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