I was totally PO’ed when Ford pardoned Tricky Dick. That was unforgivable as far as I was concerned that Nixon got to skate while the underlings that did his bidding ended up in prison. Now there’s the sorry spectacle of trump going about business as usual while others who did or are/were accused of doing far less than he did with classified documents spend time in lockup. What a farce of so-called “justice”…
Jun 13, 2023·edited Jun 13, 2023Liked by Lucian K. Truscott IV
Conversation between myself and my late mother, during Clinton's Blue Dress Blues (etc.) She was deeply disappointed with the American Public for not storming the White House and giving Clinton a public castration.
Mom: (huffy) What if this was happening with Nixon? He'd be CRUCIFIED.
Me: Actually, Mom... I think being caught in a love affair with an intern would have HELPED Nixon.
I often caught hell for sympathizing with Monica L. I pointed out that she may have had unfortunate taste (sorry) in men, but by God, that was a darling hat she was wearing. (I refer to the video where she stood in line to give Clinton a hug.)
Saturday Review. My mother gave me a subscription for my freshman year gift. (pardon me while I weep...)
I suppose psychopaths, conspiracy nuts, hysterics and the terminally stupid need representation too -- but must there be so many of them?
Jun 13, 2023·edited Jun 14, 2023Liked by Lucian K. Truscott IV
Thank you Lucian for a great story and the rare insight into American politics. I tried hard to ignore it but your reference to John Wayne and Vietnam veterans triggered an unpleasant memory for me.
In March 1968 I was a 24 year old college graduate and war protester. After five college deferments and a brief trip to Canada to evade the draft I returned to NYC for induction during probably the worst year of the war(16,000 Americans killed in just 1968). In an unexpected encounter I was subjected to “counseling” several times to convince me to go to Officer Candidate School. I told them I thought the Vietnam War was a disgusting mistake and I declined their offer.
I was distinguished in basic training at Fort Gordon, GA as one of only two college graduates in the company. I was also white and the oldest trainee. Most of the rest were 18-20 year old black, brown or poor under educated whites. Some of these boys were so brainwashed they looked forward to going to ‘Nam to kill “gooks”. I was totally surprised at the number of draftees from Puerto Rico. Those guys didn’t speak English and had a a hard time adapting to the military. I didn’t learn until many years later that while Puerto Ricans are not permitted to vote in our presidential elections they were still drafted against their will(although there is no longer a military draft, the good people of Puerto Rico still can’t vote for president).
O.K. Now on to Mr. John Wayne. At that time a new movie starring Wayne called “The Green Berets” was released. One day my basic training company was told to “fall in” and we were marched to the base movie theater and forced to watch “The Green Berets“. The film, in my opinion, was a pitiful propaganda hoax. At the conclusion of this pro-war film I couldn’t decide whether to desert or kill myself. I did neither.
I thought it quite ironic that John Wayne didn’t serve in the military during WWII and was considered by many at the time to be a draft dodger.
My brother was in just such a Basic Training company. He was the only guy in his platoon who could read and write above a 2nd or 3rd grade level and spent hours writing letters home for his largely Black and Brown platoon mates. When I was in cadet training at Ft. Knox in 1967, I was XO of an entire company of Project 100,000 draftees, guys who didn't have high school diplomas or had been let out of terms of less than 2 years to "volunteer" for the draft. Sound familiar? Mr. Prigohzin, meet Project 100,000. It was remarkable. I had truly landed in what Michael Harrington called "The Other America." I never forgot it., not for a moment, until this day.
Jun 14, 2023·edited Jun 14, 2023Liked by Lucian K. Truscott IV
After training with the Marines (+SERE), I spent a year on an Army Advisory Team by the Cambodian border. March 1968 to March 1969.
The smartest enlisted were all draftees. They were also the best soldiers. This was not a coincidence. There were volunteer soldiers that performed so poorly in the field that I reported them to the LTCOL who ran the team. Within hours they disappeared, the skipper mercifully sending them to work in some Army warehouse. The Project 100,000 (actually 355,000) guys who were not totally useless were permanently assigned to perimeter defense. Having read "McNamara's Folly" (about Project 100,000), now I think I wouldn't have slept had I known how bad and many were these people.
And Michael Harrington's "The Other America", assigned in college, was a real eye-opener to me.
Jun 14, 2023·edited Jun 14, 2023Liked by Lucian K. Truscott IV
Interesting, ironic and sad that towards the end of the Vietnam War and the introduction of the all-volunteer military the standards to enlist were raised so high that many young men were rejected and therefor denied the opportunity for needed education and job training.
Same GOP convention, 1972, Miami. I’m there with ABC News. I was in the lobby of The Fountainbleau, where ABC had rented a floor of rooms for staff. H.L. Hunt, the right-wing billionaire oil mogul, staggered up to the concierge desk, elbowed me out of the way and popped a fifty-dollar bill on the counter. “Can you gimmie fifty in quarters,” he said to the concierge. Then he looked at me and said, “Ya need to do a whole lotta tipping in this place.”
I have stayed at The Fountainbleau for close to 5 months while filming “The Bodyguard” and “The Specialist” in the early 1990’s. As anyone that travels a lot for a living knows, hotels are a poor excuse for your own home. Hunt was right about needing to tip everywhere you turned, by the 90’s after he had corralled the silver market, nobody was using quarters. Mediocre food at the time but a great beach to watch the thunder boats heading down to the Keys on Sundays at 80 mph, you would have thought they were giving them away at Thunder Boat Alley not far to the north. The Eden Roc, much smaller, next door was a step up, we had a party in the presidential suite there where Kevin was staying. It really was a presidential suite, the pictures on the walls proved it. Topping them all was The Alexander which was an all suites hotel, that they would put me up in while working on “Miami Vice”, my room there was bigger than my home in Atlanta, and the food was the best hotel food I have ever eaten. Sorry to digress, but you all brought back a lot of memories, oh and we filmed at Bebe’s home site on Key Biscane , the house was gone but the helicopter pad remained, the new house had an elevator and a view of Miami that you wouldn’t believe.
Damn, you missed being Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein by inches. That could have been a helluva story about Rebozo, because I'd always wondered what this guy was doing with all that money, and it was a lot back then.
As for a gay Nixon? I could not imagine the man having a sex drive, let alone sex. No wonder Pat drank..I would have with looking at that ugly mug every day.
I just wish the truth had come out before the whole thing went south-it could have saved us a lot of time and effort to prosecute that man for what he did, but of course being pardoned he literally got away with crimes that we should have nailed him for.
We have the chance now to do what we should have done then-and I hope we get it right this time.
I wrote multiple stories on Bebe for the Voice over a period of almost a year. That's how I came to know the counsels to the Watergate Committee. I knew more about him than they did.
Back when the Clinton/Monica thing was at its height, remember watching a Chris Rock show where he discussed why Nixon didn't cheat--"a man is only as faithful as his options" That Tricky Dick was a horndog just blows me away.
Wait a minute. What's with all this "we" jazz??? Those of us who despised and loathed Nixon, and who now hate t-Rump with an annihilating, foaming hatred, did NOT vote for either of these men, and are NOT part of the collective crazy that put them both in office. There are a frightening number of dishonest, cruel, vicious, sadistic, bigoted people in the USA who voted those two monsters into office and to this day remain fanatically loyal to them. Those millions are morally worthless human beings, period, paragraph.
You know exactly who I mean by "we". What they used to call the Great Unwashed American public. Even if you or I weren't one of them, they were out there all along, as I pointed out in my column, "Living in a Hurricane."
I covered the '72 Republican convention as a cameraman for the BBC. It was quite a deal as I remember with Nixon hugging Sammy, Ron Kovic & Norman Mailer showing up inside , and I even got tea-gassed covering a Yippy or was it Zippy protest outside the convention.
What fun to read free associating relative to Trump and Nixon. Bebe's friendship with RN was always ripe for speculation. I'm kinda sorry he wasn't closeted. That would've added to his life, and the White House would have been better decorated. As for sex and Mr. Nixon, it is better not to think about it, I believe .
And a Ben Bradlee atta boy for Mr. T. for being slotted in for *two* reporters MIA. (This is the newspaper/magazine version of Lana Turner at the soda fountain.)
Covering a national convention in Miami with Hunter Thompson had to have rocked. (And in this tale Hollywood distinguishes itself.)
I can't leave this subject without voicing a particular Watergate regret. The first prosecutor, Earl Silbert,
was my husband's roommate at college and a friend thereafter. He would never speak of Watergate. Someone convinced him, after many years, that he had important historical information, so he started writing his book. He never finished. He died last year.
This was an awesome piece. I’m am grateful to you. And yet, depressed. How do you manage to see so much reality and not just want to join dome obscure commune or something? But please don’t, we need to hear from you
It is with considerable shame that I admit that the 1972 election was the first presidential election in which I was old enough to vote, and I voted for Nixon. He is the last republican presidential candidate to receive my vote. As an aside, the thought of Nixon as a "horndog" is enough to make me puke in my mouth!
Reading your detailed and fascinating recollections of those days makes me wish I knew you then (or now, for that matter). For the record, I have never voted for a Republican at any level, and I never will. I was in graduate school in 1968, and during the Rethug convention that summer was having lunch with a few friends on the lawn in front of the student union building at Cornell, and listening to the convention coverage on a portable radio. When Nixon’s VP choice was announced- Spiro Agnew! All eating stopped in mid-sandwich, and we stared at each other. We were speechless. “Who the hell is that?”, one of us finally said. We certainly found out a few years later. He was a brazen crook, along with Nixon, despite Nixon’s very public denial that he was one. They were birds of a feather. Only Nixon collected his ill-gotten gain in secret with his bag man, and Agnew took his bribe money personally in his White House office. In my late twenties naiveté, I wondered why Americans would elect a slime-ball like Nixon. The presidents I had grown up with - Roosevelt (only slightly), Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson - were men of stature and accomplishment. Nixon was oh so clearly not in their league. I was by that time very vocally anti-Vietnam-war, and despite Nixon’s promises to end it I didn’t believe him for a micro-second. Skip ahead a few years. I wasn’t so naive anymore, but I did think someone like Nixon would ever be elected president again. Then Ford pardoned him, and I realized the precedent had been set for a president to get away with egregious behavior. Reagan certainly did; Bush Jr. did; and now we have the worst slime-ball of them all. A super slime-ball who got 74-million votes in 2020! And regardless of how many indictments *Rump accumulates by the 2024 election he will not withdraw, might even win the election with enough manipulation of the electoral process by the Rethugs, and then attempt to pardon himself. I appreciate Lucian’s eloquent upbeat essay the other day exorting us to cool it a little, and let events play out somewhat with *Rump. I would like to, but it’s not easy if you really believe what this country tells itself it believes, and have lived through the last 60 years as an adult.
I've always felt that the difference between Nixon, the first Republican I loathed, and Trump was that Nixon, at some point in his life, had chosen evil, whereas Trump was born evil. I could be wrong, of course: it is merely my intuition.
Nixon was a horndog? I've never heard that one before. It might have been the good Doctor Thompson who once told the story of a reporter asking a Nixon Press Aide what Nixon did with his semi-annual erection, smuggle it into Tijuana?
As Watergate unfolded, I was a wire-attendant at the SF Examiner. Down at the M&M Tavern where all the true ink-stained wretches gathered every single day, I would go on and on about how Watergate went back to the JFK killing. The much older reporters told me I was nuts as I pointed out all the Bay of Pigs guys who were involved in Watergate.
Many years later, H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's Chief of Staff, wrote in his memoir that the "Bay of Pigs thing" was Nixon's code phrase for the JFK assassination. You will recall that just before the infamous 18.5 minute gap in the Watergate tapes, Nixon was hectoring someone to stonewall it, to tell the kill the inquiry, that it all went back to the "Bay of Pigs" thing.
I'm happy to say that, a number of years later, those same reporters admitted that I had been right.
Hadn't heard the Haldeman comment. I knew there was more to the Bay of Pigs thing and that Bebe was in the middle of it somehow. But unlike the Watergate Committee, I didn't have a subpoena.
Nixon's resignation and pardon essentially ended all investigations, whether legal or from journos. Doing so allowed the political right to begin rehabilitating the Snake Belly. Was the beginning of the political right's quest to revise history to what they want it be.
FTR: John Dean is not a Nixon expert. He had little interaction with Nixon. Dean is more of a curator of stories told to him by Nixon's original California Cabinet. By using Dean, they remained anonymous allowing them to not be labeled traitors. Indeed, their silence kept them in good standing with the emerging conservative movement. Said another way, they were all cowards.
Much like Trump's original cabinet. Is another thing Nixon-Trump shared, the pursuit of highly flawed men lacking character yet have a so-called good reputation.
Nixon-Trump shared a few other attributes, both desperately wanted to be around, accepted and liked by respectful folk. Is a twisted form of validation. And saw anyone who didn't warm to them as enemies including the press. As you laid out both were petty, crooked, looked down on wimmin, Jews, POC, and saw themselves above the law.
Can't resist: The exception to "us" are the Commonwealth of Massachusetts voters who soundly rejected Nixon and of course Trump.
I was totally PO’ed when Ford pardoned Tricky Dick. That was unforgivable as far as I was concerned that Nixon got to skate while the underlings that did his bidding ended up in prison. Now there’s the sorry spectacle of trump going about business as usual while others who did or are/were accused of doing far less than he did with classified documents spend time in lockup. What a farce of so-called “justice”…
Imagine those poor chicks (no doubt paid for their work) who had to have sex with the young Nixon! The mere thought just about triggers my gag reflex!
Conversation between myself and my late mother, during Clinton's Blue Dress Blues (etc.) She was deeply disappointed with the American Public for not storming the White House and giving Clinton a public castration.
Mom: (huffy) What if this was happening with Nixon? He'd be CRUCIFIED.
Me: Actually, Mom... I think being caught in a love affair with an intern would have HELPED Nixon.
I often caught hell for sympathizing with Monica L. I pointed out that she may have had unfortunate taste (sorry) in men, but by God, that was a darling hat she was wearing. (I refer to the video where she stood in line to give Clinton a hug.)
Saturday Review. My mother gave me a subscription for my freshman year gift. (pardon me while I weep...)
I suppose psychopaths, conspiracy nuts, hysterics and the terminally stupid need representation too -- but must there be so many of them?
Thank you Lucian for a great story and the rare insight into American politics. I tried hard to ignore it but your reference to John Wayne and Vietnam veterans triggered an unpleasant memory for me.
In March 1968 I was a 24 year old college graduate and war protester. After five college deferments and a brief trip to Canada to evade the draft I returned to NYC for induction during probably the worst year of the war(16,000 Americans killed in just 1968). In an unexpected encounter I was subjected to “counseling” several times to convince me to go to Officer Candidate School. I told them I thought the Vietnam War was a disgusting mistake and I declined their offer.
I was distinguished in basic training at Fort Gordon, GA as one of only two college graduates in the company. I was also white and the oldest trainee. Most of the rest were 18-20 year old black, brown or poor under educated whites. Some of these boys were so brainwashed they looked forward to going to ‘Nam to kill “gooks”. I was totally surprised at the number of draftees from Puerto Rico. Those guys didn’t speak English and had a a hard time adapting to the military. I didn’t learn until many years later that while Puerto Ricans are not permitted to vote in our presidential elections they were still drafted against their will(although there is no longer a military draft, the good people of Puerto Rico still can’t vote for president).
O.K. Now on to Mr. John Wayne. At that time a new movie starring Wayne called “The Green Berets” was released. One day my basic training company was told to “fall in” and we were marched to the base movie theater and forced to watch “The Green Berets“. The film, in my opinion, was a pitiful propaganda hoax. At the conclusion of this pro-war film I couldn’t decide whether to desert or kill myself. I did neither.
I thought it quite ironic that John Wayne didn’t serve in the military during WWII and was considered by many at the time to be a draft dodger.
My brother was in just such a Basic Training company. He was the only guy in his platoon who could read and write above a 2nd or 3rd grade level and spent hours writing letters home for his largely Black and Brown platoon mates. When I was in cadet training at Ft. Knox in 1967, I was XO of an entire company of Project 100,000 draftees, guys who didn't have high school diplomas or had been let out of terms of less than 2 years to "volunteer" for the draft. Sound familiar? Mr. Prigohzin, meet Project 100,000. It was remarkable. I had truly landed in what Michael Harrington called "The Other America." I never forgot it., not for a moment, until this day.
After training with the Marines (+SERE), I spent a year on an Army Advisory Team by the Cambodian border. March 1968 to March 1969.
The smartest enlisted were all draftees. They were also the best soldiers. This was not a coincidence. There were volunteer soldiers that performed so poorly in the field that I reported them to the LTCOL who ran the team. Within hours they disappeared, the skipper mercifully sending them to work in some Army warehouse. The Project 100,000 (actually 355,000) guys who were not totally useless were permanently assigned to perimeter defense. Having read "McNamara's Folly" (about Project 100,000), now I think I wouldn't have slept had I known how bad and many were these people.
And Michael Harrington's "The Other America", assigned in college, was a real eye-opener to me.
Interesting, ironic and sad that towards the end of the Vietnam War and the introduction of the all-volunteer military the standards to enlist were raised so high that many young men were rejected and therefor denied the opportunity for needed education and job training.
Wayne was a vile and horrible human being. A crappy actor too.
"The Green Berets" is the worst, most dishonest, war movie that I have ever seen. Criminal propaganda; simply disgraceful.
Same GOP convention, 1972, Miami. I’m there with ABC News. I was in the lobby of The Fountainbleau, where ABC had rented a floor of rooms for staff. H.L. Hunt, the right-wing billionaire oil mogul, staggered up to the concierge desk, elbowed me out of the way and popped a fifty-dollar bill on the counter. “Can you gimmie fifty in quarters,” he said to the concierge. Then he looked at me and said, “Ya need to do a whole lotta tipping in this place.”
I have stayed at The Fountainbleau for close to 5 months while filming “The Bodyguard” and “The Specialist” in the early 1990’s. As anyone that travels a lot for a living knows, hotels are a poor excuse for your own home. Hunt was right about needing to tip everywhere you turned, by the 90’s after he had corralled the silver market, nobody was using quarters. Mediocre food at the time but a great beach to watch the thunder boats heading down to the Keys on Sundays at 80 mph, you would have thought they were giving them away at Thunder Boat Alley not far to the north. The Eden Roc, much smaller, next door was a step up, we had a party in the presidential suite there where Kevin was staying. It really was a presidential suite, the pictures on the walls proved it. Topping them all was The Alexander which was an all suites hotel, that they would put me up in while working on “Miami Vice”, my room there was bigger than my home in Atlanta, and the food was the best hotel food I have ever eaten. Sorry to digress, but you all brought back a lot of memories, oh and we filmed at Bebe’s home site on Key Biscane , the house was gone but the helicopter pad remained, the new house had an elevator and a view of Miami that you wouldn’t believe.
Damn, you missed being Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein by inches. That could have been a helluva story about Rebozo, because I'd always wondered what this guy was doing with all that money, and it was a lot back then.
As for a gay Nixon? I could not imagine the man having a sex drive, let alone sex. No wonder Pat drank..I would have with looking at that ugly mug every day.
I just wish the truth had come out before the whole thing went south-it could have saved us a lot of time and effort to prosecute that man for what he did, but of course being pardoned he literally got away with crimes that we should have nailed him for.
We have the chance now to do what we should have done then-and I hope we get it right this time.
I wrote multiple stories on Bebe for the Voice over a period of almost a year. That's how I came to know the counsels to the Watergate Committee. I knew more about him than they did.
You're probably familiar with the Edward Sorel cartoon of Judge Sirica listening to a noisy sex tape featuring Nixon and Rebozo in the throes...
Can I boast that I voted against both...Trump twice and Nixon once. Would have been two against Nixon but was too young to vote.
Same!
Well..I voted against BOTH twice. And Shrub twice. And Reagan. And Bush 1. I’m so proud!
You damn betcha you can boast! (me too)
Hahahahahaha. Nixon a horndog? I'm guessing that anyone as slimy, creepy and unappealing, not to mention ugly, would have to pay for it.
Back when the Clinton/Monica thing was at its height, remember watching a Chris Rock show where he discussed why Nixon didn't cheat--"a man is only as faithful as his options" That Tricky Dick was a horndog just blows me away.
exactly!
Take a look at a photograph of Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor. Different hairline, but I think I looks like Nixon...
Shuddering
Wait a minute. What's with all this "we" jazz??? Those of us who despised and loathed Nixon, and who now hate t-Rump with an annihilating, foaming hatred, did NOT vote for either of these men, and are NOT part of the collective crazy that put them both in office. There are a frightening number of dishonest, cruel, vicious, sadistic, bigoted people in the USA who voted those two monsters into office and to this day remain fanatically loyal to them. Those millions are morally worthless human beings, period, paragraph.
You know exactly who I mean by "we". What they used to call the Great Unwashed American public. Even if you or I weren't one of them, they were out there all along, as I pointed out in my column, "Living in a Hurricane."
I covered the '72 Republican convention as a cameraman for the BBC. It was quite a deal as I remember with Nixon hugging Sammy, Ron Kovic & Norman Mailer showing up inside , and I even got tea-gassed covering a Yippy or was it Zippy protest outside the convention.
What fun to read free associating relative to Trump and Nixon. Bebe's friendship with RN was always ripe for speculation. I'm kinda sorry he wasn't closeted. That would've added to his life, and the White House would have been better decorated. As for sex and Mr. Nixon, it is better not to think about it, I believe .
And a Ben Bradlee atta boy for Mr. T. for being slotted in for *two* reporters MIA. (This is the newspaper/magazine version of Lana Turner at the soda fountain.)
Covering a national convention in Miami with Hunter Thompson had to have rocked. (And in this tale Hollywood distinguishes itself.)
I can't leave this subject without voicing a particular Watergate regret. The first prosecutor, Earl Silbert,
was my husband's roommate at college and a friend thereafter. He would never speak of Watergate. Someone convinced him, after many years, that he had important historical information, so he started writing his book. He never finished. He died last year.
There has always been a big, fat rope of crazy running through American life.
This was an awesome piece. I’m am grateful to you. And yet, depressed. How do you manage to see so much reality and not just want to join dome obscure commune or something? But please don’t, we need to hear from you
It is with considerable shame that I admit that the 1972 election was the first presidential election in which I was old enough to vote, and I voted for Nixon. He is the last republican presidential candidate to receive my vote. As an aside, the thought of Nixon as a "horndog" is enough to make me puke in my mouth!
I just did!
😁😂
Reading your detailed and fascinating recollections of those days makes me wish I knew you then (or now, for that matter). For the record, I have never voted for a Republican at any level, and I never will. I was in graduate school in 1968, and during the Rethug convention that summer was having lunch with a few friends on the lawn in front of the student union building at Cornell, and listening to the convention coverage on a portable radio. When Nixon’s VP choice was announced- Spiro Agnew! All eating stopped in mid-sandwich, and we stared at each other. We were speechless. “Who the hell is that?”, one of us finally said. We certainly found out a few years later. He was a brazen crook, along with Nixon, despite Nixon’s very public denial that he was one. They were birds of a feather. Only Nixon collected his ill-gotten gain in secret with his bag man, and Agnew took his bribe money personally in his White House office. In my late twenties naiveté, I wondered why Americans would elect a slime-ball like Nixon. The presidents I had grown up with - Roosevelt (only slightly), Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson - were men of stature and accomplishment. Nixon was oh so clearly not in their league. I was by that time very vocally anti-Vietnam-war, and despite Nixon’s promises to end it I didn’t believe him for a micro-second. Skip ahead a few years. I wasn’t so naive anymore, but I did think someone like Nixon would ever be elected president again. Then Ford pardoned him, and I realized the precedent had been set for a president to get away with egregious behavior. Reagan certainly did; Bush Jr. did; and now we have the worst slime-ball of them all. A super slime-ball who got 74-million votes in 2020! And regardless of how many indictments *Rump accumulates by the 2024 election he will not withdraw, might even win the election with enough manipulation of the electoral process by the Rethugs, and then attempt to pardon himself. I appreciate Lucian’s eloquent upbeat essay the other day exorting us to cool it a little, and let events play out somewhat with *Rump. I would like to, but it’s not easy if you really believe what this country tells itself it believes, and have lived through the last 60 years as an adult.
I've always felt that the difference between Nixon, the first Republican I loathed, and Trump was that Nixon, at some point in his life, had chosen evil, whereas Trump was born evil. I could be wrong, of course: it is merely my intuition.
Nixon was a horndog? I've never heard that one before. It might have been the good Doctor Thompson who once told the story of a reporter asking a Nixon Press Aide what Nixon did with his semi-annual erection, smuggle it into Tijuana?
As Watergate unfolded, I was a wire-attendant at the SF Examiner. Down at the M&M Tavern where all the true ink-stained wretches gathered every single day, I would go on and on about how Watergate went back to the JFK killing. The much older reporters told me I was nuts as I pointed out all the Bay of Pigs guys who were involved in Watergate.
Many years later, H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's Chief of Staff, wrote in his memoir that the "Bay of Pigs thing" was Nixon's code phrase for the JFK assassination. You will recall that just before the infamous 18.5 minute gap in the Watergate tapes, Nixon was hectoring someone to stonewall it, to tell the kill the inquiry, that it all went back to the "Bay of Pigs" thing.
I'm happy to say that, a number of years later, those same reporters admitted that I had been right.
Hadn't heard the Haldeman comment. I knew there was more to the Bay of Pigs thing and that Bebe was in the middle of it somehow. But unlike the Watergate Committee, I didn't have a subpoena.
WOW! What a storytell. WOW!
Nixon's resignation and pardon essentially ended all investigations, whether legal or from journos. Doing so allowed the political right to begin rehabilitating the Snake Belly. Was the beginning of the political right's quest to revise history to what they want it be.
FTR: John Dean is not a Nixon expert. He had little interaction with Nixon. Dean is more of a curator of stories told to him by Nixon's original California Cabinet. By using Dean, they remained anonymous allowing them to not be labeled traitors. Indeed, their silence kept them in good standing with the emerging conservative movement. Said another way, they were all cowards.
Much like Trump's original cabinet. Is another thing Nixon-Trump shared, the pursuit of highly flawed men lacking character yet have a so-called good reputation.
Nixon-Trump shared a few other attributes, both desperately wanted to be around, accepted and liked by respectful folk. Is a twisted form of validation. And saw anyone who didn't warm to them as enemies including the press. As you laid out both were petty, crooked, looked down on wimmin, Jews, POC, and saw themselves above the law.
Can't resist: The exception to "us" are the Commonwealth of Massachusetts voters who soundly rejected Nixon and of course Trump.
Point taken re MA.