Det ligner en tanke, at avsløringene rundt
FBIs/Bush-II-administrasjonens til nå godt skjulte forhåndsviten om bin
Ladens selvmordspilotplaner (slike planer ble man altså advart om
allerede 1995, og Bush II ble presentert for ferdige planer for
"totalkrigen mot terror" to dager før angrepet på WTC) kom på dagen
tretti år etter at Watergate-skandalen tok sin begynnelse. Nedenstående
artikkel er jeg ikke enig med konklusjonen i, jeg har nemlig en sterk
fornemmelse av, at bl.a. det som nå kommer fram, viser at Watergate kun
var et unntak ved at saken kom fram, men ellers uttrykk for normen. Også
kampagnen mot Clinton viste dette.
Det er ellers interessant å notere seg, at Watergatesaken spiller en
helt ubetydelig rolle i f.eks. moderne norske historiebøker for elever i
videregående skole. Begivenheten er en "ikke-begivenhet" som andre
begivenheter var det i stalinistisk historieskrivning. Det samme gjelder
i enda høyere grad mordene på Kennedyene, Martin L. King og Olof Palme
samt Iran-Contras-affæren. En video fra CNN om sekstitallet f.eks. er i
forhold til norske historiebøker for vdg. skole nærmest venstreekstrem.
At en del danske gymnaisehistoriebøker om samme periode også er
annerledes kritiske henger etter min mening sammen med, at man ikke i
Danmark har det statslige godkjenningssystem (som selvsagt egentlig er
sensur) for lærebøker som finnes her.
KJ.
Fra Independent
Once upon a time in America
It was the defining scandal of our times, the moment when trust was
replaced by cynicism - and 30 years on, the ugly memory of Richard Nixon
and the Watergate affair still haunts Washington.
By Rupert Cornwell
15 May 2002
It may be the 21st-century, downtown Washington equivalent of Nineveh
and Tyre, but no one seems to realise it. "Oh yeah, Watergate," said the
concierge at the smart, recently refurbished residential hall of George
Washington University on Virginia Avenue, with a wise and knowing smile.
"No one here makes a fuss about it any more."
But then she's too young to remember what this building once was. Not
exactly a temple of antiquity to be sure – just a standard-issue Howard
Johnson, one of those featureless, anywhere-in-the-USA boxes that hotel
chains insist on calling an inn. At least, though, up outside what was
Room 723, now a two-student dorm, there's still a sign saying "The
Watergate Room". For exactly 30 years ago, Room 723 was command central
for the detonation of the biggest political scandal of modern America,
where President Nixon's men had set up shop for an electronic
surveillance operation on the Democratic National Committee headquarters
across the street.
But if you're looking for history over there, forget it too. The old DNC
sixth-floor suite at the Watergate Office Building, where Frank Wills
and the police found the burglars, has long since been remodelled. Once
there was a plaque, but long ago someone stole it. Today the premises
house Urenco Inc, a marketing firm specialising in uranium enrichment
for nuclear plants.
Watergate? What Watergate? Maybe that's what Wills thought too, all
those years ago. He was the security guard with the graveyard shift at
the office building on the night of 16 June 1972, when he discovered a
taped lock on a door in the basement. Assuming some worker had forgotten
to remove it, Wills did so. But when he went round an hour later, the
lock had been taped over again. He called the police. He didn't realise
it, but he also changed the world.
The police locked the building, turned off the elevators, and one by one
started to check the darkened offices. At 2am they reached the DNC
headquarters. Five men were hiding there. Their names were Bernard
Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, James McCord Jr and Frank
Sturgis. They wore surgical gloves and carried flashlights, various
tools and a walkie-talkie, as well as thousands of dollars in crisp new
$100 bills.
In the National Archives in Washington you will find page 48 of Wills's
dog-eared ledger in which he made notes of his inspections, containing
the entry for that night: "1.47am. Call police found tape on Doore."
Just less than 22 months later, on 9 August 1974, Richard Nixon became
the first and only President of the United States to resign. How the
first event brought about the second is the greatest political thriller
of recent times.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, two young local reporters on The
Washington Post, were assigned the story when the five were arraigned
later that day. Sitting in court, Woodward listened as one of the
burglars, McCord, whispered the three letters C-I-A as he was asked to
identify himself. With all due respect to Nixon's spokesman Ron Ziegler,
this "third-rate burglary" was clearly from day one a hell of a story.
For Bernstein and Woodward, it would be confusing, exhilarating,
frustrating and tantalising in equal measure. It quickly emerged that
the group was linked to Nixon's campaign organisation, the Committee to
Re-elect the President, universally known by the acronym of Creep, run
out of the White House and headed by John Mitchell, the Attorney General
and a close crony of the President.
Another name that investigators soon encountered was that of the White
House special counsel (or multi-purpose fixer) Charles Colson. The trail
also ran to a couple of shady White House operatives called Gordon Liddy
and Howard Hunt, formerly of the FBI and CIA respectively, who were in
direct charge of the Watergate burglars.
The first phase of Watergate was a classic of investigative journalism,
founded not upon leaked documents but old-fashioned gumshoe reporting,
checking and rechecking every lead and relentlessly pursuing the money
involved through a maze of accounts and banks. With the White House
paying hush money to persuade the burglars to plead guilty and say
nothing, Woodward and Bernstein had no easy task. But they had a trump
card – Deep Throat, an official from the executive branch who, at a
series of clandestine meetings, kept the pair pointed in the right
direction.
Watergate, however, was about to crack wide open. The trial of the five
men, plus Hunt and Liddy, who directly organised the break-in, began on
21 January 1973. Hunt and four of the burglars pleaded guilty; McCord
and Liddy opted to be tried, only to be convicted on the same charges of
conspiracy, wiretapping and burglary.
Their misfortune was to find themselves up before Judge "Maximum John"
Sirica, famous for his short temper and heavy sentences. Angry at the
stonewalling, Sirica handed down massive sentences of 30 or more years –
but indicated he would think again if the men co-operated with
prosecutors. Quietly, fatefully, McCord agreed to do so. Creep had been
behind the burglary, he confirmed, and the defendants had been paid to
perjure themselves.
Deep Throat was now superfluous. A special Senate Committee, under the
redoubtable Sam Ervin of North Carolina, was set up to investigate
Watergate and its ramifications. As the subpoenas went out, the
floodgates opened. On 21 March, John Dean, the White House counsel, went
to Nixon to issue the famous warning of a "cancer on the presidency".
Days later he told his story to Congressional investigators. By now
Watergate was a national obsession. On 30 April, Nixon stunned the
country by sacking Dean and asking for the resignations of his two
closest aides, the White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman and his
domestic affairs adviser John Ehrlichman, known collectively as "the
Berlin Wall". The next day, Eliot Richardson, the Attorney General,
appointed Archibald Cox as special Watergate prosecutor.
Even so, it was still the word of Dean and McCord against a President
who denied any involvement in either planning or covering up the
break-in. But even that stalemate ended on 16 July 1973 when the chief
White House scheduler, Alexander Butterfield, told the committee, and an
astounded nation watching live on TV, that an automatic taping system in
the White House recorded every conversation in the Oval Office. Now
either Dean or Nixon would be shown to have lied. At that moment, the
37th President later admitted, he knew the game was up.
Nixon, however, was nothing if not a fighter. He clung defiantly to the
tapes, whose surrender was being demanded by the special prosecutor,
Congress and every newspaper in the land. On 20 October 1973, in the
midst of a Middle East war, came the "Saturday night massacre", as Nixon
fired first Richardson, then his deputy, until he found someone willing
to be Attorney General and to dismiss Cox.
The rest was the slow, lingering but inevitable death of a presidency.
Besieged, virtually alone, under mental pressure that can only be
imagined, Nixon saw his last hope vanish when the Supreme Court
unanimously rejected his claim that the tapes were covered by executive
privilege and ordered him to hand them over.
The tape for 23 June 1972 was the now famous "smoking gun". Nixon and
Haldeman were discussing the FBI's progress on the break-in, especially
in tracking the money found on the burglars. They proposed having the
CIA ask the FBI to end the investigation, on the grounds that the
burglary was a national security operation. It is unlikely that Nixon
knew of it beforehand. But that tape showed, contrary to his every
claim, that inside a week he was orchestrating the Watergate cover-up.
With Congress poised to impeach him, Nixon resigned.
That night, 9 August 1974, the new President, Gerald Ford, told his
countrymen: "Our long national nightmare is over." In truth it wasn't,
quite. A few weeks later Ford pardoned Nixon, named as an "unindicted
co-conspirator" by earlier grand jury proceedings. The outrage, amid
suspicions of a deal between the outgoing and incoming Presidents, may
have cost Ford re-election in his own right in November 1976.
Watergate reverberates to this day. Its gifts to the language of
politics range far beyond the tiresome –gate suffix loved by lazy
headline writers to denote any nickel-and-dime scandal. Who can forget,
as the White House squirmed after the departures of Haldeman and
Ehrlichman, Ron Ziegler's description of earlier statements as
"inoperative"? Or the "modified limited hang-out" ("stall as long as you
can"), or the "expletive deleted" phrase that studs the Nixon
transcripts. Thanks to Watergate, we have the "smoking gun", the "cancer
eating at the presidency", "the plumbers", "I am not a crook" and much,
much more.
Three decades on, many of the protagonists have passed away. Partly
rehabilitated, having re-invented himself as a foreign policy sage,
Nixon died in April 1994. John Ehrlichman has gone; so have Bob
Haldeman, John Mitchell, Judge Sirica, Sam Ervin and Frank Wills. Colson
has found God, and writes a regular column for Christianity Today.
Liddy, conspirator turned gun freak and right-wing talk-show host, is as
manic as ever, with his shaven head and H20GATE car plates. A portlier
John Dean is an investment banker in California. Bob Woodward is one of
journalism's listed national monuments. As for Deep Throat, he is a
rarity verging on the unique – a Washington secret that has been kept.
Next month, on 17 June, Dean will cash in on the anniversary by
publishing a 40,000-word online book in which he will make his pick for
surely the most famous anonymous source in history. The theory that best
fits the few clues in the Woodward and Bernstein book All the
President's Men is that he was a disaffected FBI man (Mark Felt, the
bureau's deputy director of the day, is a much touted candidate). But
only the two reporters and the Post's then editor, Ben Bradlee, know for
sure. John Dean seems unlikely to resolve the mystery.
Unrepentant as ever, Liddy continues to peddle an implausible
revisionist theory that, far from being a dirty trick against the
Democrats, the break-in was a freelance operation ordered by Dean to
search for photos that might link his then fiancée with a callgirl ring
allegedly operating out of the DNC office to provide extracurricular
entertainment for visiting party dignitaries.
Supposedly, the pictures were kept in the desk of Ida "Maxie" Wells, a
DNC secretary at the time. Dean calls the notion "baloney", while Ms
Wells is suing Liddy for defamation. A first trial ended inconclusively
and, thanks to a deft touch by the court schedulers, the retrial will
start on 17 June.
But overshadowing everything is the dark persona of Nixon himself,
haunting the country from beyond the grave. The release of previously
unheard Nixon tapes by the National Archives has become an enjoyable
feature of the Washington political year. The most recent batch
featured, along with the usual scabrous Presidential language, Nixon
horrifying Henry Kissinger by speculating on the merits of nuking North
Vietnam, and Nixon and Billy Graham indulging in an anti-Semitic duet in
the Oval Office that last March forced a humbling apology from the
83-year-old evangelist.
Thanks to Watergate, Nixon is the only President not allowed to keep his
White House documents and whose Presidential Library must do without the
standard $5.5m of annual federal funding. That anomaly largely explains
why the library at Yorba Linda, California, is more theme park than
museum, and why his daughters Tricia and Julie are embroiled in a sad
little feud over how the library should be run.
Without Nixon's paranoia and brooding insecurity, Watergate would never
have happened. He must have been the only politician in all America who
did not believe he would defeat George McGovern by a landslide in the
1972 presidential election (in the event he carried every state save
Massachusetts and the District of Columbia). Instead his henchmen were
told to cover every eventuality, by fair means or foul.
Nixon was not the first occupant of the White House secretly to record
his conversations. Nor was he the first to seek to make improper use of
the CIA and FBI. But a charmer like John F Kennedy or a truly gifted
wheeler-dealer like Lyndon Johnson would probably have got away with it.
Nixon was a 24-carat villain who faced a Congress in the hands of the
party his men had bugged. Liberals loathed him; so, less viscerally, did
most of America's influential newspapers and its TV networks. In a
country depressed and divided by Vietnam, Nixon was a natural target.
Watergate, however, was far more than a break-in and a cover-up. What
happened in the early hours of that 17 June was the tip of an iceberg of
domestic spying and illegal eavesdropping that had been under way for at
least a year – ever since Nixon was so upset by the leak of the Pentagon
Papers in June 1971 to The New York Times that he set up the "Special
Investigations Unit" in the basement of the Old Executive Building next
door to the White House.
Thus were born the "plumbers". Liddy and Howard Hunt ran the operation,
which, prodded by Haldeman and others, soon diversified into dirty
tricks against the Democrats. For Liddy, the Watergate break-in was part
of a massive clandestine political campaign called Gemstone. The
plumbers had made their first foray into DNC headquarters on 25 May 1972
to install listening devices; 17 June was a second visit, to replace a
faulty eavesdropping bug.
From Ziegler's "third-rate burglary" blossomed the most perfect
political scandal of modern times. True, you search for the ladies in
vain: the closest connection between Watergate and sex is the
coincidence that, more than 20 years later, one of the apartments at the
north-eastern wing of Watergate was briefly occupied by a certain Monica
Lewinsky.
And for all the dodgy campaign contributions, the unregulated slush
funds and the $400,000-plus to buy the silence of the burglars,
Watergate wasn't really about money. It wasn't even about breaking the
rules to conduct a policy, such as in the tangled Iran-Contra affair,
featuring the secret sale of US arms to Iran, whose proceeds were
illegally diverted to held fund the rightwing Contra movement in
Nicaragua.
Reagan was ultimately forgiven; unlike Nixon, he was regarded as a nice
guy, albeit a bit unsure of what his underlings were up to. Watergate,
by contrast, was about the ultimate currency of politics. It was about
power, and the retention of power, whatever it takes. Its deeper effects
are with America to this day. Watergate gave journalism an aura it
largely retains; had The Washington Post not pursued the story early on,
Creep and Nixon might have got away with it. The latest changes in
campaign finance rules stem from those introduced in the wake of
Watergate, which for the first time called for strict accounting of all
donations.
More profoundly, the scandal marked a shift in power from the White
House to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. It ushered in the era of
the special counsels, as Archibald Cox and his Watergate successor Leon
Jaworski were followed by Lawrence Walsh, who did the Democrats' bidding
on Iran-Contra.
Then came Kenneth Starr, beloved of Republicans and for more than four
years the tormentor of Bill Clinton in the sleazy, ultimately trivial
soap opera of Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky. No longer would a
President automatically enjoy the benefit of a respectful doubt. Never
again would the press turn a blind eye to his foibles, as it did to the
philanderings of John Kennedy.
Above all, Watergate was a vindication of the American Constitution. Its
finely calibrated checks and balances worked precisely as intended.
Congress did its job of investigating patently criminal behaviour by the
executive branch of government. By refusing the all-embracing doctrine
of executive privilege invoked by Nixon, the Supreme Court did no more
and no less than apply the Constitution.
On the night of 8 August 1974, when Nixon went on television to announce
his resignation, Tip O'Neill – then the Democratic majority leader in
the House of Representatives, later to become Speaker – drove past the
White House. Inside, the most powerful man in the world was being forced
from office, against his will.
Yet there were no tanks, no police with riot shields, no protesters.
Just a single motorcycle policeman directing traffic in the gathering
dusk. "Isn't this the damnedest thing you ever saw," O'Neill remarked.
"You couldn't imagine this." As an epitaph on Watergate, no one will
ever better that.
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