In our modern world, every worthy scandal has the word “gate” suffixed to it, drawing comparison to the mother of all scandals, Watergate, a political crisis in which Richard Nixon’s administration was accused of covering up the burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters located in the Watergate office complex, leading to his resignation.
The true scandal, though, is that our media, for over 50 years, have wrongly attributed shameful “cover-up” conduct to Nixon, while the overarching cover-up was that of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post.
Shortly after the burglary arrests of June 17, 1972, Nixon suggested that the CIA inform the FBI that the Bureau’s investigation into the “Mexican Money Trail” would impede a CIA operation. To be sure, Nixon likely did not think this true. In fact, the FBI delayed that investigation for only several days, until savvy FBI Deputy Director W. Mark Felt restarted it, because the CIA refused to put the request in writing.
Nixon’s agreement to the scheme had been caught on a White House tape not produced until July 1974, per a Supreme Court order. Given the two years of furor over a web of mounting “cover-up” allegations, Nixon’s new advisers correctly viewed this revelation as a mortal wound, since they thought that the CIA was likely not involved. The president thus resigned on Aug. 9, 1974.
Nixon’s motive had not been to avoid criminal exposure, since at the time he had no burglary guilt and no active “cover-up” had yet begun. Rather, he was concerned that his friend, Dwayne Andreas, the president of Midland Archer Daniels and a Democrat, would be publicly revealed to be a large contributor to Republican Nixon’s campaign.
When Felt surveyed the aftermath of the Watergate burglary, he had concluded that it had been “a White House operation, a CIA operation, or both.” The truth, still unknown to most even today, is that it was both.
But the White House operation went no further up the chain than the callow, loftily titled young White House Counsel John Dean who had never met Nixon. More importantly, as the Washington Post learned but never revealed, the burglary was primarily a CIA operation involving a burglary team of current and retired CIA agents, using the infiltrated White House as cover, surveilling the phone calls between prostitutes and their johns placed on a phone line in the DNC offices.
Felt had reported his CIA suspicions to his boss, FBI Director Patrick Gray, who relayed them to John Dean. Dean then, using the false provenance of relaying advice from the respected Nixon friend, John Mitchell, proposed a way to call off the Mexican Money Trail investigation using the CIA hook.
Had it later become widely known by the time the White House tapes were finally produced in July 1974 that the CIA had pushed for this burglary, Nixon’s earlier request on the Mexican Money Trail would have appeared less obstructive than prescient, since this had been, in fact, a CIA operation.
Meanwhile, the most execrable cover-up of Watergate was that of the Washington Post in hiding clear knowledge of CIA involvement in the Watergate burglary, along with the prostitute taping. If the CIA and prostitution were involved, then the burglary was not, as the Washington Post has wrongly claimed, a Nixon campaign operation run by the Oval Office.
A consequential secret garage meeting between Deep Throat and the outlet’s Bob Woodward took place during an all-night session that ended in the pre-dawn hours of Oct. 9, 1972. On Oct. 10, 1972, the Washington Post blew open the theretofore quiescent, dying story by claiming that “FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon’s reelection.”
The problem: the bombshell claim did not accurately relay Felt’s motive during the garage meeting. The true story was that nothing was established other than a hypothesis. Felt merely wanted to test that hypothesis by ginning up publicity to force a Grand Jury investigation.
The hypothesis tied the burglary to a minor “dirty tricks” operation run by a covert political operative, Donald Segretti, on behalf of Nixon’s reelection campaign, much like John F. Kennedy’s prankster, Richard Tuck. But the burglary had nothing to do with Segretti’s small-beer op; it was not part of a campaign effort, nor was it run out of the White House, despite the outlet’s claims to the contrary.
A second major Washington Post concealment stemmed from the last garage meeting between Deep Throat and Bob Woodward in May 1973, when a frantic Deep Throat warned Woodward, “Everyone’s life is in danger!” while noting that there may be electronic surveillance. The threat came from the CIA, not the White House. While the episode was later exploited for dramatic effect in the reporters’ book and movie, All the President’s Men, avoiding implicating the CIA, not a word was published at the time of this explosive revelation.
Later, as the noose was tightening on Nixon in June 1974, Tennessee Sen. Howard Baker published a scorching 43-page minority report strongly implicating the CIA, based on previously withheld agency documents not produced until after the public hearings.
The Washington Post’s analysis of the Baker Report? Nothing to see here.
Nixon has been vilified historically for what was minor misconduct. But what do we say about a newspaper that willfully misled the public about the guilt of a sitting president and caused his removal? Much more galling misreporting is documented in Postgate.
P-HUSTLE UNMASKED: THE CLASS FRAUD OF GRAHAM PLATNER
The damage to our democracy did not end there, as the left-leaning media have ever since been incentivized to be partisan kingmakers and kingbreakers.
The true lesson of Watergate is therefore not “shame on Nixon” but, rather, “shame on the Washington Post.”
John D. O’Connor is a former federal prosecutor and the San Francisco attorney who represented W. Mark Felt during his revelation as Deep Throat in 2005. O’Connor is the author of the books Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism and The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened. O’Connor and Mark Felt also collaborated on the 2006 book, A G-Man’s Life.