Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (67 page)

The greatest, and maybe only lasting, lesson of Watergate is that when presidents screw up and make a mistake, they must admit it and not try to hide it. For example, most recently President Bill Clinton learned this lesson the hard way by failing to admit to his illicit affair with Monica Lewinsky. President George W. Bush did not learn the lesson either, and his presidency is going to be haunted as history digs out the horrific mistakes he made by authorizing torture and jeopardizing the civil liberties of Americans in his “war on terror.”

One morning while working at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland on the book that would become
The Rehnquist Choice
(2001), a distinguished-looking gentleman with a British accent approached me. He too was doing research and he said that he recognized me, introduced himself, said he was an historian, and asked if I might join him at lunch later in the cafeteria. I had no plans, so I told him I would be pleased to do so. At lunch, an American woman who was his research assistant joined us. He said he wanted me to know this was all off-the-record, should we stumble into anything interesting. We talked about the value of documents and the unique record that Nixon had created of his Presidency, which is probably the best-documented Presidency that will ever exist since no sane President will, again, tape his conversations. My new historian friend lamented that notwithstanding the remarkable record of what occurred during the Nixon years, he had recently read a book about Watergate that he had picked up in a used bookstore:
Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA
(1984) by Jim Hougan, that distorted that record. He said the book had caught his attention because he was visiting the National Archives to do some work with World War II papers. He had been retained by a London law firm, a team of lawyers who were deeply involved in a case dealing with Holocaust deniers, who claim that Hitler might have been hard on the Jews, but the Holocaust was a myth. He said he had been stunned to find signs of a similar and incipient revisionism regarding Watergate in the Hougan book. He mentioned that he hoped that it was not a sign of a “Watergate denial” movement, akin to what had been developing more slowly with the Holocaust. When I told him about Watergate revisionism—and the nine years of litigation I had only recently ended—he was horrified. “Don’t let the bastards get away with it,” he pleaded. I assured him I would fight them until my last breath.

I understand that there will always be those who will argue that the earth is flat; that the Bible is the literal truth; that evolution is wrong; that there was no Holocaust in Germany; that Franklin Roosevelt was the cause and not the solution to the Great Depression; that mobsters or Castro or Lyndon Johnson, not lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald, assassinated President John Kennedy; that James Earl Ray did not shoot Dr. Martin Luther King; and that Nixon was an innocent victim of Watergate—to mention a few areas where conspiracy theorists delve. The deliberate distortion of history may sell books, settle scores, and satisfy ideology, but it does little to help us understand ourselves and the real world.

Part II

Watergate Revisionism, or Sex, Lies, and Bogus History

One reason I have explained here, in some detail, how and why the break-ins and cover-up occurred, is because of the effort to falsely rewrite these events for political and financial gain, or both. There is a small group of revisionists, all of whom seem to know one another and work together in their efforts to reject the “received wisdom” about Watergate. The word “cabal” is too pejorative, although they meet the definition; I might call them a “conspiracy,” but because they include so many conspiracy buffs, it could be confusing. I think they can best be described as a “clique” because of their working relationships. Some in this clique are merely out to make money, while others are ideologically-driven, and have adopted a “we got it right and everyone else is wrong” attitude, even as they deeply distort the historical record. Because I do plan to fight these people as long as I am able, and after discussing it with counsel, I am only addressing two of the revisionists’ works. They have forced me to become litigious, and I am actively considering taking legal action against several of them. Nor will I list them, for they love such publicity, and would only play on it if I did. But a discussion of the two principal works will give you the gist of their work and explain, to some extent, how they develop their new (and bogus) accounts
.

Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA

Watergate revisionism efforts began with
Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA
(1984) by Jim Hougan. The fly-leaf on the book jacket of his sensational work summarizes its contents
:

The generally accepted belief about the affair has always been that White House spies bugged the Democrats in their headquarters at the Watergate complex—apparently to gain political intelligence.
Secret Agenda
, however, reveals that accounts of the break-in have been deliberately falsified by a CIA cover story. The readers also learn that;

• The Democrats’ Watergate headquarters was never bugged;
  
• The President was spied upon by his own intelligence agents;
  
• The CIA tried to manipulate the press to conceal the agency’s involvement in forbidden domestic operations;
  
• False evidence was planted for the FBI to find in Democratic National Committee headquarters;
  
• Sexual espionage—and not election politics—was at the heart of it all.
  

Doing what all revisionists and conspiracy theorists do, Hougan, a freelance journalist, went digging into the minutiae of Watergate. This first effort at revisionism did not seek to question the broad outlines of the events, which were still well-known a decade after they occurred, when Hougan was writing. Rather, Hougan sought to raise questions, leaving it for those who might follow him to add to his account (and many have obliged). Hougan claims that the CIA (always a good target for conspiracy theories) was deeply involved in Watergate from start to finish. He accuses former CIA employees Hunt and McCord of having still been connected to the agency when working for Nixon, and he claims that McCord sabotaged his own work to make sure everyone was caught. In addition, Hougan states that the CIA was operating a call-girl ring near the Watergate complex that became involved in all of it.

Reviewing Hougan’s work for the
New York Times Book Review
, Watergate author and journalist Anthony Lukas credits Hougan with having been enterprising in his digging, but is forced to question the findings because Hougan “piled premise upon premise” until Lukas found himself “tottering on a tower of unproven assumptions.” This is a nice way to describe it. As for my take, I feel Hougan’s work can be dismissed because it falls squarely within the analysis of Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt’s classic work
On Bullshit
(Princeton University Press, 2005). Hougan’s evidence is pathetic. Take, for example, his claim that McCord botched the break-in and bugging in order to protect his former employer, the CIA. Here, Hougan mistakes McCord’s conspicuous ineptitude for skill. Yet McCord had never been a spy or covert operative at the CIA, a position that would have been way above his pay-grade. Rather, he was something of an electronics janitor who swept CIA facilities to be certain they were not bugged. Hougan appears to misunderstand the fact that the CIA’s relationship to Watergate began as a red-herring argument to defend Nixon—an argument that had been cooked up by Chuck Colson, working with Senator Howard Baker. The Watergate Special Prosecution Force investigated the CIA’s role in Watergate and found the CIA to be a lot smarter than the efforts of Nixon, Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman to involve the CIA in Watergate.

The New York Times
, which received a copy of Hougan’s book shortly before publication, tried to generate news from it. On November 6, 1984, the
Times
used the inside-page headline “’72 Data Show FBI Questioned If Burglars Bugged The Watergate.” The headline refers to an FBI memorandum Hougan obtained through the Freedom of Information Act that reported that the FBI laboratory “doubted that telephone taps found at the Watergate complex in Washington were compatible with eavesdropping receivers used by” Liddy’s team. Earl Silbert, the Assistant U.S. Attorney who had prosecuted McCord and Liddy (Hunt and the Cuban-Americans had all pled guilty), was quoted in the FBI materials as having “strenuously challenged the FBI’s conclusions” at the time, as he did when the
Times
contacted him. Silbert then believed, as he does today, that the FBI lab screwed up. Baldwin testified at the McCord and Liddy trial that he had listened to as many as hundreds of conversations (and, as noted earlier, these involved 50 to 100 or more different people) from a bug in the DNC, just as he did again during our lawsuit. Hougan handles this conflicting information by simply expressing his confidence that the FBI lab was correct, and that there was no bug in the DNC. However, Hougan’s explanation is absurd. He claims that Baldwin was not overhearing conversations in the DNC, but rather was listening to conversations at a nearby call-girl ring located at the Columbia Plaza—a covert operation run by the CIA, according to Hougan. Baldwin’s testimony completely undermines this claim. That the
Times
would think this nonsense was news, however, is not surprising.

The Washington Post
, which understands Watergate, largely ignored Hougan’s book.
The New York Times
, on the other hand, which was scooped by the
Post
on the biggest story of the last quarter of the Twentieth Century and has never recovered from its weak Watergate reporting, prominently reviewed Hougan’s work and declared it one of the best nonfiction books of 1984. (Fiction, maybe, but nonfiction?) The
Times
has consistently promoted Watergate revisionism, for it seems that its institutional memory is so jealous of the drubbing the
Post
handed the paper during Watergate that the
Times
keeps looking for information that might somehow show that the
Post
got it wrong. Thus, they are overly willing to promote any other version of this history.
6
*

In fact, the
Times
should have looked into the history enough to know that virtually every sensational claim in Hougan’s book was wrong. For example, Hougan’s candidate for Deep Throat,
Washington Post
reporter Bob Woodward’s notorious unidentified Watergate source, was about as off-the-wall and inaccurate as the rest of the book. Hougan deduces that because Deep Throat never told Woodward about Al Baldwin, the “FBI’s top echelon and many of its agents” must be eliminated as candidates for consideration—thus eliminating Assistant FBI Director Mark Felt, who we now know was, in fact, Deep Throat. Hougan felt it was “ultimately fruitless to speculate about Throat’s identity,” but still suggested that Throat “could be part of the Old Boys’ network, in which case Admiral Bobby Ray Inman must be a leading candidate.” Admiral Inman surely must have gotten a few laughs from Hougan’s nomination.

Despite the deep flaws of
Secret Agenda
, it remains the starting point for most Watergate revisionists, who, in turn, consider Hougan no less than the Godfather of their splinter history. In truth, Hougan’s work is a sorry example of history. It is not untypical, nonetheless, of Watergate revisionism’s selective use of evidence, conspicuous deficiencies in critical thinking, remarkable disregard for common sense, and its deliberate manipulation of the evidence to reach predetermined and sensational conclusions. In reality, historical consensus is seldom fundamentally wrong, and there can be wisdom in crowds. Sadly, dubious (or worse) scholarship has dominated Watergate revisionism, and no more so than with those who have picked up where Jim Hougan’s work left off, and pushed the boundaries even further.

Silent Coup: The Removal of a President

In 1991, St. Martin’s Press published
Silent Coup: The Removal of a President
by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin. The book is divided into three sections. The first rehashes the infamous Moore-Radford incident at the Nixon White House, when it was discovered that the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Moore) assigned a Navy yeoman (Radford) to the National Security Council with the task of spying on Nixon and Kissinger. It seems that the Joint Chiefs were worried because the Nixon White House was so secretive that they did not know how to effectively provide military assistance to their Commander-in-Chief. The authors used this story to provide a nasty, highly-distorted portrait of a young Bob Woodward, which was designed to call into question the honesty of his reporting. (The authors failed to mention, however, that they both had bones to pick with Woodward. Colodny, once a liquor salesman and would-be Maryland political figure, was infuriated that Woodward revealed him as the source of stories published by the
Washington Post
when Woodward was the Metropolitan Editor. The stories concerned a liquor scandal in suburban Maryland based on Colodny’s illegally-recorded telephone conversations. Gettlin, a would-be journalist, had been turned down by Woodward for a job at the
Post
.)