Certainly it comes as no surprise to you that Howard was with the CIA. All the President’s Men 1976 starring Dustin Hoffman & Robert Redford & Jack Warden & Martin Balsam & Hal Holbrook & Jason Robards & Jane Alexander & Meredith Baxter & Ned Beatty et al, director Alan J Pakula, bloke on dog to Redford
We can’t seem to figure out what the puzzle is supposed to look like. ibid. Redford to Deep Throat
Just follow the money. ibid. Deep Throat
Testimony Ties Top Nixon Aide to Secret Fund. ibid. Washington Post headline
It was a Haldeman operation. ibid. Deep Throat
Covert activities involve the entire US intelligence community. ibid. Redford
Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it is awfully hard to get it back in. Bob Haldeman
While Carl Bernstein is a very very fine journalist, Bob Woodward is actually a CIA agent that was put with Bernstein to lure him away from the actual truth about the Watergate scandal. Neil Sanders, Richplanet TV
Watergate: Washington DC on 17th June 1972, the Watergate office building. Five burglars broke in that night to photograph documents and plant listening devices at the Democratic National Committee headquarters based in the building ... The burglars were caught redhanded ... The White House Plumbers were working on behalf of President Richard Nixon’s election campaign. America’s Book of Secrets: Presidential Cover-Ups s2e7, H2 2014
‘What did the president know and when did he know it?’ ibid. Democrats in Senate
Had he orchestrated a cover-up? ibid.
The truth about the Watergate break-ins started to become known. It became a national scandal of historic proportions. Alan Hart, Media Morphs II: Conspiracy, producer Hossein Setareh, Edge Media 2012
What was at stake in Watergate was not merely as it were the right of those at the top or in power to line their pockets or appoint their friends … High corruption of police and other federal properties as if they were private property … There was an attempt to institutionalise the use of agencies of the state as a private and political police force. Christopher Hitchens vs William Buckley, Firing Line interview December 1984, ‘Is There a Liberal Crack-Up?’
So many of the professional foreign policy establishment, and so many of their hangers-on among the lumpen academics and journalists, had become worried by the frenzy and paranoia of the Nixonian Vietnam policy that consensus itself was threatened. Ordinary intra-mural and extra-mural leaking, to such duly constituted bodies as Congress, was getting out of hand. It was Kissinger who inaugurated the second front or home front of the war; illegally wire-tapping the telephones even of his own staff and of his journalistic clientele. (I still love to picture the face of Henry Brandon when he found out what his hero had done to his telephone.) This war against the enemy within was the genesis of Watergate; a nexus of high crime and misdemeanour for which Kissinger himself, as Isaacson wittily points out, largely evaded blame by taking to his ‘shuttle’ and staying airborne. Incredibly, he contrived to argue in public with some success that if it were not for democratic distempers like the impeachment process his own selfless, necessary statesmanship would have been easier to carry out. This is true, but not in the way that he got newspapers like Rees-Mogg’s Times to accept. Christopher Hitchens
The James Bond plot that took place in Washington – they found these people sneaking in with eavesdropping devices and one of them is a CIA man. Dick Cavett’s Watergate, Dick interviewing Ted Kennedy
‘There’s nothing new about this – and in frankly, what can be gained – nothing. We know every caper they can put; they know everything we can pull.’ ibid. Barry Goldwater
‘He invited crises and that he couldn’t stand normalcy.’ ibid. Kissinger
They still don’t get it. They don’t realise that there was some larger questions at issue. ibid. Cavett
Watergate, the worst political scandal in American history, finally destroys Richard Nixon. Watergate, BBC 1994
‘When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.’ ibid. Nixon
Nixon’s closest advisors now give evidence the Watergate break-in was just one in a series of crimes instigated by the president himself. ibid.
Two years later Dean would bring down the Nixon administration by exposing its conspiracies. ibid.
The man Nixon wanted punished was Daniel Ellsberg who he feared had opened the floodgates. ibid.
He [Nixon] now set up a full-time unit within the White House. ibid.
Howard Hunt knew where to recruit them. It was the tenth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion … ibid.
Despite the fiasco no-one got the sack. ibid.
Liddy promptly produced a million dollar plan … codenamed Gemstone. ibid.
They were caught red-handed inside Democracy Party headquarters in a building called the Watergate. The same team had already committed a succession of crimes for the White House. ibid.
The chief law enforcement officer of the United States was turning a blind eye to the cover up. ibid.
For Nixon’s men keeping Watergate away from the president was going to be a nightmare. ibid.
Martha Mitchell was forcibly sedated and held incommunicado. ibid.
Haldeman presented the president with the plan. ibid.
‘I wanted to stop the investigation if possible.’ ibid. Nixon, interview David Frost
While their boss was burning evidence, FBI agents were uncovering more. ibid.
Nixon’s men paid out over a quarter of a million dollars in hush money that summer. ibid.
The biggest margin in history: it looked like he had got away with it. ibid.
Envelopes stuffed with cash had been dispatched to Howard Hunt and his men. ibid.
Dean tried to persuade the president that Hunt’s blackmail threatened all the inner circle especially Nixon’s close friend John Mitchell who had organised the Watergate break in. ibid.
Dean knew the president needed a scapegoat before the senate hearing started and he began to fear he was it. ibid.
‘I had no prior knowledge of the Watergate break in. ibid. Nixon on TV
‘I felt it would be an admission of guilt to destroy them [tapes].’ ibid. Nixon’s Frost interview
‘I am innocent of the charges against me.’ ibid. Agnew
At Cox’s [special prosecutor] public show of defiance, Nixon resolved to sack him at once. ibid.
The media reported it [Cox’s sacking] as a naked attempt to overthrow the rule of law. ibid.
The rump force of special prosecutors sat tight. ibid.
Congress now began talking impeachment. ibid.
Miss Woods [secretary]: Tape Erased By Accident. ibid. newspaper headline
The decision about Nixon could no longer be avoided. ibid.
‘I do not expect to be impeached.’ ibid. Nixon press conference
The public were appalled by the language and fascinated by the number of expletives deleted. ibid.
1972: Washington DC police arrest five burglars with political connections at the highest levels. The president is under fire. The Final Report: Watergate, National Geographic 2007
What does the Nixon campaign hope to learn? ibid.
The next morning the story of the break-in falls to two low-ranking reporters at the Washington Post. ibid.
‘I could not muster much moral outrage over a political bugging’. ibid. Nixon’s memoires
A federal grand jury indicts the five Watergate burglars along with Liddy and Hunt. ibid.
Nixon is now facing both a criminal probe from the Justice Department and a political inquiry in the Senate. ibid.
Nixon releases edited transcripts of the White House tapes. ibid.
The House Judiciary Committee passes an article of impeachment. ibid.
He [Nixon] created the Plumbers Unit. ibid.
Nixon’s crime was the Watergate cover-up which he instigated. ibid.
‘This was much worse than we thought. Nixon was worse than we thought. What happened was worse then we thought.’ All the President’s Men Revisited, Carl Bernstein, Discovery 2013
Because the American people had learned the truth about Richard Nixon … Nixon’s downfall had begun two years earlier when five men were caught spying and wiretapping at the Democratic National Headquarters at an office complex called Watergate. ibid.
Nixon’s Law and Order platform was very popular. ibid.
There was something just as odd about the White House response: ‘A third rate burglary’. ibid.
It was a Haldeman operation; it was driven by Nixon. ibid.
‘We are going to use any means; is that clear? ibid.
Woodward met with a highly placed government official … Deep Throat. ibid.
[Mark] Felt was Deep Throat … The number two guy at the FBI. ibid.
Congress: What did the president know and when did he know it? ibid.
‘John Dean’s testimony was on for four days. It was mesmerizing.’ ibid. Alexander Butterfield
Watergate was becoming a bloody mess. Nixon was a wounded president. ibid.
Some 40 people pleaded guilty to Watergate-related crimes. ibid.
‘His dislocated relationship with truth.’ ibid. David Frost