The Real Watergate Scandal

Nathan Pinkowski has a great essay in the Claremont Review of Books on what has only become clear with the passage of time, based on the release of old information under FOIA about then-associate director of the FBI, Mark Felt, coming out as “Deep Throat” in 2005.

Though the Ervin Committee praised J. Edgar Hoover’s resistance to the Huston Plan, the committee failed to mention that the plan described activities in which the FBI was already engaged and continued to be engaged. As was finally revealed in 2005, “Deep Throat” was Associate Director of the FBI Mark Felt, who had overseen some of the bureau’s more controversial domestic spying operations. He appeared to be Hoover’s natural heir, but after Hoover died, Nixon twice passed him over in order to appoint an outsider to lead the bureau instead, which enraged Felt. For Yale historian Beverly Gage, “Felt cooperated with Woodward not to preserve the American Constitution or to limit the imperial presidency, as the standard Watergate myths would suggest, but to protect the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover.”

Has the FBI run any ops against a presidential candidate and/or a sitting president recently?

I was in high school as the made-for-TV Watergate hearings dominated broadcasts with the largely now realized goal of making the Administrative/Deep State Democrat Media complex into a shadow government. Not until Trump’s first term, and now even more so in his second, do we see more of “the agencies behind the curtain,” no longer quite so shadowed.

If the myth of Watergate can be summed up in a phrase, it’s “the imperial presidency.” Postwar liberalism’s greatest historian, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., popularized that expression at the start of Nixon’s second term. Conceived largely to attack Nixon’s centralization of foreign policy in the executive branch, the phrase came to indicate widespread presidential abuse of power, regarding Nixon as an anti-constitutional actor who subjected the American system to its ultimate trial.

Article II vests executive power in the president and gives him the exclusive authority to represent the United States in foreign affairs — including the power to negotiate treaties (with Senate approval) and to appoint ambassadors. The president is also the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, which gives him control over military actions abroad. These powers are broad and can be exercised without direct legislative authorization, giving the executive a central role in shaping foreign policy.

The CIA, the FBI, the rest of the administrative state, along with the media, assumed that from FDR on, the Constitutional powers of the presidency would either be actually or at least effectively under the control of the Democrat party and therefore the imperial presidency was a very good thing. The ‘68 election was very close, and both houses were under Democrat control, but in 1972 when Nixon won with 60% of the vote, the government for Democrats by Democrats was in peril.

Nixon believed that his victory gave him a clear mandate to set a different course for the country. He would reorganize the federal government, reasserting voter control and accountability over the agencies via the office of an elected official—the president—who symbolized that majority.

Democrats are all about “Our Democracy”… meaning their oligarchy. As we see in the LA mayoral primary, having a Republican on the ballot is a real danger to Their Democracy! Things like voter ID, same-day voting with no mail-in ballots… any attempt to enhance the integrity of elections is an existential threat. With Nixon’s landslide victory and intentions, the oligarchy felt forced to act to maintain its authoritarian control.

Four forces worked to achieve this symbolic murder of presidential authority, driving Nixon from office and enshrining the mythology of Watergate in America’s collective psyche. In the bureaucracy, it was the national security apparatus; in culture, rising anxiety over authoritarianism; in media, the hegemony of network television; and in law, the fanaticism of the college-educated elites. When we dig into the origins of the Watergate affair, we see not an “imperial presidency” controlling the national security agencies, but an institutional conflict between the White House on the one hand, and the military, CIA, and FBI on the other. In this conflict, the president was not winning.

Along comes 2016, 1972 all over again. Hillary, Obama, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the DOJ, the IRS, the legacy media all swung into feverish, panicked action. But just because the oligarchy is powerful doesn’t mean it is competent. Hillary’s open server full of classified information, the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” operation to take down Trump using covert surveillance supposedly allowed due to fallacious FISA warrants, the assertion that major oil producer Russia which spent millions in anti-fracking propaganda supposedly working to get pro-fracking Trump elected, “pee tapes” of the borderline germaphobic Trump paying Russian hookers to urinate on him…. the whole panicked subversion op made the Keystone Cops look like James Bond in comparison.

Back to Nixon.

Nixon wasn’t wrong to mistrust the agencies. From at least November 1970 to December 1971, the Joint Chiefs of Staff ran a spy ring against the president. Led by Admiral Thomas Moorer, the military was worried about Nixon’s foreign policy shifts and his planned withdrawal from Vietnam. Collecting documents from the White House via Navy yeoman Charles Radford, they leaked to the press to compel the White House to change course. The Moorer-Radford affair, as it’s called, was wartime espionage on the commander-in-chief. It was, as a furious Nixon put it, “a federal offense of the highest order.” The president, however, opted not to publicize this scandal or to open prosecutions.

As the historical record shows, Nixon didn’t contest the clearly flawed 1960 election because he knew it would expose the level of election fraud that the Daley political machine. “People need to have faith in elections” (even though he knew the faith was often unfounded).

Nixon was aware that the national security agencies were working against him. But he didn’t want to expose publicly how these agencies had become the engines of government, driving and determining much of policy at the expense of the elected branches. The exposure of the Moorer-Radford affair, for instance, would have undermined military morale and dismayed patriots. “Admiral Moorer, I could have screwed him on that and been a big hero, you know. I could have screwed the whole Pentagon about that damn thing,” Nixon told Haldeman on May 11, 1973, as the Watergate scandal was intensifying. “Why didn’t I do it? Because I thought more of the services. You know that. By golly, that’s the way I deal.” It’s only because of the release of the relevant Nixon tapes in October 2000 that we know the details. Haldeman later wrote in his memoir, The Ends of Power (1978), “we were well on the way to the point where the Administration could, for the first time in decades, be controlled by a President. And that caused pure fright in Washington—because this President was Richard M. Nixon.” Nixon generated such hatred because he was the symbol of what the country’s elders and elites had come to despise. For decades, he embodied the aspirations, anxieties, and insecurities of middle America. By the early 1970s, this symbiosis with average Americans was a double-edged sword. American liberals had lost their confidence in middle America. They regarded these fellow citizens with suspicion and often outright contempt. Nixon’s proximity to middle Americans turned into evidence of his viciousness.

“Middle America” … the “deplorables”, the “bitter clingers”, the “garbage.” Those unwashed, insufficiently educated, NASCAR and UFC watching, pickup trucking idiots. Nixon was an existential threat to the authoritarian rule by elites, so he had to be destroyed in such a way that another such president would never attempt to take on the Deep State.

As Chuck Schumer in January 2017 told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, “you take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you” in response to then-President-elect Donald Trump criticizing U.S. intelligence agencies.

The Watergate Special Prosecution Task Force was molded to the task of lawfare. It had an unlimited budget and personnel, the discretion to decide what information to share with Congress, and the authority over the rest of the Department of Justice and other U.S. attorneys to investigate “all offences arising out of the 1972 presidential election.”

Time passed, Boomers aged, and the mythology of Watergate and the fear of the intelligence community that Schumer expressed held sway. Republican presidents, Reagan, HW Bush, even RINO GW Bush, faced Deep State “investigations” — though in the case of the Scooter Libby/Valerie Plame affair, the lawfare was laughable.

The mostly leftist Boomers became nostalgic for the older version of the TV medium, where everyone watched the same select channels. Most importantly, they longed for the unity that would come from a successful re-enactment of the Watergate scapegoating. That’s the best way to understand the post-2016 impeachment efforts against President Donald Trump. Like the Ervin Committee, the Mueller, Ukraine, and the January 6 investigations were all sophisticated, expertly choreographed, high-production-value TV operations. But in the new fragmented media environment, the redeployed Watergate script could only reach about half the country. These productions never came close to moving public opinion the way the televised Watergate hearings did.

Now we stand on the brink of the midterms with the RINO Senate unwilling to pass the SAVE Act and Trump caring more about the safety of the world than the safety of his presidency as he defangs Iran. The Democrat/Deep State/Media oligarchy isn’t what it was in the ‘70s, but it is still powerful and for the aging Boomers, a majority still bow to the approved narrative.

That Trump is still alive can only be explained as an act of God. Various levels of security breaches and assassination attempts have become blase. If the House is lost, the country will face two years of impeachment attempts and all other means to destroy the economy, create chaos in the streets to exceed the sick ‘70s level of disaster that may create the sort of unity on the left that Watergate once did.

Pinkowski's article is well worth reading, packed with pointers to supporting documentation.