From: AlterNet
March 10, 2013 |
A favorite saying of Official Washington is that “the cover-up is
worse than the crime.” But that presupposes you accurately understand
what the crime was. And, in the case of the two major U.S. government
scandals of the last third of the Twentieth Century – Watergate and
Iran-Contra – that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Indeed, newly disclosed documents have put old evidence into a
sharply different light and suggest that history has substantially
miswritten the two scandals by failing to understand that they actually
were sequels to earlier scandals that were far worse. Watergate and
Iran-Contra were, in part at least, extensions of the original crimes,
which involved dirty dealings to secure the immense power of the
presidency.
Shortly after Nixon took office in 1969, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover
informed him of the existence of the file containing national security
wiretaps documenting how Nixon’s emissaries had gone behind President
Lyndon Johnson’s back to convince the South Vietnamese government to
boycott the Paris Peace Talks, which were close to ending the Vietnam
War in fall 1968.In the case of Watergate – the foiled Republican
break-in at the Democratic National Committee in June 1972 and Richard
Nixon’s botched cover-up leading to his resignation in August 1974 – the
evidence is now clear that Nixon created the Watergate burglars out of
his panic that the Democrats might possess a file on his sabotage of
Vietnam peace talks in 1968.
The disruption of Johnson’s peace talks then enabled Nixon to hang on
for a narrow victory over Democrat Hubert Humphrey. However, as the new
President was taking steps in 1969 to extend the war another four-plus
years, he sensed the threat from the wiretap file and ordered two of his
top aides, chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman and National Security
Advisor Henry Kissinger, to locate it. But they couldn’t find the file.
We now know that was because President Johnson, who privately had
called Nixon’s Vietnam actions “treason,” had ordered the file removed
from the White House by his national security aide Walt Rostow.
Rostow labeled the file “The ‘X’ Envelope” and
kept it in his possession, although having left government, he had no
legal right to possess the highly classified documents, many of which
were stamped “Top Secret.” Johnson had instructed Rostow to retain the
papers as long as he, Johnson, was alive and then afterwards to decide
what to do with them.
Nixon, however, had no idea that Johnson and Rostow had taken the
missing file or, indeed, who might possess it. Normally, national
security documents are passed from the outgoing President to the
incoming President to maintain continuity in government. MORE
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