the landslide win,
but you know, because voter turnout was a lot more
like precedented in terms of you know, for for a
you know, for the post war era, like nobody could
allege that like you know, Nixon, Nixon has no real mandate.
You know this, this guy couldn't he didn't carry any
of the cities. This is also when the myths started
this like bizarre kind of symbol and claim that like
the popular vote is the real votes, and like the
electoral collogism conspiracy to hide the real votes. Like that
kind of nonsense became in seventy two, and obviously that
carries onto this day. But this, uh, this, I'm gonna
stop here in a minute because what I'm gonna get
into next has to do with the White House plumbers,
and I don't want to just have to stop talking
about the mid stream robili speaking. Otherwise it's gonna kind
of interrupt the flow discussion. But uh, next episode will
we'll deal specifically with like the Watergate break in and
and everything everything everything adjacent and like the actual you know,
the kind of move towards impeachment of President Nix and
then also the indictment of the the intended indictment of
Spiro Agne. But this background was important Otherwise what we
Otherwise when we deal with the nitty ready, uh of
what ensued, it wouldn't really have a context. And forgive
my horse voice, I'm I'm still kind of getting over
you know, the ship I go through.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no problem at all. Two plugs and we'll end
it and come back for part two.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's great, Pete. You can find me on substack
at real Thomas seven seven seven dot substack dot com.
I'm still editing the season two premiere of My phasor
my favorite podcast, but it's coming. I promise you can
find me on x real capital R E A L
underscore number seven h O M A S seven seven seven.
And you can always find me at my website. It's
Thomas seven seven seven dot com number seven h O
M A S seven seven seven. That's uh, that's all I.
Speaker 1: Got, all right until part two. Thank you, Thomas, Thank
you man. I want to welcome everyone back to the
Pekanana Show Part two. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2: I remem very well, thank you. There's a lot here,
But what I chose, what I chose to emphasize is
what I think that you know, our key variables that
are most neglected by mainstream accounts. Like I said, the
book Silent Coup is an exhaustive book about the Watergate
break in. But I think, but that's the whole and
I mean, and I basically agree with the thesis presented.
That's the book that famously suggested that John Dean White
House counsel, among other things, his his his mistress was
uh this formerly like this this uh kind of high
end call girl who would become a madam, and documents
to that effect, you know, her client lists and things
were supposedly was the object that the White House plumbers
were supposed to procure from the Watergate Hotel. That may
in fact be true. There's also a claim presented that
representatives of Howard Hughes were we're trying to incentive like
putting out feelers about a payout relating to getting their
way with respects to these burgening like emissions restrictions on
aircraft and other things I did did The evidentiary record
on that claim is scant. But there's also a claim
that the White House plumbers were either looking for evidence
of you know, the solicitations of of brides that effect,
or that there was actual like bag money in the
Watergo Hotel and they were looking to steal it. Frankly,
I find that easier to believe than the latter. Easier
to believe in some of these suggestions because G. Gordon
Liddy was not a dummy. He was a pretty experience,
you know, a heistman, albeit you know, like he wasn't
like a street dude. He was a guy who was
insinuated into kind of the and into and into the
kind of gray ops as it were. But you know,
first of all, it was like a weird thing to do. Secondly,
because nobody really seemed in I mean, if anybody knew
in in an if anyone in an executive role truly
knew like what the whole story was, he would have
just come clean with it. I can. I can easily
see Liddy saying like, hey, there's you know, there's one
hundred thousand dollars, which in those days was real money,
like in the water yet hotel, you know, and nobody
can report it stolen, like I think Christmas is gonna
come early this year. I mean, frankly, if I were him,
I do it, you know that? Uh? Or I mean
we may never know. But my point is, I guess
it's very very peculiar that nobody, including Lyddy himself, ever
really acknowledged what they were doing, you know, And uh,
the whole thing seems like kind of a comedy of errors,
you know, like it and I mean it's kind of
like that's kind of the point is that this was
I call it, I called Watergate the Seinfeld scandal because
it's the scandal about nothing, and not only it's about nothing,
but especially when you consider sort of the precedent relating
to executive malfeasance, as it were, the idea that you know,
these kinds of white house hatchetmen and breaking into a
hotel which sometimes acts as a like a honey pot
for you know, setting up liaisons between you know, DNC
contributors and hookers. The idea that this is something like
this is like some moral affront to like all things decent,
and this is just like so horrible it almost can't
be spoken of. Like there's something just kind of like
preposterous about that. You know, I'm at the very worst
is an instance of breaking and entering. I mean okay,
like that there's that shocking to the conscience, you know,
I mean America lost its innocence the day it was
discovered that these kind of weird guys broke into a hotel.
I mean like like like where it it doesn't pass
the straight face test, and people will allege that there's
like something I'm missing or something that Nicks and apologies
are just missing because there's some broader like principle at play.
You know, like it's really, really really weird if you're
gonna if you're gonna confabulate, you know, like some kind
of like feigned moral outrage, you know, but be it
as it may. Like. Well, and also I'll include this
now I was gonna I wasn't gonna speak of it
until kind of the end of the episode. But I
want people to contemplate. I want people to conteplate with
the precedent is for impeachment of a sitting president. Now
this isn't what about ism, Okay, When we're talking about
the criminal law, and impeachment is a matter of criminal law,
albeit a narrowly tailored process and an unusual circumstance, it
gives rise to it. You know, what constitutes an actionable
wrong is contingent upon the facts, Okay, And it's continued
to it's contingent upon how the trier of law and
the trier of fact has interpreted the circumstances giving rise
to the alleged wrong. Okay, If it's just something that's
if it's just a process that's capriciously and randomly and
arbitrarily invoked owing to political expediency, Like we're not really
talking about criminal justice, you know, we're just talking about
what we're talking about politics, like masquerading as as a
you know, due process of criminal law. Uh So, not
even uh not even a decade after Watergate, it came
to light that Reagan's National Security Cabinet to get around
the Bowland Amendment, which had specifically prohibited aid to the
Concience in Nicaragua or any other actor whose aim was
to overthrow the Santinista government, Reagan's National Security Cabinet had
taken it upon itself to sell arms to Iran and
his BLAH, which was listed as a terrorist organization, and
to take those funds and you know, provide the Contras
with with arms of their own, and you know, money
for infrastructural needs so that they could continue to proces
cute there war and direct violation of the Bold Amendment.
That's incredibly illegal. I mean, my sympathy actually has always
been with Oliver North, Like I met the guy years back,
and I probably would have done the same thing in
his shoes, honestly, especially because he had come to believe
he had a personal debt of honor to these people
in Nicaragua. You know, he made certain guarantees to them.
This was before so Calm existed, and these kinds of
ongoing special operations were kind of ad hoc just for clarity,
you know what, Like like North wasn't putting on airs
when he said he felt personally responsible. But however, anyone
feels about this, that's incredibly illegal. There was never any
talk of impeaching Reagan, and I mean selling selling weapons
to his ballah to then illegally pay the Contras in
direct violation of a you know, an explicitly prohibited you know,
foreign policy initiative. I mean, that's kind of that that
that that's kind of a textbook example of what the
impeachment power exists for. Okay, but nobody seriously bandied impeaching Reagan.
You know, subsequent people forget because I guess there's not
really historical events anymore in the twentieth century sense, which
is a subject for another podcast episode. But such that
there is discussion of the Iraq War, it's presented as
Bush forty three eating a buffoon, or you know, Tony
Blair lining to the lying to the people of the UK,
or you know, the kind of tactical disaster that ensued,
you know, within months of Bush declaring mission accomplished. What
people forget is that Bush literally suborn perjury through Colin
Powell before the Senate. You know, that's incredibly illegal, and
this time of the fact, there's a felony in its
own terms, and it's kind of unconscionably you know, is
wrong just on it in terms of you know, the
implicators of public trust. You know, tens of thousands of
people died because of this perjury, and like there was
nary I mean who who suggested Bush should be impeached
other than you know, like like people like Bill Maher
would like, you know, drop like stupid, one off kind
of statements that effect. But there's never any serious discussion
of that. So like suborning perjury to procure a warman
date where in tens of thousands of people die, that's permissible.
That's a permissible executive act. But guys breaking into a hotel,
you know, it cannot there's something that cannot be allowed
to stand. I mean, if there's something wrong with this picture,
like however you feel about Nixon, you know, and you
can't people can't cope by saying that's what about is them.
We're talking about criminal law. There's no what about ism
in criminal law. There's precedent that controls, and there's everything
else that's that's not controlling, you know. So I mean,
I don't I don't think that I don't think that
the Watergate fetishes and they really are fetishist. And I'm
not just being silly. I don't really think they have
like a limb to stand on anymore. So I think
increasingly in the historical record it's kind of it's gonna
kind of evaporate. But it hasn't happened yet, you know.
And it's not just uh, it's not just because of
it's not just because of boomers, you know. And there
I mean, everybody likes to burn boomers and proverbial life.
And I mean, I'm the first to point out that
some of these ridiculous sort of civic mythologies, you know,
originate from that coterie. But the like like the Watergate
fantasy goes beyond boomerism. There's something really deep seated about
it and like literally delusional about it, you know, in
the and it only makes sense if you consider the
person of Nixon, not even Nixon's subjective traits and the
man himself, but he represents the same thing that Trump
does to these people.
Speaker 1: So I was and I was going to say, there
was an article on the Wall Street in the Wall
Street Journal, I think it was today, is yesterday or today?
I can't remember that mentions Trump and talks about how
he said that there were good people on both sides.
I mean they're still yeah, although and you will still
have people defending Russia Gate that he you know, that
he was he colluded with the Russians, And I mean, it's.
Speaker 2: That's one of the more bizarre even even considering like
what is first of all, like the term collusion, it's
not even a colloquialism. It doesn't mean anything, like as
a matter of law, is is the State Department colluding
with the House of Sod? Like is Lindsey Graham colluding
with Israel? Like what does that even mean? Like Donald
Trump likes Vladimir Putin, so Russian trolls, you know, said
mean things about Hillary Clinton through memes and that ruined
the election. That that's that's so fucking stupid. I don't
even know like where to It's like beyond it's beyond
the conceptual reality of like a saying it old person,
you know, like I and again, like quote unquote, collusion
isn't it has no meaning as a matter of law
or in the context of you know, power political affairs.
There's there's conspiracy. I mean, if you can claim that,
I guess you could claim that Donald Trump he took
sensitive data or relating to like the NATO operation in
Ukraine and Fedda to FSB. I mean, I he could
if he's the president, He's within his rights to do that.
That's not against the law. But I mean, I suppose
he could say that, you know, they could constitute some
sort of conspiracy between you know, the Kremlin and the
White House. But like, what the fuck is collusion? Like
it doesn't that doesn't mean it literally means nothing, you know,
and even if it even taking it on its own terms,
it's like I don't think I don't think. I don't
think Trump has developed ideas on power politics anyway. But uh,
you know the fact that he doesn't have some drain
hatred of Russia and maybe let's say, let's even say
like he was an admirer of Vladimir Putin, was like
that and I mean that that's that's not that that's
not somehow against the law, nor is it particularly strange.
I mean, I went in church all used to pretty
regularly praise Mussolini, you know, was he colluding with Mussolini?
Like what is what? What does this mean? I realized
him being obtuse myself. But it doesn't. But right the point,
it was not even it's not even like there was
a confatulated scandal relating to Russia and Donalds from because
it like literally meant nothing. It was just like these
weird sound bites kind of kind of spat out by
people who don't have a meaningful understanding of the subjects,
you know, and it's parameters like or you're you're colluding
with a bad guy, Like it's that's that's illiterate, Like
on its face, it's a literate it's it's it's not
it's not. Nobody competent in the English language would say that.
But moving on, because like I said, I if very
many for jumping around. I I I thought it was
better placed to raise the issue of precedent now rather
than kind of on the tail end when we'll probably
have you know, moved on to other things. Something I
touched on a bit last time, and I think Warrant's
a bit of a deeper discussion. This wasn't the approximate
cause by any means, of the hostility that developed towards
mister Nixon, but it was an essential cause within the
broader nexus of you know, deep state opinion. I ironically,
I believe that despite the fact that these deep state
types owed their personal prosperity and clout to the dramatic
expansion of state power and you know, the concominant you know,
like physical expansion of the state apparatus itself, there remains
is kind of basic hostility and suspicion of an empowered
executive office. You know, not just in ethical terms and
not just in war and peace terms, as the country
kind of fractured in elite corridors relating to the situation
of the Soviet Union and everything else. Okay, after the
that doest settled into the Second World War, you know,
the presidency and becoming a true power onto itself structurally,
that seemed to impact people it in a deeply psychological capacity,
even people who presumably were very familiar with kind of
the structural parameters of government. As a matter of law, which,
according to the letter of Article two, quite literally vest
you know, tremendous power in the executive. It's one things
to understand as a matter of law that this power
exists as a potentiality. It's another thing to kind of
be surrounded by it physically and to witness its tremendous reach,
and to contemplate one of his own fortunes if that
great power was uh, what was was turned on you? Okay.
The first reference to the imperial the quote imperial presidency
emerged right around the end of Wilson's administration, even even
among media people who are otherwise sympathetic to the kind
of progressive enterprise, at least the strike represented by Wilson.
The uh. The fact that executive power had been growing steadily,
with a dramatic spike obviously during Roosevelt's tenure, but even
before and after that, you know, slowly but steadily, you know,
there'd been this structural increase, and you know, the real
power of the executive and media began to view itself
increasingly as you know, not just the fourth estate, you know,
as this kind of as it's kind of beacon proverbially
that you know, whose role it was to ethically, you know,
lead the Holy poloy away from you know, the false
promises and and bad faith of official dumb But also
they viewed themselves as literally like a hedge against an
active presidency that had increasingly taken on you know, what
had theretofore been, you know, the role of an increasingly
comatose and kind of and kind of inert senate, you know,
and the fact that again the peculiarities of Nuremberg and
the strange fictions therein. We talked about that and how
that came to constitute you know, the manner and means
in which American president's pictured a war mandate. You know,
we talked about this in the context of the Gulf
of Tonkin, but it also it changed the way that
wars were waged in terms of civilian command and control, okay,
and basic capacities. You know. Not only did not only
did the Senate kind of scale back its own micromanagement
of such affairs, in part, of course, obviously because these
careers type I wanted to protect their own reputation and
voting record, but also increasingly it became the domain of experts.
Like everything else. You know, you'd have a president you
had this, you know, emboldened and dramatically and large and
relative terms of national security staff. They were interpreting and
processing reams upon reams of data, trying to interpret it
in real time in order to render battlefield decisions, you know,
in a hot theater of war in Southeast Asia, well
at the same time managing political perceptions you know, around
those decisions by both friendlies and hostiles. On top of that,
there was the ongoing strategic menace of the Cold War.
You know, this wasn't even even in the kind of
best of all possible worlds with a balance of power
structurally between the three branches of government kind of existed
in look a perfect and complementary stasis. It just it's
inconceivable to conceptualize some sort of equal division of responsibility
over war and peace questions, you know, between the executive
and the legislature. And people found this alarming, I believe,
particularly people who frankly, do not really understand the nuances
of war and peace, either you know, in practical terms
at scale, or in you know, conceptual and philosophical terms.
Most men can't and don't. Frankly, I've made that point
a lot, and I'm sure, those of a less than
charitable view of me and my work product would say, well,
I'm just trying to insinuate some kind of mystique into
my own skill set. That's not true at all. But
moving on, I mean, just for Roosevelt's White House was
the first White House where every man had had had
a number of executives administrative assistants. I mean, it's like,
think about that, okay, I mean, like it was the
Truman White House. Yeah, was represented something of a scaling
back this tendency. But by the time but by the
time Eisenhower took the oath of office, like like the
managerial state was in structural terms, was here to stay.
And nowhere was that felt more than you know in
the Oval office and everything that orbited it, the uh
lbj's uh White House personnel staff, you know, ancillary people,
you know, like custodians, you know, everybody, feel like the
top down it was forty times bigger than the size
of the entire like White House Personnel Directorate and uh
in the Hoover administration. So I considered that it uh
uh the cost had exceeded by nineteen seventy two a
billion dollars. It was. It was, it was, it was.
It was effective to exceed a billion dollars by the
end of the decade as of nineteen seventy two. And
that was that was huge money in those days. It
was like almost inconceivable money. Okay, like it's not it's
not even suggested considering you know, what was on the
table needs to be the Cold War, America's defense commitments,
collective security commitments for better or worse. You know, these
infrastructural projects that were still ongoing, you know, like the
highway system. That's not that's not to say that this
was just you know, an example of like public spending
gone crazy and and pigs just you know, gorging themselves
at the verbial trough. But that was a staggering number,
you know, to anybody in those days. The Kenned he
tried to finesse this a bit, you know, by one
of the reasons why, like the Camelot myth, like corny
as that kind of whole miss manufacturing mystique, that kind
of like Time magazine and Life magazine mystique was that
was very much cultivated by the Kennedy administration. Okay, in
lieu of transparency, you give people a fairy tale literally,
all right, all of that came to crashing down when
Kennedy was murdered. You know, LBJ played things very close
to the chest. His concession to media was allowing them
to embed in in the field in Vietnam, you know,
with the common infantry as well as you know, it's
allowing newsmen to attack himself to the staff of of
a battalion level commands and higher, which proved to be
a terrible mistake. But the idea that suddenly there's been
an information blackout from the imperial executive. This is how
that kind of canard gained traction, you know. And obviously
it played into it played into their despite the fact
that these are a bunch of like newsmen, you know,
and like bitch made police worshipers, you know, and and
and and UH and middling apparatics, they fancy themselves as
like anti authoritarian you know, and this all these tendencies,
all these kinds of future shock tendencies, you know, fed
their kind of delusions in that regard, you know, their
delusions about themselves and their own roles and significance as
well as about you know the nature of UH. You know,
the UH the imperial executive, which again was kind of
a boogeyman that, although only extending our own minds, you know, loomed, uh,
like the angel of death over these people's horizon. And frankly,
I mean really from really from the turn of the
century onward, it's uh. You know, the White House as
a power center. It was engaged in all kinds of
activities which which didn't bear a public scrutiny. And the
Cold War kind of sealed the fate of you know
that you got the kind of open executive. You know,
you couldn't allow you couldn't allow free flow of information
out of the White House when you know, when if
the enemy were to come upon you know what happened
upon you know, the right data, the strategic balance could
be totally altered in terms of you know, in terms
of discerning like the the will capability and and and
political and political gumption to you know, to wage war
like this. I mean this goloes out saying, but it
the really the uh, the Cold War was won and
lost by data and the ability to correctly interpret data.
I mean you can say that about like any modern war.
But when you consider that, you know, the world that's
settled into this kind of strategic paradigm where by the
triggering of the primary conflict diad could lead to general
nuclear war. But even in times of peace, you know,
like a state, but some sort of state between like
war and peace was always a foot, so that like,
you know, genuine peace as it had existed prior to
you know, nineteen forty one in this country could not
be said to exist. Like the idea that executive decisions
you know, should be subjected to public scrutiny or availed
to some sort of like plebiscite, like actual or metaphorical,
I mean, is laughable. But the uh, and just to
the way that this was managed again for context contra Nixon.
You know when when when people assert that, you know,
the assembly of something like of a of a team
like the White House plumbers itself constitutes overreach. You know,
FDR created his own special intelligence unit, was responsible only
to him. They had a staff of eleven men. It
was financed by this what was called the Special Emergency
Fund of the State Department. He poached the members of
it from Hoover's FBI, which at that point it's it's
it's mandate, it's kind of like come into its own,
you know, like FBI men are now carrying guns. You know,
they had like real arrest power, you know, they were
real cops by that point, as well as in the
I R. S. And uh, you know, there was also
some there was a coterie from the Department of Justice,
you know, like lawyers. They kind of finessed everything and
you know, to make sure that the verbial is we
died and teas were crossed. But rosel openly, he openly
used this this intelligence unit to get dirt in his
enemies and harass them, especially the press and especially businessmen
you know, like Robert McCormick who were his enemies. You know,
he tapped their phones. He'd have them followed, you know,
like uh he'd he uh, he'd have he'd have been
indicted on for tax evasion, you know, based on trumped
up allegations and you know, things that constitute like simple
accounting errors. You know. He he made persistent efforts to
get The New York Times indicted for tax fraud, which failed.
But I mean they were tied up in litigation and
being you know, served with civil and criminal subpoenas you know,
for years on end. I mean that's you know, and
this was all this, this was all very above board.
You know. He uh he used his intel Roosevelt special
intelligence unit. It bugged the room, the hotel rooms of
his cabinet. It even bugged Missus Roosevelt's the hotel room.
Not because he was like spying and Missus Roosevelt, but
because people when they talked to her obviously thought that
they were speaking or in confidence, and he also wanted
to hear it like the other wives were saying, you know,
the this kind of personal espionage against uh, you know
again against ones, you know, fellows as well as adverse series.
I mean, nothing like that was in our way in
the Knicks administration whatever. You and I've got no louses
about Nixon, but I mean that's like, that's one step
beyond you know, dirty tricks and in the business of
modern politics, you know I say modern. I mean, you know,
from the twentieth century onward. I mean, have you has
anyone ever read a book about the gross overreach of FDR.
I mean not like not not like Fleming's book. I
mean in terms of you know, his special intelligence unit,
you know, likening them to the White House plumbers or
I mean No, it doesn't exist. People don't even think
in those terms. You know. Again, it's the uh Truman
like like was basically it was basically ran like a
clean White house. That's not just a myth. They basically
avoided these kinds of like domestic clandestine dealings. But it,
uh frankly like Eisenhower was a foregone conclusion. He was
gonna have two terms. And Eisenhower also he basically there's
never been there. There's never there's never been after the
war between the States, like a president who had the
kind of mandate that Eisenhower did. Like it's kind of
like across the aisle, just an agreement, you know, and
then that odorate much to the emergent kind of global
system and everything else. But my point is that like
Eisenhower is an odd case. You know, you can't extrapolate
much from what he did or did not do in
this regard generally about you know, the exigency's faced by
a modern executive, you know. And of course Kennedy himself
was uh, the all time king of dirty tricks and intrigues.
I'm not I'm not a Kennedy basher, despite what people say.
A lot I've actually made no secret of it that
I think he had tremendous balls, and the way he
managed the sixty two crisis, standing up not with the
cruise chift, but also the Curtis Leamay, and you know,
his own war cabinet when he was just a wet
behind the ears, you know, rich Man's son in the
eyes of most people. He was a real man. He
wasn't a plunk. But JFK stated no on certain terms
that uh, one of the chiefer grants was not having
made his brother RFK had a CIA, you know, to
bring it under family control too, because his notion, uh,
like Roosevelts, was to know everything. You know, the he'd
uh he'd been privy very much to the reading which
she was privy to the assassination of uh of a
DM is it's questionable obviously, like DM it'd been is
like one time. Ally, subsequent historians like to claim that
like Kennedy knew nothing about this, and there's a CIA,
you know, being atack things like this rogue element. And
then of course these fools also like to you know,
they got this whole they got this whole fantasy that
the CIA killed Kennedy. But I'm not even that touched
to that because it's fucking retarded. But the but in
the case of DM, the point is, like Kennedy knew
it was gonna happen. He was very much insinuated into it.
Whether he formally objected to it, you know, but then
you know, went ahead and ordered it or allowed it
rather by actor omission as a necessary evil, or whether
he was one hundred percent behind it doesn't matter. This
idea that like Kennedy was like running this clean administration
and had no idea that you know, elements within the
executive branch were killing people. That's nonsense. He had uh
where where his brother was at It was the Department
of Justice. Obviously in sixty two. These US steel executives
who are parenially perennially threatening strikes and opposing administration policies
related to the terrorf regime, like uh, head of them
have harassed with subpoenas and pre dawn and search warrants.
There were dog agents, n FBI man you know, rated
their houses, you know, just like family men, you know,
like in pre dawn hours, you know, just to just
to terrorize them, you know. In the Kennedy brothers, you know,
long before Martin Luther King totally ran a foul of
uh you know Jager whoever in LBJ. You know, half
a decade later, Jeff get RFK didn't trust him a bit.
You know, they had him put under surveillance, you know,
they was it was the Kennedy brothers who you know
first uh became aware of his uh a King's problems
with females and his like sex addiction. They were the
ones who you know, first documented this by having these
liaisons with prostitutes and other women that he was compulsed
of waving sex with, you know, like recorded and documented.
You know, I mean it's this wasn't this wasn't Jay,
This wasn't like mean racist Jadrew whoever? Are doing it
for the fun of it, you know, that's they uh
nass and right wing media, you know, like birth society
types and these kind of nascent uh people like Connie
McGinley who put out in the tabloid common sense, you know,
and guys like uh you know, these are the guys
like Tommy Metzker were associating with back when it was
like a klansman. They were trying to uh you know,
like as uh as media became more more ubiquitous, and
some of the censorship regime on radio loosened. You know,
they were trying to insinuate themselves into into the discursive
media again like father Coughlin had, you know, the Kennedy
shut that down again, like using the weaponized I R
S and other things. When uh, subsequently, Yeah, the first
big U the first big scandal that LBJ found himself
embroiled in not long after was uh, the Bobby Baker scandal.
Baker was uh, he was political advisor to LBJ having
started this is the Senate secretary of the majority leader.
Like what Baker's job was, and Uh, Lbj's fingerprints were
all over this. He was implicated in arranging liaison as
with prostitutes between soft money donors as well as UH,
as well as as well as congressmen and the House
representatives whose votes he needed on government contracts and other things.
And like when this broke, lbj's enemy is gonna certainly
like a bunch of vultures. LBJ uh asked Baker, what
kind of dirt you know we had on anybody in
I R S. Baker came up with it. LBJ told them, like,
you know, you're gonna indict these people or after me
or guess what you know, like you know, your wife,
your family, the National press, you know, everybody at i RS,
like everybody in Capitol Hill. You know they're gonna they're
gonna find out about this, you know, like little deliance
you had with you know, with this prostitute. And we've
got the receipts to prove it. I mean, like people
knew about this stuff, Okay, I mean it's it's this
idea that you know, I mean, what did anybody was it?
We're people gonna impeach the Kennedy's for spying on Martin
Luther King where people gonna impeach LBJ, you know for basically, uh,
for basically keeping Bobby Baker rounds a pimp in order
to get dirt on his enemies. Like no, no, because
that that's k But four guys breaking into a hotel
is is the equivalent of like, you know, murdering a
child or something apparently, like according to the American like
moral code of Capitol Hill, and frankly too until the
until the Nixon era, like the LBJ Nixon era, I
kind of consider him in the same vein for reasons
I think are clear by now, not because the two
men amen thing in common, but I believe we got to.
I believe it was established. Like why I consider it
in those terms, the media was pretty selective and the way,
the degree which in the way it publicized presidential wrongdoing,
and for no other reason then, because it was understood that,
you know, kind of the lynchpin of American national security
amidst the Cold War was the presidency, okay, and even
before that, during the Roosevelt and Wilson administrations and the
Hoover and Hardy administrations, it was understood that contained with
an Article two, it's not just a great it's not
just an express delegation of great power in warr in
peace terms. It's not just a way of structuring the
government so as to confer upon the only nationally elected representative,
you know, a kind of authority above and beyond that
enjoyed by the judiciary or by the Senate. But there's
an understanding that the president is a prime symbol, okay,
And in America, you know, it's like, okay, like white
Christians shouldn't be shouldn't be worshiping you know, you know,
a high office or something, or treating elected official dum
like their kings. But at the same time, you know,
there's there's got to be a certain respect afforded to
the office the chief executive like other was the officer
is in fulfilling its function, and which is why you
gotta be very careful about what what kind of man
you know you installed in the office. Okay, So there
was a basic understanding that attacking the presidency in a
in a kind of a in a truly dedicated on
going capacity would very much is throwing a baby out
with the bath order. Okay. I mean the fact that
I mean Kennedy. When Kennedy was president, he he shared
a mistress with Sam g and Conna like Kennedy probably
was a sex addict. Kennedy was drug dependent. He wasn't
doing drugs the party. I mean it was he was
in terrible health. And you know he he had a
doctor not unlike doctor Morrell was the hitler who uh
basically like made sure that Kennedy had like whatever drugs
in the system had to be there from the function
and get through the day. You know. I mean, if
somebody at the National media wanted to ruin Kennedy, they
could have done it in an instant, which is what
was another reason. It's totally retarded, and we will claim
that that Kennedy was whacked. Like you want to get
rid of Kennedy, like follow him around on a Friday night,
bribe one of his secret services detail, you know, and
like take you take take a photo of him getting
shot up with eight different drugs by his doctor, or
you know, like having a threesome with like two black hookers.
You know, no more, mister Kennedy. But you know, the
uh it's striking, and I've i've I've literally spent hours
perusing like the main large market newspapers of the day,
you know, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal,
the Chicago Tribune, you know, the La Times. It's striking.
How even during even in miss presidential scandals again like
going back, you know to Wilson, there's like neary a
peep you know about the kind of bad character of
the president or any like ad hominem really at all.
And then come Nixon. This day after day after day,
it uh, this this like just continual invective you know
against Nixon, you know, just just just non stop. That
was like the lead story like every day and every
paper you know, it's like I said, it was, it
was it was the it was Trump one point zero.
It's fascinating. I guess that's part of aging, is being
able to witness the cyclical patterns of the sociological phenomenon.
Psychosocial phenomenon at scale kind of emerged a high relief,
but it's not usually this clear.
Speaker 1: You know, is this the beginning of where everybody, every leader,
now everything is going to be judged on morality, Where
the where the greatest, the greatest criticism that's going to
be leveled against somebody is that they're a bad person.
Speaker 2: I think that's part of it. Yeah, but a certain
kind of bad person, you know, like that that's all point.
Like you know, there was there there was men in
high office who are prone devices that everybody knew about,
and even when it was reported on, it was kind
of soft balled and people didn't react the way they
people didn't react way they did to you know, uh,
this constant invective against Nixon or Trump. So yeah, that's
part of it. But it's the president being this kind
of stand in for a boogeyman imperial executive who's some
kind of you know, paternal figure gone wrong. That was
very much. That's what I do agree with Paul Johnson
on people developed this this this kind of just like
disdain for authority, like quah authority, not like real rebels
or something, but I mean like actual authority, like where
it should be vested in something like the presidency. Like
this became like scary and bad, you know. But like
these same people though, like howtow to the police or
howtow to a COVID mandate like immediately, but this idea
that like, let me just say thing like why the
media has this like hysterical fixation with declaring that laborer
Putin is like an evil evil man like Labry Putin's
he's a he's a moderate liberal who basically acts like
any Russian executive would with more restraint, you know, like
because he but but he's he's like an evil man
because in Russia there's you know, Russia doesn't just like
rotate actors and pretend like you know, the executive is
these kinds of uh, you know, there's not this rotation
of of like frontmen you know, like behind like a
real executive like in America, like like Putin actually is
the president something. But there's this idea that like that's
scary year, that constitutes some kind of like authoritarian overreach
or some kind of threat to people's preferred way of living.
I think it's I think it owes a lot to
symbolic psychology, which a lot of things do in this
country and just and probably elsewhere too, when I don't
live in other countries, so I can't speak to that
and with as much certainty. But yeah, it's the interplay
of symbolic psychology of you know, the kind of the
kind of collapse of authority by future shock and kind
of the weakening of social bonds to facilitate authority. You know.
The capitalis the capitalization on those fears and the kind
of perverting of the form of those fears such that
you know, it appeals the you know, the kind of
hoy peloy who are increasingly kind of like sleevish and
and resentful. It's almost it's.
Speaker 1: It's weird because it seems like people nowadays really only
want to really only listen or respect the president when
there's a state of exception.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think, yeah, I think that's part of it.
It's but yeah, like I said, it's something i'd have
to I have to. I have to think about it
and like organize my thoughts to convey a really concise
view of like what the source of it is. I've
thought about it before, and you can. It's kind of
like the last It's sort of it's sort of like
the last instinctive or intrinsic structure of authority that falls.
That's one of the reasons why, like Hobbes, Hobbs ontology,
Hobbs sociological and political ontology is absurd in terms of
how humans actually live, But what remains intact is Leviathan,
you know, because the patriarchal authority of the executive over
his domain is absolute and unimpeachable. I'm not making a pun,
I mean quite literally. You know. Why is that the
last psychological structure to come under attack or at least
to be effectively deteriorated by design? Well, I mean that's why.
But this also brings up there's also reasons questions about,
you know, the secularization of concepts of God, you know,
and how executive action in a modern state takes on
the trappings of like literally miraculous events, suggestive divide intervention,
not like literally, but in the symbolic mind and for
all practical purposes. Symbolic psychological occurrences are are real occurrences.
But again that's kind of outside the scope. I'm raml
like you're not. But it's a when you can come
back to that question when I'm more like folks like
one of the less like discreetly focused on the subject
at hand, the uh, but also lowered to your point,
and I mean to what we've been talking about the
entire of the hour. Not only it became someone impossible
for policy were to be reduced to discourse and polemic
and catch phrases anymore, you know. Prisoner Lash made that
point a lot too like about the Vietnam War. One
of the reasons so little is understood about it, aside
from the bad faith in trendic to the people who
are trying to sabotauze the war effort. You can't explain
something like the Vietnam conflict in five sentences, and you
can't reduce it to being a good war or a
bad war, or like we should just do more to win. There.
There's a complexity here. There's nuances, and it's not saying
they can really be debated at policy level other than
between men who truly understood, you know, all the variables
and the strategic implications beyond the battle theater of those variables,
as well as the historical implications of victory defeat in
that theater. You know. So as a journalism could no
longer really kind of capture the essence of policy decisions
and what went into those decisions, and it became less
and less capable to kind of structure the world according
to these sort of polemical devices. It just it just
simply lowered the standards of the US journalism. You know,
everything just slowly but surely became a tabloid. You know,
even those brands and outlets that there tofore had been
fairly serious and particularly anti Nixon. Well, the way to
stay alive now is is tabloid and we hate Nixon,
or you know, splashing across the front page that you know, uh,
you know, some some like some some snap sort of
hollderman looking like he's snarling about to strike a reporter,
you know, saying like you know, with some lurid you know, headline.
You know, that's what that's what sells papers. And if
you decide to take that, if you if if one
had decided to take the high road, or they just
like wouldn't be in the game, you know, they don't ceremoniously.
They's one of my ceremonials ceased to exist, you know.
And even even stuff that was like nominally, even like Midwood,
stuff that was like nominally kind of like the intellectual alternative.
Look at like look at like old firing line with
William Buckley. I mean it's note of the fact. I
mean he was he was an up two's prick. But
you know, even that, it's like it's like, okay, so
gas Buckley he talks about they'll give like a five
minute summation of something instead of a three sentence summation.
But it's still you know, the same kind of dumb
down slogan earring, you know, just like a little bit
more uh just like a little bit more like meat
to it, at least in terms of stylistic convention, but
no more like intellectual nuance, you know it the uh,
this idea of you know, the newsreader as you know
kind of like the arbiter of policy, you know, like
owing to you know, his participation, you know, as the
target audience of this this cursive process whereby you know,
we arrive at the truth. You know, like this like
American discursive space is like, you know, it's like some
giant like lyceum, like maintained by Plato or something like.
It's I mean that that's that's fucking ridiculous. But it
became even more ridiculous in the twentieth century. You know,
the and this and this is why this, this is why,
this other the other things that set the foundation for
the Nixon coup, you know, like uh, you know, like
they were like the leading of the Pentagon papers and
like the demand that you know that the demand that uh,
the executive opened up proverbial books relating to Vietnam and
battlefield outcomes and special operations, as well as you know,
asymmetrical warfare techniques, you know, some of which may or
may not have been you know, legal according to the
prevailing paradig I'm the idea that, you know, it was imperative,
it was morally imperative for these things to be availed
the journalistic scrutiny or or to uh, you know, brought
into the purview of the public mind. I mean, that's preposterous.
Like the I mean, in in pretty much every NATO
state at that time. I mean exclude like the Buonis
Republic because they was not was not not a normal
country and the hostile occupation. But I mean in the
UK there's there's the Official Secrets Act, you know, which
obviously like as as as lettered in their system, wouldn't
pass First Amendment muster, But I mean national security exigencies,
you know, like are an exception to the First Amendment,
you know. I mean there's ways to if one were
to be inclined, if what had been inclined to draft
a body of law to kind of formally insulate state secrets,
you know, from the prying eyes of media and from
the cynical maneuverings of of of parisans. I mean, it
could have been done. I mean this idea that it
was just not only not only like more morally wrong,
but you know, somehow like ali into the American political
culture to allow for official limb to keep it secrets
is a posterous The UH and the appearance of the
appearance of secret material, genuinely eyes only material in newspapers
like national papers. It shot up spectacularly during Nixon's first
months in office. The first six months of UH nineteen
sixty nine, there was a there's there's twenty. There's twenty
major leaks of documents of from class at INFO circular
classified memos circulated by the National Security Council, to documents
transmitted to and from c i A to the White House,
to Army intelligence files, you know, relating to the conditions
relating to then XTA had conditions on the ground in Vietnam, uh,
I mean serious violations and national security. Later that year,
CIA was so concerned and this is pregates hearings a
CIA actually still had some cloud. At the end of
nineteen sixty nine, CIA trained into a White House a
list of forty five newspaper articles which were regarded as
serious violations and national security which would have real effect
on you know, the state of the strategic paradigm potentially
you know VISA V nuclear secrets, as well as the
battlefield situation in Southeast Asia, which obviously was still raging,
and of course the kind of the dear of this.
It was June thirteenth, seventy one, was when the Pentagon
what's called the Pentagon Papers dropped in the New York Times.
It was a seven thousand words survey of America's involvement
in Southeast Asia, specifically Vietnam, but also Cambodia. Allows from
the end of World War Two ninety forty six, which
was when you know, the Vietnam War kicked off, until
ninety sixty eight. The study had been commissioned by Macnamera,
you know then when he was you know, Defense secretary
under Kennedy and Johnson UH and the Joint chiefs of Staff.
These were top secret documents, okay. It related not just
to you know, America's overall uh, strategic ambitions in the Orient,
which had become gonna the key theater as a you know,
a strategic nuclear terms as we talked about, as well
as in you know, conventional terms. It uh, it dealt
with the American can forces at the operational level and
like what you know kind of like the what like
emerging battle doctrine was It dealt with like under what
conditions America would consider deploying nuclear weapons to a secondary theater.
I mean, this was catastrophic, okay. The author of the
leak was Daniel Ellsberg. He was a four year old
Rand Corporation employee who'd been a researcher on the study,
and he's stolen all these documents, and when the administration
and the FBI discovered the source, they were convinced the
guy was a double agent because they're like, if there's
analyzed by KGB experts, not only could jeopardize basically an
entire range of CIA operational codes, practice and operations, but
it also it also l bear basically you know, like
how America derives its own intelligence, you know, from Warsaw
packed elements, you know, the method that uses to try
and turn these people, you know, and that information on
like American surveillance devices, which at that point, you know,
was was not readily available data, you know, I mean
this was so the reasoning of the reasoning of the
Pentagon and other people in the Nicks administration was that
if this guy's not KGB and trying to cover his
ass by going public, so doesn't up show up dead,
It's like what's his angle? Like why is he doing this?
You know, like the fact that this guy would basically
be so fucking deranged he's gonna like essentially like burn
down the American national security establishment to stick it to
Nixon because Nixon's a bad guy. That's literally insane, you know,
Like that's but that that's but that's how the people think,
you know, it's the uh. Nixon was so disturbed by it.
He uh. On the one hand, you know, he said,
you know, he said, if we overreact to this. This
was speaking to his uh, his national security Cabinet, and
then privately, Kissinger, you said, if we overreact to this,
we're just that, you know, we will look like weaklings
because it's kind of constantly reacting to what our enemies do.
You know, So should we should we? Should we? Not?
Speaker 1: Should we?
Speaker 2: You know, ignore it in the court of public opinion
and not a sho an official statement and deal with
you know, eliminating these people. Later, Kissinger uh said, no,
the fact that some if he's like, the problem is
the fact that some idiot can publish that, like you know,
the the diplomatic and military seeks with this country on
his own. Like the fact that this and this can
destroy our ability to get up foreign policy, like the
fact that's being done in the first place, Like the
damage is done, you know, and there you see, like
Kissinger kind of the Machiavelian emerging contra Nixon the politician,
which I kind of interesting. And it's also too, I mean,
if if other powers feel you cannot control leaks and
the flow of information. They're not going to negotiate with
you in a serious capacity. You know, North Vietnam is
not gonna talk to you seriously. The Russians and the
Chinese tourists aren't going to talk to you because you know,
they they've got to be certain that you know what
they tell you, like doesn't travel to the to the other.
If you cannot control the flow of information within your
sovereign domain, you cannot be said to be sovereign. So
Nixon's solution to this was an anti leak unit who's
mandate specifically was to make sure nothing like the Pentagon
papers could ever happen again. The unit was formed by
h who got air Litman's assistants Ego Bud Crow and
Kissing Germ's administrative assistant David Young. They recruited G. Gordon Lyddy,
who'd been an FBI man, and he was a military
event and he was working at the in the Department
of Justice as a in kind of a murky capacity,
technically as an investigator, but probably in some like national
security policy like I would I would imagine counter espionage,
which at that time was a big part of the
FBI is like mission mandate. They were called the Plumbers
because apparently David Young's grandmother, upon hearing that he was
running a unit to stop leaks, she wrote him a
letter saying that you know, well, you know, your grandfather
be proud that you're returning to the family business because
he'd been a plumber in New York City, Which is
kind of funny. But the uh also the plumbers did.
I was entirely justifiable, if any reasonable perspective, in light
of the severity of the Elsberg case. Their first kind
of breach with legality, They've got they got they got
to go ahead from Erlockman himself too covertly, in his words,
obtained the files to obtain Elsberg's medical files from his
psychiatrist's office, and the White House plumbers broke into the
psychiatrist's office after hours, and they in fact procured those files.
That break in of Elsberg's psychiatrist's office. That was the moment.
It was the Nick administration, albeit totally unknown to Nixon himself,
It did over overstep the bounds of legality, but nobody
talked about it subsequently, obviously because it could be rationalized
as you know, an infraction that was unfortunate, but the
necessity of which was dictated by basic national security exigencies.
And it also raised the incomgtable questions like why is
Elberg like feeding secrets, you know, feeding state series to
the media and potentially putting tens of millions in Maria's
lives in jeopardy the sole purpose of bringing down Nixon,
you know. Obviously the subsequent break in May, in late
May nineteen seventy two, and then again on June seventeenth,
I mean seventy two. These are the Water eight break ins.
There was two break ins at the Water eight Hotel
by the White House plumbers, the second of which was
when they were caught. All we've been going for let's
I've got about another hour. I want to go. If
you want me to do that, I eat a break
or we can reconvene in a day or two.
Speaker 1: Sorry I was muted. Why don't we reconvene in a
day or two?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: No, I know you have a lot more, a lot
more to go.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I didn't mean to dra us out too long,
but I want to deal with Archibald Cox as well
in that. But I promise we'll wrap it up in
the third episode.
Speaker 1: All right, so just let's end it right there. Give
your plugs and.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I hope you on the subs were happy. I
hope I wasn't rambling too much. It's a it's a
dense topic.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You can find me at x at Real Capital r
e A O Underscore number seven h M A S
seven seven seven. Find me a substick Real Thomas seven
seven seven at subseck dot com. That's what the podcast
is too. Find me my website number seven h M
A S seven seven seven dot com. I'm a some
people answered the call. I'm assembling a team of video
and audio editors who have offered to help me and Rake.
That's gonna dramatically expedite our ability to get content out there.
And like I said, I think something miss understood when
I shouted out on Twitter when I said I gotta
scale back. Like my pod appearances, I'm gonna keep doing
these with Pete as long as he wants, as long
as Wing to host me, but other commitments outside of
my own pod, I'm gonna have to scale those back dramatically.
Otherwise I'm not gonna have any time in the day
to work on these manuscripts and this other stuff. I
will come back to making myself basically available. But in
the next few days, I it's I'm gonna have to
dramatically cut back on abiding invitations to appear, and I'm
sorry about that. But I will always be on here
as long as Pete wants to host me, and I
will always be active on my own shit. But I'm
gonna need a couple of months to just focus on
getting a hit on this stuff.
Speaker 1: That's all I got, all right, man, till the next time,
till part three, talk to you. Thanks. Yeah, I want
to welcome everyone back to the Pecanana Show. I think
Thomas is ready to uh finish up this three parter
on Nixon and Watergate today. How you doing, Thomas, I'm doing.
Speaker 2: Well, there's a lot. There's a lot to this topic.
I mean, that's why I wanted to go an extra episode.
I think people get bogged down to minutia. They don't
see the forest through the trees. That's easy to do
because there's so much smoke and mirrors and you know,
just no morm of deliberate ledgard main by interested parties.
But also people focus on the wrong things, you know,
Like I said, the book Silent Coo is exhausted and
it's a good resource, but I think it focuses too
much on, you know, speculating about the intrigues actually led
to the Watergate break in, and as I'm going to
get into, because I'm going to get into today, the
second Watergate break in, whereby the plumbers were actually arrested,
that increasingly faded into the kind of faded into the
peribrial ether even as the narrative was reaching its zenith
in terms of, you know, the coalition that had assembled
to bring down the Nickson White House, you know, even
when they were kind of like at the peak of
their power, and we're very it was it was you know,
a fore round inclusion that they would they would get
an impeachment quorum if in fact it came down to
such a vote. And that's important to consider the degree
to which, you know, whatever the plumbers were doing was
really protextual what I believe people are saying, and this
is entirely this is very very dishonest. I'm not saying
this is somehow more legitimate than the kind of laughable
sort of pretext of what is being alleged is indicative
of you know, intolerable corruption and overreach on the necks
and White House, the below board, or extra judicial wire
tapping of certain individuals, as well as as well as
what was said on the infamous Nixon tapes that seems
to be abould really through Special Counsel Archibald Cox, into
this kind of vicious moral crusade, which makes a little
bit more sense than the Watergate break in pretext, but
in comparative terms. And again, this isn't what about ism
when we're talking about criminal law and the impeachment power
and process is a matter of criminal law, albeit a
very discreetly narrowly tailored one and a very unusual one.
But we can only rely on precedent, you know, to
determine what's an appropriate way to proceed under diverse facts
and circumstances. And essentially nobody cared when other administrations did
exactly the same things that the Knickson administration was doing
and considering the exigencies presented, you know, it can never
be it should never be forgotten that Nixon was a
wartime president in a very real sense and that had
had that had existential implications during the Cold War, you know,
I mean Bush forty three was also a wartime president.
But the not to sound overwrought, but the kind of
fate of the world system as it existed was not
in the balance, you know, I react not a client
state of a superpower that could kill eighty million Americans
within hours an event of a general war. So whatever
Nixon did as regards extra judicial measures undertaken against people
who are believed, based upon some reasonable suspicion, to be
compromising the ability United States to specifically off off to
the president, you know, to carry on not just diplomacy,
but carry on and prosecute an active war while protecting
state secrets in the midst of a wider strategic paradigm
that that that's got to be considered and what's what's
appropriate and what constant is a clear and present danger
then cannot be analogised or analogized to facts and circumstances.
Were such such factors not present. I think we spoke,
and I think we ended last time around the even
one's second to call my notes hears, I'm not having
to do them, so I'm not having to do Google
food to get them next to check my dates and things. Yeah,
I think we I think we ended in discussing we
started to talk about the White House tapes before we
get to that. Though, one of the reasons why Liddy
became sort of the face of Watergate is not just
because you know, he was an eccentric character and he
was kind of made for you know, conspiraal narratives in media,
like the Man of Lydia. I mean, after the after
the White House plumbers were arrested, a particularly ambitious judge
named John si Rica Cloak People Cloak Willie, anonymously known
as Maximum John because he was very much like a
Rockefeller laws or a judge who was known for his
absolutely draconian sentences. He was threatening to slap the White
House plumbers with life sentences like with parole, but just
the same if if they refuse to turn state's evidence.
That's quite literally insane, you know, to say, well, you're gonna,
you're gonna, you're gonna lock people up for the mouse,
you know, twenty years to life from a petty burglary,
you know, regardless of the implications visa via a sitting
in presidential administration. I mean, things like things like this
that doesn't just smack a malicious prosecution, but I mean
that that's that's an obvious made of judicial overreach, you know,
and it goes to show you're kind of at every level,
this was this this this scandal that we can call
it a scandal and not you know, coup, which is
kind of more probably what it was. At every stage,
you know, every every every actor of regime official dumb
was proceeding abnormally, you know it, Uh Liddy uh clammed
up essentially stated he wasn't afraid to go to prison.
Three could further threaten him by making it clear that
he'd see to it that Liddy was sent to a
maximum security prison, you know, presumably that housed violent offenders.
And this was you know, the Attica era when when
when when racial warfare was underwayne American penitentiaries. I mean,
this is this is very this is this is really
quite grotesque. Okay, it's you know, I mean, as it were,
uh lady was able to plete out. But you know,
for people proportedly, you know, for these Woodward and Bernstein
types supposedly were so singularly concerned with the integrity of
processes and things. I mean they I I would think
that that would have given them pause. But apparently it didn't,
you know, So thus the water when you know, the
water gets the water get scandal broke, you know obviously
with with the arrest of the plumbers, but it wasn't
you know again, it kind of pretty rapidly mutated into
something totally unrelated. The uh the Democrats had majority congressional control,
so this was kind of their proved opportunity to assault,
you know, the imperial presidency, which had become their boogeyman,
as they've been talking about the last two episodes, and
what they singularly focused on first was you know, the
White House tapes. You know, the claim then is now
was oh Nixon was this paranoiac. He was taping everything
in the White House. There'd been a White House taping
system in place since FDR. When Nixon took the other
of office, there was a taping system installed that Johnson
had installed Nixon, and that one removed. The one that
replaced it was one that holler him and selected that
was voice activated. So that was which was something of
a double edged sword because obviously it guarantees that you know,
if if if the third man in the room forgets
to you know, hit the record button. In those days,
you know, with that with the same technology, know, the
the minute somebody speaks audibly, the mechanism would would kick on.
You know. Some people have claimed like, oh, this, this
is what this was the single greatest disservice you know,
Hallerman could have all be it unintentionally done? I don't
accept that. Like the issue with the tapes, wasn't that
the whole point of the whole point of taping Oval
office conversations is that they're not doctored. It's that when
it's claimed that you know, oh, mister Nixon said this,
he ordered this. There's literally both sides or all sides
of the conversation. You know, it can't it can't be
said to be you know, half of a conversation, you know,
owing to owing to selective editing, you know, in sitsu.
But of course, uh, these uh, the transcriptions of these tapes.
The court and the Congressional advent instigators insisted that these
be handed over without exception. And I mean obviously that's
you know, uh, this is this is literally what executive
privilege is tailored for, is to prevent such things from
seeing the light of day, you know, not not because
we're gonna protect you know, a sitting executive, not because
we're gonna indentify, indemnify I am from wrongdoing. But again
it was understood by everybody, literally everybody, you know, until
this Watergate moment, that there's going to be state secrets
bandied about pretty much constantly in the Oval Office. You know,
we're not We're not gonna just kind of throw open
the doors of you know, the machinery of policy in
a time of war and you know, destroy the ability
to practice you know, meaningful diplomacy and and wartime negotiation,
and you know, just so that you know, Woodward and
Bernstein can get the scoop, or just so that you know,
there can be some kind of forth estate veto over
what they perceived to be you know, bad conduct and
the prosecution of the Vietnam War or whatever, you know,
something that's that was bad faith of itself. The driving
force against Nixon, particularly in this regard of the tapes
in the Senate at least was Sam Urvin, who, ironically,
you know, we talked about that Bobby Baker scandal, you know,
like sex scandal involving LBJ. Like Irvin had been the
man who successfully you know, kind of intervened like save
Olbg's ass you know, many years back. By that point,
he'd kind of retained his role as a political fixer,
you know, but obviously he didn't have any particular history
with Nixon personally. You know, this is obviously very much
a careerist, uh effort. And you know, since he'd been
the secretary of the majority leader back in back in
the days the Baker scandal. He'd ultimately resigned during an
investigation in ninety sixty three into this, you know, into
the into his business and political activities. But he very
much bounced back from that, and uh, I think of
this as a way of him kind of trying to
ingradiate himself to the new masters, as it were. But
the uh, the investigation into Baker was in sremonus he
dropped there for the assassination of Kennedy when kind of
everything got thrown into him chaos, you know, and uh,
not not to be make a crude pun, but I
mean Urban kind of dodged a bullet as as much
Kennedy uh did not did not dodge a bullet simultaneously.
Because I think we touched on you know, Vice President
Spureau agnew he was very suddenly accused of accepting kickbacks,
you know, for for government contracts, particularly by you know,
construction firms that you know, we're alleged to have organized
crime ties, you know, all government Maryland. He got slapped
with this uh indictment containing over forty counts, you know,
and alleging everything from you know, tax tax fraud and
tax evasion. He's accepting the bribes, you know, criminal conspiracy
and solicitation to commit fraud. You know. But again it's
like why why is this suddenly coming out now? You know?
But I mean Agnew had Agnew had no choice but
to resign on October ninth, ninety seventy three, the Justice
Department offering him if he was willing to resign, off
offering him a play, uh no contest. You know, I'm
on one kind of tax evasion, which also I mean
is very transparent too. You know. It's well, we'll make
we'll make this forty kind indictment go away as long
as you quit, you know. Enter Alexander Haig and he
becomes key. Higg's a really compelling figure, and I think
he was a stronger military mind than he's credited. He
was a commander of a naval forces during kind of
kind of keep during kind of the key detent era
and as Dayton came to an end. I mean, he
famously is remembered for you know, his uh putting his
foot in his mouth after Reagan was shot. I'm in
control here. I No matter what Haig said, he was
gonna be used as a pinata by you know, by
the enemies of mister Nixon and you know, those with
long memories. But Haig, at this point became the White
House Chief of Staff, held him and having resigned, you know,
owing to the fact that he there was you know,
he'd been singularly targeted by the Watergate witch hunters. Haig
was a pretty I mean, indition to being a strong
general officer type of that era, he was a combat
veteran in of Korea. He had good Machiavillian instincts for Washington,
and he was in favor of Agnew stepping down without
a fuss for the sake of optics. But privately, his
big concern was uh that both Nickson and Agnew would
be indicted, leaving succession to the constitutional next in line,
who was figure at the House, Carl Albert at that time,
who is known to be like a barely functioning alcoholic.
He was presently under psychiatric here, you know, to a
military man like hey, everything else aside the idea of
there basically being like a headless executive at that juncture,
you know, mind you in the midst of the on
the costs, but in the midst of you know, the
nineteen seventy three war, the kind of you know, critical
critical developments in Southeast Asia after you know, the signing
of the peace agreement, which had to be managed correctly
as you know, to say the least, you know, as
Han NOI kind of tested the parameters of American willingness
to enforce it. You know, this sin was so be
it split was you know, the blood was still fresh
from that coverbial separation. This this could have been uh,
this this, this, this, this could have been an absolute disaster. Now,
enter Archibold Cox. One second. Let me sorry about this.
Speaker 1: I always lose my place and notes too. Okay, yeah, no, jit,
you want a little you want a little question that
might no.
Speaker 2: I'm good, okay, I got okay, Yeah, here.
Speaker 3: This second, I was gonna ask you a question about
hag Yeah, by all means, go ahead.
Speaker 1: This is off topic. But when he made that comment
after the UH after Reagan got shot. Do you think
the Russians thought a coup might be under underway?
Speaker 2: It's possible, but it uh yeah, but I think, yeah, definitely.
But the there was an aspect, you know, we these
these sovietologists in in America were always kind of lamenting that, uh,
that it was like a miss a riddle wrapped in
an enigma to the try and discern, you know, like
who the real power was behind the throne in the Kremlin,
and drop Off thought that Reagan was something of a
cipher anyway. And that's one of the reasons during the
Avil Archer era why I kind of the real intromvirate
of grim Eco Ustenoff and it dropped Off became so
paranoid as it were so Yeah, I think that added
to the danger of a Reagan Reagan being shot just
just on its own terms, like added to the danger
of the of the situation. In my opinion, I don't
think I don't think what Haig said signaled to the
Russians any any kind of critical any kind of critical perception,
critical capacity that impacted their perception. As far as Haig's
uh role in you know, the final days of the
Knicks administration, Hay very much came into the gun sights
of Archibald Cox, who is Archibald Cox before Nixon's appointment
of Attorney General Elliott Richardson before the Senate would confirm
him on May ninety seventy three, Richardson had to agree
at his confirmation hearing to a point of Watergate special prosecutor.
The special prosecutor role and of itself is absurd, like
in any epoch, like it was absurd when ken Starr
was assigned the role. I mean, Clinton was a total
piece of shit. But that's beside the point. This idea
of we're gonna we're gonna appoint what amounts to a
law enforcement officer. He's simply gonna like investigate. He's gonna
begin an investigation from a man and from there discover
some kind of wrongdoing. I mean that that's grossly offensive
to due process. It intrinsically politicizes, you know, the Fag
finding mission. And it also it basically in the best
of times and in the best of circumstances, in the
most stable circumstances, in terms of you know, a true
moral consistent in Washington, it basically calls by the sitting executive,
the police himself, and the worst at times in terms
of across the aisle trust and goodwill. You're you're basically
guaranteeing a witch hunt. Okay, Richardson h back to the
point of Archibald Cox. Under a one time special regulation
he was allowed to it was essentially allowed to appoint him. Okay,
Now this this, this, this, this whole arrangement was to
say it was I mean that Turtle legal scholar might
call it novel. I mean, it was just moronic. You know,
we're gonna have the incoming age essentially appoint a special prosecutor.
His job is like dig up dirt on the chief
executive of the administration. He's now going to serve. And
Richardson's reasoning for selecting Cox to say it was tortured,
it doesn't even begin to describe it. Cox had an
idea that richards and idea that Cox there was so
much natural hatred between Cox and the NIXT administration that
when Cox didn't come up with anything substantive in his investigation,
it couldn't be said that there was you know, any
kind of there was any kind of cooperation, you know,
or collusion, which is the stupid reviews word now between
Cox's office and in the White House. Like how anybody
could convince themselves of that is incredible. But Richardson actually
believed this. This wasn't He wasn't some This wasn't some
leedgered Maine that he was invoking because he, you know,
had some kind of secret enmity for his boss. Cox
had been John F. Kennedy's labor advisor. Kennedy had appointed
of Solicitor General and he held that role for four years.
He was an arch Kennedy loyalist, and he was a
radical leftist, you know, son of a Manhattan lawyer, Harvard alumni,
couse judical activist. He cited John Marshall as a model jurist,
you know, and thus I mean Marshall's literally the father
of judicial review and judicial activism, you know, Marbray versus
Madison being you know, the the progenitor authority. Cox had
graduated first of his class at Harvard. He got uh
a top posting at the Solicitor General's office when World
War two broke out? By it, what's that? Did you
say something? No?
Speaker 1: I didn't. I didn't say anything.
Speaker 2: He'd uh as an associate solicitor, he had a certain
outsized power the Labor Department in those days. Mind you,
I mean, this was this was kind of the zenith,
you know, like like really the twenties to the nineteen
seventies peaking in kind of you know, like the the
the nineteen thirties to the early fifties. You know, uh,
you know, real battles between organized labor and management, you know,
and the facts I mean of national economics in the
manufacturing economy. You know. His his role being the supervise
enforcement at the district court level of federal labor statutes,
you know, meant that he had a lot of clout, okay,
and again his his radical strikes brought him down unfailingly,
you know, on the side of a big labor and
interpreting regulatory in arbitration regime, you know, most as charitably
as as he possibly could within their favor. In this role,
he had a staff at eight lawyers each which supervised
apartment's regional offices. He could he had final authority and
when an attorney could bring suit. Most of these, most
of these, most of the litigation involved issues arising under
the Fair Labor Standards Act. Okay, which is kind of
the bane of of of of management, and of and
of capital in those days. He Uh. He also sat
on the wage Adjustment Board periodically with all the construction
industry and attempts to maintain labor peace by mediating disputes
and settling prevailing you know, you know, disputes from over
like you know, wage rates and increases, which was also
statutorily controlled by the Davis Bacon Act, which was tailored
to standardize wages. But obviously I mean that that that
was open to very very wide interpretation. So I mean, uh,
you Harvard Man himself, you know, the rich scion of
a of a legal family from Manhattan. You know, Uh,
this kind of like who had a hero worship and Kennedy,
you know, it's like who, It's like, what the hell
was richards in thinking like this is It's like, uh,
it's like hiring Uh, it's like hiring LUCIFERD guard the
Pearly gates when uh Saint Peter goes to take a
piss or something. But after the war, uh, Hovard Law
School hired Cox as a professor. Cox said the st
he used to the stipulation that he would as long
as they have to teach corporations or property. You very
much use this as like, you know, an opportunity to
grand stand on his you know, socialist politics. Obviously, he
became a permanent family member in nineteen forty six forty
seven school year, you know, and this was during the
post war boom and the g I Bill, So he
you know, he the guys who were guys who went
on to become real players on the Beltway, you know,
like like passed through like you know Professor Cox's class
at Harvard to a degree that's really kind of striking.
You know, he sired proverbially speaking, like many many intellectual offspring.
He became hugely influential in the labor field there an
even fifties. You know, this was the era where the
public intellectual was alive and well that as as you know,
that role, I mean the uh he was instrumental in
defining what became you know, kind of the controlling body
of industrial relations law. You know, for an entire generation.
You know, his UH is there's no man comparable with
who's got that that kind of influence, like in any field,
but particularly not the legal field. You know, these days
it's uh, you know, mind you this he wasn't just
like a you know, kind of like a celebrity legal
commentator like Dershowitz or something, you know, he was he
was a true like public intellectual and you know, in
the way, in the way Thomas Schelling was on the
side of like new nuclear war planning. Okay, Kennedy when
he was a freshman senator in ninety fifty three, decided
that labor relations would be kind of his primary point
of attack, you know, and he wanted to build his
policy resume on that, you know, which was which was smart,
and it also allowed him to kind of like play
the set on civil rights and things. He wrote to
Cox inviting him to testify with the Senate Subcommittee on
Labor and Public Welfare. Cox reciprocated his admiration and affection.
You know. He was he was gonna county his constituents.
He's a fellow Harvard man, you know. And most importantly,
I mean this, this really kind of made a star
like permanent. You know. He was he was already naturally
recognized academic expert on labor law, and this kind of
like you know, radical liberal democrat with a predecision towards
labor but now you know, like this popular freshman senator
that people are like bandying is going to be the
president someday, is you know, hitching his wag into his
own okay, out of the fall of nineteen fifty nine
or in the fall in nine fifty nine or rather,
there was an effort to beef up the Landrum Griffin Act,
which is a bipartis and effort to kind of butcherss
the taff Hartley Act, by way, have a sort of
legislative injunction. And this was the first in a series
of kind of shipping away of you know, the hegemony
that organized labor had had won throughout the New Deal years.
It under the under the osises of residentially premise upon
anti corruption and anti recodeering concerns, and it need to
you know, get organized crime out of out of out
of labor unions. It it allowed, uh, it allowed a
Senate subcommittee like very wide based police power to essentially
like force you know, unions above a certain membership, which
was a very low bar, you know, like open their
books essentially, you know. And these kinds of a lot
like these endless kind of like mafia related hearings, like
a lot of them like were premise upon initially at
least upon the power convert by Langem Griffin incidents at
taff Hartley. Just incidentally, this is important for context. I believe,
Sorry if I'm boring everybody to death. According to I
don't know, he's the topographal because other people have claimed
this too. It's believed that like outside of his own family,
Cox was the first man that Kennedy can fight it too,
that he's running for president, you know, he wrote he
approached Cox formally despite them by that point being quite friendly,
saying you needed to he would needed to quote tap
intellectual talent in the Cambridge era, you know, and basically
build kind of like a dream team of like public
intellectuals and academics, you know, and kind of go go
forward like all guns blazing at full frattle, you know,
on you know, kind of like we're forming the labor code,
you know, to bring it back to you know, what
had happened under the New Deal, but augmented by the
kind of like newfound postwar prosperity. You know, that that
will ease the burden on management. You know, very utopian,
very much kind of the very very much the language
of kind of like you know, the utopian socialism of
the day. And uh in turn, like Cox, he prodded
a lot of labor, both labor union types and as
well as a lot of academics who again had a
lot of cloud and policy playing circles like towards the
Kennedy camp. Okay, so to say that, to say that
Cox was insinuated into the into the kind of into
the kind of the Kennedy orbit, I mean he he
absolutely was like more than more than anybody, like not
a relation of the man could be, you know. In
nineteen sixty, Cox was appointed Solicitor General. Solicitor General is
something of an unusual role. He's kind of like corporation
council would function in a municipality or at the state level.
He basically acts as the government's lawyer before the Supreme Court.
It was in those days immensely influential, not just knowing
the fact that government had more clout than but this
was the War in Court era where the Supreme Court
and the Federal judiciary in general was like legislating from
the bench and everything from four six and fourthe Amendment
issues to these you know, civil rights acts all on
Sundry and you know, these these social engineering endeavors. It
basically it was uh Cox is ten year as Solicitor
General absolutely facilitated a lot of these things. Okay, So again,
like the idea that this man would behave in any
way once appointed as Special Pride Pecuter other than to
try and do everything he could to destroy Nixon is
a really insane you know. But again, it's incredibly smart
people and incredibly stupid people often like outsmart themselves by
by twisting themselves in a crazy conceptual contortions. And I
can't tell if Richardson was either like that stupid because
he was so smart or because he was such a fool,
But it's one or the other, because there's no there's
no other explanation. But that was that was Cox's background.
And in July of nineteen seventy three, Cox immediately requested
the White House tapes and then subpoenaed them, and not
just the White House tapes but all other wire taps
and extra judicial like non court ordered tapes that had
been you know, produced by you know, any anybody on
the executive staff. Obviously, the next administration refused to produce
these tapes and the executive privilege, and they were right.
And this dispute carried on until October and carried on
through the that the nineteen seventy three war. Cox seemed
some people like Paul Johnson and CLAYT. Cox was his
grandstanding for you know, a Democratic Congress, you know, so
he at every every turn, you know, he kind of
refused to abide not just that the honor of the presidency,
but also refused to give grant the benefit of the
doubt to Nixon the chief executive. I think I don't
I don't think that was it. Okay, I think I
mean he he was absolutely doing those things. He wasn't
doing it because of like simple you know, simple show
voting for a Democratic majority. Like he he utterly hated
Nixon and was exactly the kind of person who viewed
Nixon and the silent majority as UH as like the
epitome of of of of literal evil. On October twelfth,
Cox one uninjunction doesn't cure the right of access to
the tapes, UH, to the recordings of all Nixon's White
House conversations, and uh Nixon responded by firing Cox. Okay,
Now this is held out by people as oh that
you know, crazy Nixon trying to become a dictator. Look,
this man was literally appointed by Nixon's Attorney general. Okay,
and he's within one of the absurdities of Special Council
is he's within the executive chain of command. Like under
Article two, you can fire him, you know. I mean
and again it's you. Uh, it'd be like saying like
let's say like a court order. Let's say like you,
let's say you were like an incorrigible uh, like you know,
like traffic violator. Okay, if you like a court like
ordered you to like hire like a policeman or like
a parent in type to like follow you around and
you know you should do citations for speeding. Well, at
the same time, you pay him a salary, and you're
within your rights to fire him. Like then if you
fire him, they'll charge you with a crime. I mean.
It's it's like something it's it's like something that of
have not particularly creative, you know, like Joseph Heller kind
of sat attire or something. It was at this moment
you know that like like a firing cox is is
like breathlessly and and incomprehensively called the Saturday Night massacre.
Kind of all all this, all the hysteria usually associated
with the kind of Nixon which Hunt. It just just
it says they wanted to like absolute, like full frattle
after this. But I want to I want to get
back to the issue with with with Haig, he just
for one a second, Okay, he was alarmed by cox
As immediate plans to widen the Watergate investigation for a
few reasons. Hey kind of saw the writing on the wall. Okay,
Haig realized that the Watergate, like Watergate in of itself,
didn't really make sense. Haig had been very deeply involved
in to what degree is not clear, but even very
deeply involved in what came to be known as the
Houston Plan. Okay. The Houston Plan was an ongoing effort
to surveil people who are believed to be the source
of information weeks like the Pentagon papers. You know that
involved discloses a critical information of uh you know of
of of a national security imperative. Okay. Between ninety sixty
ninety seventy one, there'd been about seventeen extra judicial wire
taps of private persons who these private persons were will
get into in a moment, they'll see that there's some
of mischaracterized and Haig was, uh, pressure has brought to
bear on Haig did has closed what he knew. This
is when Coals began threatening to bring indictments again those
who had conducted and supervised the breaking the break in
of Elsburg's doctor psychiatrist's office, you know, doctor fielding with
the doctor. Haigg's rebuttal, without admitting knowledge of any wrongdoing,
was that any such disclosures that you know, derived from
such prosecutions by antenor accident would threaten national security and
grave capay cities because the White House plumbers were involved
in a highly classified matters, some which were related to
these wire taps, which we'll get into in a moment,
some of which were not. But Cox then responded by
uh subpoena documents relating to the purchase of Nixon's home
in San Clemente. You know, I mean, so this became,
it became, it became, it became very clear that this
was a witch hunt. By this point, Okay, when you're
when you're when when the scope of your investigation simply
widens every time that your stone walled with a refusal
biactual mission to cooperate with a threatened subpoena. It's not
even clear if that subpoena power it's constitutionally permis did
I mean you're not You're not talking about an investigation
in the public corruption based on you know, facts coming
to light that demanded, you know, and you're not talking
about you're not talking about due process as we think
of it. You know, you really are talking about a
wish hunt by this point, and I don't I don't
see how that can be contested. But a man of
in one second, Jade Burzards. He was named Special White
House Council for Watergate matters to the President on May tenth,
and Alexander Haig apparently confided in him quite a bit,
which kind of came with the role because again, Hig
became White House Chief of Staff following the resignation of Holliman.
He can fighted a buzzart that his role at the
White House to be temporary, and so he retained his
title at the Department of Defense, so essentially essentially saying like,
I'm just a placeholder, and one of the reasons I'm
here is because you know, the way I interpreted the
least one of the reasons I'm here is because you know,
I obviously you know my top priority is is guaranteeing
He's guaranteeing, you know, security, and it's in the integrity
of state seekers. The first task of UH, the first
ask a special council, Buzzart's, was to investigate fromer whaloes
Counsul John Dean. Dean was believed to possess classified documents.
And this is where you know, again the the kind
of entire narrative to some people of Watergate like revolves
around John Dean. That's about outside the scope of what
I want to tackle in this series. But what John
Dean had direct knowledge of was the Houston Plan. And
I believe the big concern about Dean being pressured, if
for no other reason then only to his connections the
intelligence community. Deans, I mean, Buzzart was convinced that these
documents related to what was called the Houston Plan. The
Houston Plan was a proposed banged and a domestic surveillance. Okay,
was it illegal as proposed? It was extra judicial? But
this is this is gonna kind of like the meat
of Watergate, Okay, like what and at the eleventh hour,
suddenly this became the rationalization like you see other goal
post was always changing between the Houston plant. What was
even plant first was a forty three page report and
outline posing security operations, surveillance espionage while you're tapping of
domestic targets. It is proposed it it was, it was
proposed in in nineteen sixty nine. It came to light
owing to Sam Urban's efforts, like what exactly, but like
how we came to know if it's existence isn't clear
Again to this this may have been like a Dean
league them may have Dean may have told they may
have just closed what he knew about it. He may
have his closed that he had documents relating to it,
and then his ace in the hole was saying like
I absolutely will not like release those documents unless, say,
you know, before an immunity qualified or otherwise. Conventional wisdom
is that Nixon rescinded the plan on July twenty eight,
nineteen seventy, after approving it only a few days before
in July twenty third. This has led to this kind
of hysterical refrain that for five days in nineteen seventy,
the fundamental guarantees that Bill Roy were suspended by the
mandate given the secret Houston Plan. Beau if like hevieus
corpus and new process has never been suspended before. And
then you know, most recently during you know, the Bush
forty three era. You know, before that during World War one,
world War two, during Roosevelt's you know, internment of a
you know, thousands of people based on subjective subjective national characteristics,
you know, his indictment of people under the sedition active
and the list goes on, no no, no, no, no,
no no. But the impetus for this report was, uh,
the belief that a lot of left wing radical NGOs
were in fact being funded by Warsaw Pact. That was
actually true. Okay, countercultural era a movement in general. I
think it was like the anti war movement which seemed
to emerge out of nowhere and was flushed with money.
Was you know it was it was an enemy okay.
Jaegrew Hoover initially back the Houston Plan. Also Houston himself
at or closely with William Sullivan, who was uh, William C.
Sullivan who was one of humors assistant Hoover's assistants, and
drawing up the options listed what eventually became you know
the Houston Plan. The plan called for you know, domestic burglary,
electronic surveillance, surveilling of male of domestic radicals. Okay, like
in broad terms at one time, it's uh, it calls
for a suspension of habeas corpus in the case of
you know, people like the Weathermen who were known to
be involved in terrorist activities and allow their detainment you know,
without you know, like formal arraignment or indictment incidents. Uh,
you know, clear clear and present danger, which like I said,
I there is precedent for that, for better or worse.
Nixon RADI. Nixon ratified these proposals, and they were submitted
uh two FBI, Central Intelligence, d I A, and the
National Security Agency. So again this you have Hoover collaborating
on this, you have White House Council liaising with the
FBI on this. You have uh, the director of every
one of the major intelligence organizations that constitute the National
Security Apparatus being literally like availed to this document. Like
the idea that this was like Nixon developing some secret
spy for wars or something is laughable, you know, to
say nothing of the fact that he rescinded it five
days later, and there's this incredible in nineteen seventy three.
The world's on the prank and nuclear war at that
time and about every decade, you know, and it ends
up there the American streets being torn apart by race wars.
This is an incredibly brutal war in Southeast Asia that
has just come to close, you know, the third World terrorism.
Speaker 1: There's terrorism on the streets and planes are being hijacked
all over the place. Yeah, what the seventies is unless
you yeah, unless you've studied it or lived through it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then and then you got these you got
you got these dipshit, You got these dipshit Washington lawyers,
you know, like getting like teary eyed and saying, you know,
this is the day, this is the day democracy died.
You know, not I guess, I guess, I guess it
didn't die when like Habeas Corpus was suspended and a
bunch of people are suspected sympathizing with the South were
just like locked up without trial like mister Lincoln's order.
I'm not saying that like translink and I'm saying that
as what happened, but it the so like very very
suddenly the very very very very suddenly the Houston plan,
Like oh now, now this is now, this is the
reason for you know this, this why Nixon must go,
you know, and who are these out of the uh,
out of the intelligence and in law enforcement establishment aforementioned
Only Hoover objected to the plan and and pressured the
attorney and pressure then Attorney General John Mitchell to to
get Nixon's ear to rescind it. Like why Hoover thought
it was a bad plan. There's a few reasons in
my mind, but it wasn't because he was, you know,
horrified at the thought that the Bill rights might be corrupted.
But you know, this is presented as a case of oh,
you know, like regular people or like college teachers or whatever.
Just you know, John and JQ public were being set
up to be terrorised by the government. Okay, here's here's
a list of the people who were actually placed on
surveillance incident to the provisions of the he was in planning,
I can implemented one Martin Helper and who's a National
Security Council staffer and a consultant UH Democratic Presidental cannedy
Edmund Muskie. His phone was tapped from May sixty nine
to thirty seventy one. Daniel Davidson, another NSC staff member
who UH who Hoover ultimately had fired Colonel Robert Roberty
Persley then Melvin Lair, a Secretary of Defense adjutant a
whole lot of em earlier administrations in the wake of
the Cambodian invasion. It was believed that he was the
source of the leagues to national media. Okay, this is
a bird colonel, you know, serving the Secretary of State,
Secretary of Defense Helmet Sunenfeldt Uh, a sovietologist and National
Security council who served in the State Department. Haig wrote
his name to the FBI because it was believed that
he might be a mole for for East Bloc intelligence
named Henry Brandon. He was the London Times, the London
Sunday Times correspondent liaison to Washington. He was friendly personally
with Henry Kissinger.
Speaker 1: And UH.
Speaker 2: Kissinger presented him to Hoover through a third party as
a man who had strong connections with Ali Fornes intelligence services,
so presumably tamping his phone. You know, he wasn't at
the target, but you know whoever he might be speaking to,
particularly those you know, who might be a on both
sides of the Iron curtain. John Sears, his assistant to
White House counsel John Erlickman, later became Reagan's campaign manager
until he was until he was on cere whence he fired.
And WILLIAMS. Safire, who'd been a he was he was
the New York Times writer columnist, and that's what he's
most known for. The people our agent. He was a
White House speech writer at UH wasn't clear what Safire
was on the list, but again like he was, you know,
very much, very much a public figure. The two kind
of outliers where Marvin Kel was a CBS and an
NBC reporter, and William Beecher was a report of the
New York Times and the Boston Globe. But again too,
you know, the media was acted, especially the print media.
They were they were they were, they were engaged in
actively publicizing eyes only documents relating to the critical national
security of the United States. You know, So none of these,
none of these people under war conditions which were underway
in ninety seventy three or from ninety sixty nine to
you know, seventy one, like it should have been like
off limits or something, you know, the remaining UH, the
remaining targets. UH Richard F. Peterson States Bari councilor Williamate
Sullivan Ambassador of Laus Anthony Lake, an NSC specialist in
Vietnam who had very much a murky career. He was
probably a spook, is what I'm getting at. Under light
dolomatic cover Winston Lord, China specialist in the NSC staff.
And UH James H. James McLean was a staff member
with ties to UH Rockefeller, kind of liberal Republicans like Health,
Education and Welfare Secretary Robert Finch. He was close the
former gardner of Massachusetts, Francis Sergeant McLean was was briefly
tapped for ever of weeks at Halliman's of warquest. I mean,
who knows why, but that's where that that was it.
That was the extent of private citizens tapped by the
precepts of the Houston Plan, you know. And that was
and after, you know, after after Nixon lost the fight
to give up the tapes, Nixon has still been ahead
in the polls until publication of the tape extracts. The
tape extracts says printed we're very much doctored. Many marks
have exploited, deleted, you know, persuaded members that Nixon and
his team were constantly swearing, you know, and habitually uttering obscenities,
which sounds corny today, it's made like a difference, you know,
it was they were kind of cast in a light.
It's putative. Yeah, there's rumors constantly bandied that all these
tops have been these tapes have been doctored and censored
by Nixon and his staff, you know, like the media
was claiming this. So anything you read, it's way worse
than what you're reading, you know. But so as the
pollster and moving against Nixon, you know, the machinery impeachment
is brought into play in a true sense, the impeachment process,
the way it works, its specified an Article one. Obviously,
Article one, Section two and three provides for the president
of the impeach where offenses describe an Article two, section four.
That's where treeson bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.
That's where that phraseology comes from. I mean, in reality though,
it just me it's it's just politicians sitting in judgment
and one another. You know. Andrew Johnson got impeached because
he was like a Southern patriot and a bunch of
radicals and people wanted to you know, and people wanted
to like hang him anf figy for the death of
mister Lincoln, like said to impeach him, you know, like
like bitch made retards, you know, want to uh who
uh who have some kind of like superstitious hatred of
Donald Trump? You know they they get off on impeaching him.
I mean that's you know, that's but but the actual
like process that follows the House Judgery Committee is like
the court of like first Review, Like they're like the
reigning court basically like what what amounts will they they
sent off on what amounts to a fighting of problem cause?
And uh then it goes to the and then it
goes to the Senate. But the two thirds majority is
required for a conviction. Like the actual article that comes
before the House. The Detrict Committee is is is literally
one of the foreign organization of the articles of impeachment.
The Senate then tries the accused of these articles you know,
like any other like like an like any other trial. Basically,
you know, a two days majority is required for conviction,
at which time the convicteds removed from office. It's qualified
to holding any subsequent office under the Constitution in the future.
Nick Son's view early on was that, uh, it was
like the House to repert stamp the article of impeachment,
but that they'd never get through two years majority in
the Senate, the House Judirie Committee there was twenty one
Democrats and seventeen Republicans. Eighteen to twenty one. Democrats were
certain to vote for impeachment no matter what, just because
they hated him and they were absolute partisans. So the
committee was a stacked deck as it developed. All twenty
one Democrats and six of the Republicans, six out of
seventeen voted for impeachment and recommended I and voted to
recommend Pee into the full House. There was no doubt
look mixed of the first His reasoning was that he
wanted to get in his public career as a fighter.
He actually wrote that down and Nixon wasn't a prol
big diars. He jotted that down on a pad of paper,
in public career as a fighter, and he thought, even
if convicted, you know, there would be the opportunity to
defend himself in public. And uh, the odds of it.
Two thres majority again were not particularly strong. Andrew Johnson
had survived by a single vote famously, and by that
time there had been twelve instances of the House moving
to impeach a public official, and the Senate had only
convicted on four occasions. But Nixon, Nixon in nineteen sixty
shown through subsequently. I mean, he realized there'd been incalculable
damage done to the executive end of the country by
the which hunt, by the entire charade. You know, America
was a nation just coming off of a general war.
The future is very uncertain. The Soviets that achieved nuclear
parody and strategic terms and were winning on the battlefield,
the impeachment process itself, I mean, even if Nixon's successor
was a real executive, which basically was no chance of
the impeachment process itself, would would be head the executive
you know, at a time when NATO was quite fragile,
you know, in the UH in the anti communist block,
would such be like literally headless, you know, in Nixon's mind.
And it's clear if you know what to look for
in his statements on it, and they're not self serving. Next,
I'm not playing martyrs. He's entirely right like, had he
not stepped down, he would have been playing directly into
the hands of the Soviet Union and at a critical
juncture it may have given them what they needed to
win next and decided, obviously in the national news, to resign,
other than stand to be impeached. Nixon's hope had been
that John Connolly for a governor of Texas, you know,
who'd been who got shot, you know, and the same
that Kennedy was murdered, would be a successor. And had
you know, had Nixon seen out his term, he was
gonna back Connolly in seventy six. But it's uh such
that it was Ford. Ford was a like a good guy,
like morally, like he had no vices, and by all
accounts he was like a decent man. But you know,
Ford was like a non entity. And there's no you know,
there's no way anybody truly affiliated with Nixon would have
gotten would have gotten a nod for the job after
Nixon's removal. But that's basically Watergate, man, Like you give
me the scatter shot. There's like a lot there that
I wanted to like get in that we weren't able
to before. And I hope it didn't seem to disjointed.
Speaker 1: Now, what do you think if Nickon finishes his term
out these two term president full full two terms, gets
what done what he needs to be done, at least
for you know, a couple of years there, or at
least for a decade. How do you think the country
is different?
Speaker 2: The strategic landscape is different because North Vietnam doesn't win
the war. There's a stalemate, you know, like the like
the like the like this the final offensive like never happens,
you know, because uh, the pairis piece, the treaties afforded,
agreement is is enforced. Also, there's, uh, there's the Cold War.
The way it ends plays out differently because Nixon remains
very much in the driver's seat of policy. And there
never would have been this situation where you know, a
decade goes by and there's no communication, you know, between
the Soviet executive and the president of United States. It's
like how that developed would have been interesting. And I
think a possibility of like real strategic nuclear disarmament before
the collapse of the Soviet Union would have been realizable.
But it's it's hard to say. Otherwise Nixon did get
is like the Burger Court was I mean, Nixon was
able to pack like the federal judiciary and you know,
Renquist was this guy. You know, it's I'm in rentalist.
So I mean a lot of a lot of Nixon's
legacy like was realized, you know, set up the EPA
and stuff. I ever what he feels about that. It's
been like impactful, but it's it's hard to say. I'm
oriented towards you know, the Cold War side of it
and things like that. But you wouldn't have a gilded executive, Okay,
that's the big I think that's what you're looking for. Okay,
Like there wouldn't you would do this bizarre situation like
the presidents is kind of like the cipher, and you've
got this like Soviet like gerontocracy that's impossibly get rid of,
and the legislature and the judiciary, you know, and you
and you have like basically like a headless executive that
just kind of exists, you know, and it's kind of
like a magnet for you know, sort of like pure
island manufactured controversies and political theater and stuff. So you
have so other country functions more like it did you know,
like you know, from like Trueman to Kennedy and Nixon himself.
Speaker 1: All right, well to plug and we'll get out of here.
Speaker 2: Yeah sure, I'm uh. I'm soundproving my like home office here,
and I'm doing all kinds of sexy stuff, like getting
all kinds of like I'm getting like this like fucking
like outer space like ergonomic chair and stuff. And I
just got like this brand new gimbal so I'm like
sexing up my production gear so long last I'm gonna
be able to get into like a proper like workflow schema.
Fresh stuff is coming, I promise for right now. You
can find me on substack. That's where the podcast is,
That's where our chat is. That's where some of my
medium form writing is. It's real Tom. It's seven seven
seven dot substay dot com. Check out my website. It's
number seven h m as seven seven seven dot com.
Check me out an X real capital R cavil e
capital A capital L, number seven lowercase h M E
S seven seven seven. That's where I'm at.
Speaker 1: All that stuff is going to be as always in
the UH show notes of every episode that Thomas is on,
Thank you Thomas, appreciate it.
Speaker 2: A human