Tag: Nixon

Watergate and Trump and deja-vu: The Saturday Night Massacre Redux

We’re rerunning this post from our series on the 1972-5 Watergate crisis because of the Trump Administration’s sudden firing of acting Attorney General Sally Yates. President Trump firing an attorney general who stood up to his unconstitutional requests is all too reminiscent of a horrible 24 hours in our nation’s history, when President Nixon tried to fire his attorney general for refusing to help Nixon break the law. Two attorneys general would resign in what was called the Saturday Night Massacre.

Members of our federal government rose up to save the Constitution and the United States in 1973. They fought for our system of government, which explicitly says the president is not above the law. They knew that we, the people, do have “an alternative” if a president breaks the law—we impeach that president. They knew that Nixon’s actions posed “a grave and profound crisis.” How will the members of our federal government act in 2017?

 

It’s post 5 in our series on the Watergate crisis, and here we come to the most shocking part of the entire event, which is the Saturday Night Massacre of October 20, 1973. We left off last time with the forced resignations and false confessions of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and the firing of John Dean for deciding he would tell all he knew to the Senate Watergate Committee. Bear in mind that Dean knew that the original break-in had been carried out by CREEP and approved by former Attorney General John Mitchell, and he knew that the president had ordered evidence to be destroyed and people to be paid off to keep quiet, but he did not know that Nixon had tried to stop the FBI investigation. No one but Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman knew that. The only way anyone else could find that out was if they listened to the secret tape recordings Nixon made of all of his conversations, including the one we mentioned last time from June 23, 1972—six days after the break-in—in which Nixon told Haldeman to have the CIA director, Richard Helms, call the head of the FBI, Patrick Gray, and tell him to “stay the hell out of this” in the name of national security. Luckily, only a handful of men in Nixon’s administration knew about the tapes. Unluckily for Nixon, one of them told all he knew to the Senate Watergate Committee, on live national TV.

On Friday the 13th, July 1973, White House assistant Alexander Butterfield was asked if there was any type of recording system used in the White House. After some prodding, Butterfield said there was, and that it automatically recorded every word spoken in the Oval Office, Cabinet Room, and Nixon’s private office. Three days later, after the weekend break, Butterfield reiterated this claim. Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox subpoenaed Nixon for these tapes. He wanted to listen to them and see if they showed that the president ordered the break-in, had tried to cover it up, or just knew about it. Nixon refused, citing executive privilege and again saying that national security would be damaged if the tapes were made public. Cox said he would only make public information relating to Watergate; if there was none, no part of the tapes would be made public. Nixon still refused and ordered Cox to rescind the subpoena, which Cox refused to do. On Friday, Nixon offered a compromise: he would allow Mississippi Senator John Stennis to listen to the tapes and write a summary of their contents. Cox refused. He did not trust Nixon to give Stennis access to tapes that would incriminate himself. The subpoena stood.

Now the events unfolded that would be called the Saturday Night Massacre, events which threatened the very basis of constitutional law in the U.S. It’s hard to believe that finding out that the president had tried to obstruct a criminal investigation to protect the criminals could be overshadowed by any other of his actions, but what Nixon ordered on Saturday, October 20, 1973 surpasses even that obstruction of justice in its seriousness.

That morning, Nixon told his chief of staff Alexander Haig to call his new Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, and tell him to fire Cox. Richardson had just been appointed as Attorney General by Nixon in April after the “resignation” of John Dean. A few days earlier, on Thursday, Richardson had met with Nixon and learned that he wanted Cox fired if he wouldn’t accept the Stennis compromise. Richardson told the president he felt sure Cox would accept it, but left the meeting already resolved to resign if Cox didn’t. He knew that Nixon would ask him to fire Cox because only Richardson could: as Attorney General, he had appointed Cox as special prosecutor, and only he could fire him. Richardson did not believe the refusal to accept the Stennis compromise was grounds to fire Cox, but Nixon did. After that Thursday meeting, he told Haig “No more tapes, no more documents, nothing more! I want an order from me to Elliot to Cox to that effect now.”

When Haig called Richardson at 7.00 on Friday night to tell him to fire Cox, Richardson refused, saying he would resign instead. As this was happening, Cox (unaware of this call) issued a statement to the press just in time for the evening deadline saying that the president was refusing to comply with a court order “in violation of the promises which the Attorney General made to the Senate” that the Watergate break-in would be investigated thoroughly. Cox’s statement was front-page on Saturday morning, and he was planning to hold a press conference at 1.00. Richardson phoned Cox to tell him what had happened. At the press conference, Cox reminded reporters that only the Attorney General could fire him. Meanwhile, Haig phoned Richardson again and ordered him to fire Cox; Richardson refused. Knowing what would happen next, Richardson met with his Deputy Attorney General, William Ruckelshaus, and told him that he, Ruckelshaus, would be asked to fire Cox once Richardson’s resignation was made public. Ruckelshaus said he would not do it and that he, too, would resign.

Nixon summoned Richardson to his office and told him that if he didn’t fire Cox, Nixon couldn’t meet with the Soviet Premier to work out a solution to the crisis in the Middle East because Brezhnev wouldn’t respect a man who was being publicly defied by a subordinate. Again Richardson refused, and Nixon said “I’m sorry that you insist on putting your personal commitments ahead of the public interest.” Richardson resigned. As Richardson left, Haig was on the phone to Ruckelshaus, telling him to fire Cox. When he balked, Haig barked “Your commander in chief has given you an order! You have no alternative.” Undaunted, Ruckelshaus replied, “Except to resign”, which he did. Finally, Nixon sent a limousine to pick up Solicitor General Robert Bork from his home and bring him to the White House. There, Nixon told him to fire Cox. He had a letter of dismissal ready, waiting for Bork’s signature. Intimidated, Bork signed it. Nixon told him, “You’ve got guts.”

At 8.25 that evening, White House press secretary Ron Ziegler held a press conference announcing the resignations of Richardson and Ruckelshaus and the firing of Cox, saying “the office of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force has been abolished as of approximately 8 PM tonight.”

The nation was shocked. The way they experienced it, they woke up to read Cox’s claim that the president was refusing to obey a court order. Then they watched his press conference at 1.00 PM where he outlined his rightful claim for the tapes. Then they heard an 8.25 PM press conference saying that Cox, Richardson, and Ruckelshaus were all fired, and that the president had declared the Watergate investigation over. It was abundantly clear that Nixon had eliminated three men whom he was afraid of—what was he afraid of? What did he think they would discover if they had the tapes? And more importantly, would the president’s illegal, unconstitutional firing of the special prosecutor be allowed to stand? was the president above the law? Could he do whatever he wanted, no matter what? As commander in chief, if he committed a crime, did the American people “have no alternative” but to let him do it, and to quietly accept an imperial presidency?

The name “Saturday Night Massacre” may seem overdone—like the “Boston Massacre”, in which only five people died. But what was being massacred was the Constitution, separation of powers, and the rule of law that said that in the U.S. no one, no matter their position, is above the law. The coverage on the news that night reiterated this perception of danger:

John Chancellor, NBC News: Good evening. The country tonight is in the midst of what may be the most serious Constitutional crisis in its history. The President has fired the special Watergate prosecutor, Archibald Cox. Because of the President’s action, the attorney general has resigned. Elliott Richardson has quit, saying he cannot carry out Mr. Nixon’s instructions. Richardson’s deputy, William Ruckelshaus, has been fired.

Ruckelshaus refused, in a moment of Constitutional drama, to obey a presidential order to fire the special Watergate prosecutor. And half an hour after the special Watergate prosecutor had been fired, agents of the FBI, acting at the direction of the White House, sealed off the offices of the special prosecutor, the offices of the attorney general and the offices of the deputy attorney general.

All of this adds up to a totally unprecedented situation, a grave and profound crisis in which the President has set himself against his own attorney general and the Department of Justice. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

Nothing like this had ever happened before. Nixon had thrown down a gauntlet to the nation: you must accept my power to live above the law. I will not be questioned. How would the nation react?

Leon Jaworski strikes back

Hello and welcome to part 6 of our series on the Watergate Crisis. Last time we described the Saturday Night Massacre, October 20, 1973, in which Nixon attempted to override the Constitution, establish an imperial presidency, and end the Watergate investigation all in one day. His efforts shocked a nation that had up to this point generally believed him when he said he didn’t know anything about the Watergate break-in. Firing the deputy Attorney General who refused to fire the Watergate special prosecutor whom the Attorney General had refused to fire, thus leading to the AG himself being fired, and then finding someone at last to fire the special prosecutor was pretty clear evidence of obstruction of justice on Nixon’s part, and seemed to prove that he was, indeed, involved in a cover-up.

The public was furious, and Nixon’s aggressive refusal to admit any wrongdoing only damned him further in their eyes. At a press conference on November 17, 1973, Nixon made his famous statement that “the American people need to know if their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.” Few were convinced. The new Attorney General Nixon had appointed—Robert Bork, the man who signed the paper he was told to sign to fire Archibald Cox—was forced to appoint a new Watergate special prosecutor to replace Cox. Leon Jaworski took over that role. He was a Washington lawyer who had believed the Nixon was not guilty of any criminal acts; only his advisors were. But after the Massacre, Jaworski was determined to get the full tapes of Nixon’s conversations. Just as Cox had done, he subpoenaed Nixon for the tapes, and once again, Nixon refused on the grounds of executive privilege. He added his assertion that the special prosecutor did not have the authority to sue the President—another attempt to put the president above the law. Knowing Nixon could drag this argument out for months, Jaworski went over his head to the Supreme Court.

In United States v. Nixon, on July 24, 1974, the Court ruled that the special prosecutor did have the right to sue the president, and that a president’s claim of executive privilege is overruled if he has evidence that is clearly pertinent to a criminal trial. The Justices may have been rankled by a statement made earlier in U.S. District Court by Nixon’s attorney James St. Clair: “The president wants me to argue that he is as powerful a monarch as Louis XIV, only four years at a time, and is not subject to the processes of any court in the land except the court of impeachment.”

This is an unbelievably astounding statement. Nixon is not trying to camouflage his intent: he is an absolute monarch while he is in office, and “not subject to the processes of any court in the land”. No wonder St. Clair shamefacedly said “the president wants me to argue” this point. The Court responded to St. Clair’s statement by saying that no president had any claim to “absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances.”

Nixon was forced to give the unedited tapes—all of them—to Jaworski, and the transcripts and some audio were made public.  They revealed a Nixon no one was prepared for: perpetually foul-mouthed, hostile, petty, vengeful, racist, anti-semitic, sexist, and criminal. So many four-letter words had to be bleeped out of the released audio and omitted from the public transcripts with the words “expletive deleted” that that phrase became a bitter joke to Americans, used by comedians to refer to the entire crisis. The “Smoking Gun” tape, in which Nixon talked about stopping the FBI criminal investigation of the break-in six days after it happened, which we cover in part 4 of this series, was released at last, and there was no way for even Nixon to pretend he wasn’t involved in the cover-up. Congress moved as one body to vote for impeachment, and there was only one thing left for Nixon to do: resign.

Next time: the dishonest end of a dishonest road

The Saturday Night Massacre

It’s post 5 in our series on the Watergate crisis, and here we come to the most shocking part of the entire event, which is the Saturday Night Massacre of October 20, 1973. We left off last time with the forced resignations and false confessions of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and the firing of John Dean for deciding he would tell all he knew to the Senate Watergate Committee. Bear in mind that Dean knew that the original break-in had been carried out by CREEP and approved by former Attorney General John Mitchell, and he knew that the president had ordered evidence to be destroyed and people to be paid off to keep quiet, but he did not know that Nixon had tried to stop the FBI investigation. No one but Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman knew that. The only way anyone else could find that out was if they listened to the secret tape recordings Nixon made of all of his conversations, including the one we mentioned last time from June 23, 1972—six days after the break-in—in which Nixon told Haldeman to have the CIA director, Richard Helms, call the head of the FBI, Patrick Gray, and tell him to “stay the hell out of this” in the name of national security. Luckily, only a handful of men in Nixon’s administration knew about the tapes. Unluckily for Nixon, one of them told all he knew to the Senate Watergate Committee, on live national TV.

On Friday the 13th, July 1973, White House assistant Alexander Butterfield was asked if there was any type of recording system used in the White House. After some prodding, Butterfield said there was, and that it automatically recorded every word spoken in the Oval Office, Cabinet Room, and Nixon’s private office. Three days later, after the weekend break, Butterfield reiterated this claim. Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox subpoenaed Nixon for these tapes. He wanted to listen to them and see if they showed that the president ordered the break-in, had tried to cover it up, or just knew about it. Nixon refused, citing executive privilege and again saying that national security would be damaged if the tapes were made public. Cox said he would only make public information relating to Watergate; if there was none, no part of the tapes would be made public. Nixon still refused and ordered Cox to rescind the subpoena, which Cox refused to do. On Friday, Nixon offered a compromise: he would allow Mississippi Senator John Stennis to listen to the tapes and write a summary of their contents. Cox refused. He did not trust Nixon to give Stennis access to tapes that would incriminate himself. The subpoena stood.

Now the events unfolded that would be called the Saturday Night Massacre, events which threatened the very basis of constitutional law in the U.S. It’s hard to believe that finding out that the president had tried to obstruct a criminal investigation to protect the criminals could be overshadowed by any other of his actions, but what Nixon ordered on Saturday, October 20, 1973 surpasses even that obstruction of justice in its seriousness.

That morning, Nixon told his chief of staff Alexander Haig to call his new Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, and tell him to fire Cox. Richardson had just been appointed as Attorney General by Nixon in April after the “resignation” of John Dean. A few days earlier, on Thursday, Richardson had met with Nixon and learned that he wanted Cox fired if he wouldn’t accept the Stennis compromise. Richardson told the president he felt sure Cox would accept it, but left the meeting already resolved to resign if Cox didn’t. He knew that Nixon would ask him to fire Cox because only Richardson could: as Attorney General, he had appointed Cox as special prosecutor, and only he could fire him. Richardson did not believe the refusal to accept the Stennis compromise was grounds to fire Cox, but Nixon did. After that Thursday meeting, he told Haig “No more tapes, no more documents, nothing more! I want an order from me to Elliot to Cox to that effect now.”

When Haig called Richardson at 7.00 on Friday night to tell him to fire Cox, Richardson refused, saying he would resign instead. As this was happening, Cox (unaware of this call) issued a statement to the press just in time for the evening deadline saying that the president was refusing to comply with a court order “in violation of the promises which the Attorney General made to the Senate” that the Watergate break-in would be investigated thoroughly. Cox’s statement was front-page on Saturday morning, and he was planning to hold a press conference at 1.00. Richardson phoned Cox to tell him what had happened. At the press conference, Cox reminded reporters that only the Attorney General could fire him. Meanwhile, Haig phoned Richardson again and ordered him to fire Cox; Richardson refused. Knowing what would happen next, Richardson met with his Deputy Attorney General, William Ruckelshaus, and told him that he, Ruckelshaus, would be asked to fire Cox once Richardson’s resignation was made public. Ruckelshaus said he would not do it and that he, too, would resign.

Nixon summoned Richardson to his office and told him that if he didn’t fire Cox, Nixon couldn’t meet with the Soviet Premier to work out a solution to the crisis in the Middle East because Brezhnev wouldn’t respect a man who was being publicly defied by a subordinate. Again Richardson refused, and Nixon said “I’m sorry that you insist on putting your personal commitments ahead of the public interest.” Richardson resigned. As Richardson left, Haig was on the phone to Ruckelshaus, telling him to fire Cox. When he balked, Haig barked “Your commander in chief has given you an order! You have no alternative.” Undaunted, Ruckelshaus replied, “Except to resign”, which he did. Finally, Nixon sent a limousine to pick up Solicitor General Robert Bork from his home and bring him to the White House. There, Nixon told him to fire Cox. He had a letter of dismissal ready, waiting for Bork’s signature. Intimidated, Bork signed it. Nixon told him, “You’ve got guts.”

At 8.25 that evening, White House press secretary Ron Ziegler held a press conference announcing the resignations of Richardson and Ruckelshaus and the firing of Cox, saying “the office of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force has been abolished as of approximately 8 PM tonight.”

The nation was shocked. The way they experienced it, they woke up to read Cox’s claim that the president was refusing to obey a court order. Then they watched his press conference at 1.00 PM where he outlined his rightful claim for the tapes. Then they heard an 8.25 PM press conference saying that Cox, Richardson, and Ruckelshaus were all fired, and that the president had declared the Watergate investigation over. It was abundantly clear that Nixon had eliminated three men whom he was afraid of—what was he afraid of? What did he think they would discover if they had the tapes? And more importantly, would the president’s illegal, unconstitutional firing of the special prosecutor be allowed to stand? was the president above the law? Could he do whatever he wanted, no matter what? As commander in chief, if he committed a crime, did the American people “have no alternative” but to let him do it, and to quietly accept an imperial presidency?

The name “Saturday Night Massacre” may seem overdone—like the “Boston Massacre”, in which only five people died. But what was being massacred was the Constitution, separation of powers, and the rule of law that said that in the U.S. no one, no matter their position, is above the law. The coverage on the news that night reiterated this perception of danger:

John Chancellor, NBC News: Good evening. The country tonight is in the midst of what may be the most serious Constitutional crisis in its history. The President has fired the special Watergate prosecutor, Archibald Cox. Because of the President’s action, the attorney general has resigned. Elliott Richardson has quit, saying he cannot carry out Mr. Nixon’s instructions. Richardson’s deputy, William Ruckelshaus, has been fired.

Ruckelshaus refused, in a moment of Constitutional drama, to obey a presidential order to fire the special Watergate prosecutor. And half an hour after the special Watergate prosecutor had been fired, agents of the FBI, acting at the direction of the White House, sealed off the offices of the special prosecutor, the offices of the attorney general and the offices of the deputy attorney general.

All of this adds up to a totally unprecedented situation, a grave and profound crisis in which the President has set himself against his own attorney general and the Department of Justice. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

Nothing like this had ever happened before. Nixon had thrown down a gauntlet to the nation: you must accept my power to live above the law. I will not be questioned. How would the nation react?

Next time: the backlash of justice

What was Watergate?

Hello and welcome to the second post in our series on the Watergate crisis. It was 40 years ago that this shocking series of events took place, and it’s amazing how little most people know about it. Watergate may have been the greatest challenge to our democracy in our entire history, because it was an attempt by a president and his advisors to undermine, and even overthrow, checks and balances of power between the three branches of government, judicial review, and equal protection under the law. No president that we know of had ever before, or has ever since, committed himself and his closest advisors to actual crimes: robbery, intimidation, blackmail, attempted murder. These were all things that President Nixon either ordered his men to do, or mapped out a plan for. It took all the accumulated power of our democratic system to stop this metamorphosis into dictatorship, and one crucial event was so terrible it was called the Saturday Night Massacre, and yet—few Americans today know what that was, or any of the main events, let alone the details and motives behind those events, that made up Watergate. Unfortunately, all that lives on of that crises are: a paradoxical, cruelly unwarranted, deeply heart-breaking lack of faith in our government on the part of Americans; and the suffix “-gate”, which we apply now to all sorts of idiotic pseudo “scandals”. We call Watergate a crisis, not a scandal, because it threatened the very basis of democratic government in this country, which goes beyond the minor thrill of shock and titillated interest that defines a scandal.

We will bring Watergate back in this series, because it was a forceful attack on our democratic system that was even more forcefully beaten back by Americans who understood that system and were willing to fight for it. Let’s go through the events in the crisis as they happened.

It all started in January 1972, when Gordon Liddy, leader of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, came up with a plan to cripple the Democratic Party’s presidential campaign that year by spying on their headquarters, stealing documents, threatening members of the Democratic National Committee, and more. Winning the 1972 was beyond crucial to President Nixon. He was determined to win re-election, mainly so that he could continue the Vietnam War (which he believed the U.S. could win under his leadership) and continue his efforts to reach out to Communist China. Nixon also felt it was crucially important that a moderate Republican hold office for two terms to break the Democratic stranglehold on the presidency: since 1933, there had only been two Republican presidents, Dwight Eisenhower and himself. So the Committee for the Re-Election of the President was not some minor group of volunteers working in a basement office. Nixon was personally involved in their work.

One thing that has lingered in the public memory is that name: the Committee for the Re-Election of the President. It was known as the CRP in the Nixon administration, but once the Watergate crisis began to break, and public opinion turned against Nixon, it was popularly referred to as CREEP.

Liddy presented his criminal plan to the CRP’s chairman, Jeb Magruder, U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell, and Presidential Counsel John Dean (the president’s personal lawyer). That Liddy felt no qualms about suggesting illegal activities to two federal lawyers—one the nation’s top lawyer and the other the president’s top lawyer—is telling about the atmosphere in the Nixon Administration. It was clear to Liddy that Nixon would not disapprove of illegal activities in the name of winning the election. Attorney General Mitchell reviewed the plan and rejected it as too complicated, but two months later he approved a revised version that involved CRP members breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC. The men would bug the phones, so that all phone calls would be recorded and listened to by CRP, and then copy any important documents they found that revealed the Democratic strategy for winning the election. The men for the job were Liddy and two former CIA officials, Howard Hunt and James McCord. At this point, Mitchell resigned as Attorney General to take the job of Chairman of the CRP.

The “burglars”, as they came to be known, were not talented secret agents. They got into the DNC offices at the Watergate, and tapped the phones, but were unable to find any documents with important information. They broke in two more times looking for data, and on the third trip in, they were caught by a security guard. Frank Wills was working the overnight shift on June 17 when he saw masking tape covering the latches in a door (so the door would close but not lock). He took the tape off. An hour later, he came back and found the door had been re-taped. Wills called the police, and the burglars were caught red-handed in the DNC offices. Hunt, McCord, and three other men hired for the job were charged with attempted burglary and wiretapping. On September 15, they were indicted by a grand jury, as was Liddy, for conspiracy, burglary, and violating federal wiretapping laws. Judge John Sirica was the man who oversaw the grand jury, and he convicted the five men on January 30, 1973.

That is the description of the Watergate break-in that began the crisis. We see that there was already a crisis in the Nixon Administration, even before the break-in(s) took place, in that it was committed to a by-any-means-necessary election strategy that condoned criminal activity in the name of re-election. Whether Nixon knew about the break-in before it happened remained a question for many years; it seems clear now that he did not know in advance. But his men were sure he would not disapprove. They did not tell him about the break-in beforehand simply because they didn’t think they needed to—they felt sure it would have his approval. The HBO documentary “Nixon on Nixon: In His Own Words” that is airing now is powerful proof of this. By playing some of the thousands of hours of recordings made of Nixon talking to his advisors and other people, it shows that Nixon was constantly urging his men to commit crimes to stop people he considered to be his enemies, long before Watergate. He ordered his men to break into the Brookings Institute, a Washington think tank which he considered too liberal, and commanded that they blow up the safe there and destroy its contents. When Senator Edward Kennedy requested Secret Service protection because of death threats, Nixon tells his advisor to get Kennedy two men who will spy on him and find some scandalous information that Nixon can use to ruin Kennedy’s career. The advisor replies instantly that he has a Secret Service agent who has pledged to do anything for him, including committing murder, if he is asked. Nixon approves this man as Kennedy’s bodyguard, saying “Good, good” when he hears about the man’s willingness to kill for the president. If murder was okay, mere robbery and wiretapping were nothing at all.

We’ll end this installment by clarifying something that, like so many features of this crisis, was once common knowledge but is now mostly lost. Presidents before Nixon had sometimes tape-recorded their conversations in the Oval Office, but he was the first to record all conversations—phone calls and face-to-face. He only told three men in his administration about this. Everyone else was unaware that they were being recorded. These tapes would be discovered during the Watergate investigation, and used to prove Nixon’s involvement in criminal activity, as well as his overall coarseness, bigotry, racism, and aggression, all of which shocked the nation. Nixon used so many four-letter words that had to be bleeped out that the transcripts of the tapes read “expletive deleted” wherever they appeared, and this became a bitter catch-phrase Americans used at the time to describe the president’s overall negative and hateful agenda.

Next time, we’ll explore the shift from minor burglary to major investigation that was Watergate.

Watergate Recap by the Colbert Report

It’s the 40th anniversary in 2014 of the end of the Watergate investigation, and a good broad outline of what happened is available from a not-completely unexpected source: Stephen Colbert and the writers of the Colbert Report. Everyone, by now, knows the premise of this show is that Colbert is an extreme right-wing commentator, and so would be supportive of Nixon to the end. But as usual, real historical facts are presented clearly and briskly, and Colbert’s cartoonishly neo-con interpretations do not detract from what the average viewer can learn about the topic at hand. 

We’ll begin our series on Watergate by linking you to the Colbert Report’s “A Nation Betrayed—A Fond Look Back: ’74”. Enjoy!

 

Next time, we enter the world of the Watergate break-in that started the crisis.