The Mysteries of Watergate John O'Connor
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- History
Watergate was a serious American political scandal resulting in the only forcible removal of a U.S. President, Richard Nixon. After seemingly exhaustive investigative reporting by the Washington Post and dozens of books and movies on the scandal since, there are many questions left unanswered. Through this podcast series, The Mysteries of Watergate, lawyer, author and historian John O’Connor methodically presents the lingering questions, central truths and inconvenient facts of the scandal so we can finally solve the mysteries of Watergate. Get the new "The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened" book from Amazon here: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h8985
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Ep. 34: Watergate Journalism's Bitter Harvest
Prior episodes have shown that the Nixon Presidency, churlishly cynical though it may have been, was the victim of deceitful journalism by the Washington Post which cast it far more villainously than deserved.Was the harm of this journalism limited to this particular epoch? Unfortunately, no. This episode will show but a few examples of how this greatly ballyhooed style of “investigative” journalism caused far more harm than partisan electoral advantage. In its effort to prosecute a target, s...
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Ep. 33: Watergate Journalism, The Seeds of Our Discontent
Clearly the full and correct Watergate story was not reported by the Washington Post. Often a journalist simply gets a story wrong while acting in good faith. But if the Post was willfully deceitful in its Watergate reporting, not simply negligent, then the entire modern project of slashing “investigative” journalism is built on fraud. Is today’s partisan journalism based on a “proof of concept” that was obtained by fraud? If so, our country has been divided horribly by the Washington P...
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Ep. 32: A Lid on Liddy
G. Gordon Liddy, a lawyer, former FBI agent and chief operative in the White House Plumbers unit at the time, was a central focus for Watergate activity, even though he is correctly, and admittedly, seen as a dupe. But he was an honest man, incapable of insincerity, such that his 1980 memoir, Will, is know to be the most candid and honest of the Watergate confessionals. Liddy, stoutly refusing to seem a “rat,” said nothing about the scandal until this book, and therefore it was no...
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Ep. 31: Baking Baker
As impeachment was closing in on President Nixon, the CIA could, it seemed breathe a sigh of relief, as it had skillfully and luckily, with the unstinting help of the Washington Post, navigated rocky shoals. The Mullen cover contract (Ep. 3), Michael Stevens’ bombshell stories (Ep. 14), Lou Russell’s involvement (Ep. 15), the desk key found during the Watergate breakin (Ep. 16), CIA handler, Lee Pennington's document burning (Ep. 17), the CIA Defense offered duri...
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Ep. 30: Stranger Danger, Hiding Stevens and Russell
As of late March 1973, it looked like all the pieces were falling in place for the CIA to avoid exposure of its role in the Watergate scandal and to hide the salacious information actually targeted. If Watergate continued to be viewed as a campaign fiasco, John Dean’s and Jeb Magruder’s testimony against their superiors in the White House would be increasingly valuable. But there loomed, as Watergate burglar James McCord was unleashing to Judge Sirica about the White House, ...
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Ep. 29: Misrepresenting McCord's Misconduct
James McCord is a highly intriguing character, if an opaque one. As we described earlier, John Mitchell had wanted a personal security officer, but Alfred Wong of the Secret Service, with thousands of retired agents in D.C., could only find McCord, a “retired” CIA agent with no personal security experience. So why did McCord’s friend Wong recommend him, and is it a coincidence that McCord came from the shadowy Office of Security ("OS") within the CIA, as did Watergate burglary sup...