What Can We Learn from the Watergate Scandal?

My VIP for this week is Richard Nixon, the 37^th President of the United States. Fifty years ago on August 8, 1974, Nixon announced his resignation from the office of President. He is the only POTUS in American history to resign from office.

Nixon was the first POTUS for whom I voted. The minimum voting age at the time was 21 years of age, so my first opportunity to vote in an election was 1968. I remember where I was on the day that he resigned – driving a pickup truck pulling a small house trailer with my two toddlers into the McCarthy hunting area. My husband had flown into the area with his hunting buddy, and the two wives were tasked with bringing the vehicles and camping equipment.

This trip was the first time that I had ever driven our truck while pulling a trailer. It was a baptism by fire experience. Whenever we stopped, I always made sure that I could pull forward. The scariest part of the trip was crossing a long bridge made of wooden planks – open on both sides and between the lanes – high above a river. I was far out of my comfort zone!

The Watergate scandal was in the news for at least two years. While driving to McCarthy, I heard Nixon’s resignation on the radio, and I felt great sadness for our nation. Now, fifty years later, I learned shocking information in an article written by John D. O’Connor: “While the Watergate scandal is widely recognized as journalistically impelled, few realize that the sensational reporting was not only partisan but also fraudulent.” This was the first time that I had heard this perspective of the event. 

After the arrest of five burglars on the morning of June 17, 1972, the Washington Post quickly learned the true target of the burglary, which had nothing to do with the 1972 election, contrary to what the Post has claimed for over 50 years.

The Post consistently withheld its knowledge of two concurrent causes of the burglary. It knew about the strong likelihood of CIA involvement in pursuing its program of monitoring prostitutes and johns of interest. Young Nixon aides, using resources from the cash-rich Committee to Re-elect the President, were seeking dirt for their own blindly ambitious dossiers without oversight from the Oval Office, which remained clueless.

If the Post had reported the truth, however, it would have hurt its political ally, the Democratic National Committee, where one affiliated secretary was referring out-of-town visitors to a neighboring bordello. Publishing this would have hurt Democrats and helped the hated Nixon.

This sounds so much like our nation today. For example, the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was discovered a few weeks prior to the November 2020 presidential election. Mainstream media and social media all refused to cover the story – calling it misinformation -- because it would have hurt the Democrats and “helped the hated” Trump.

O’Connor wrote about burglars, CIA operations, mysterious deaths, evidence tampering, evidence destruction, “Deep Throat” (FBI’s Number 2), congressional investigations, and coverups. I will skip over the details, but I suggest that you read the lengthy information that can be found here. 

The Post’s summary and analysis of the Baker Report, which was otherwise buried in the Congressional Record in those pre-internet days, deceptively covered up the findings, essentially saying “nothing to see here.” Nixon soon resigned due to a crime revealed on White House tapes.

John Dean informed the White House shortly after the burglary that Mark Felt’s analysis suggested the burglary was likely a CIA operation. To protect the identity of his large donor, industrialist Democrat Dwayne Andreas, Nixon called the FBI off the Mexican money trail, claiming it would interfere with a CIA operation. Although Nixon believed this was a misleading overreach, it turned out to be truthful. The money washer was Mexico City lawyer Manuel Ogarrio, a CIA asset who often laundered money for the agency.

With Nixon’s resignation, the Post learned not only that journalism had the power to make or break a president but also that it could do so fraudulently.

In the 50 years since it sold its honesty dishonestly, the Post’s journalism has never been challenged by the dull-normal lemmings in the partisan press. This dishonest reportage has only been amplified over the last five decades. For example, when Trump was elected, a prominent journalism school dean confidently told his students, “Don’t worry; we’ll Watergate him.” In 2016, Bob Woodward proudly told adoring pundits that he was putting 20 Post reporters on the Trump beat.

When the journalism intelligentsia scratch their heads over the origins of today’s tribal divisions, they answer their own question. By asking it, they ignore that they are the cause, through inflammatory, fraudulent journalism. Donald Trump calls it, crudely but accurately, “fake news,” and millions roar their approval.

Now, 50 years after Nixon’s departure from office, it’s obvious that our divided country is the bitter harvest of fraudulent Watergate journalism. The only way to begin the cure is for the offending parties to admit their wrongdoing.

But we should not hold our breath.

Now we are in the midst of another presidential election, and the media continues to tell its lies to help the Democrats and to hurt Trump. It was the media who did not blow the lid off the fact that Joe Biden is senile. It is the same media who were trying just a month ago to get Kamala Harris off the presidential ticket because she was a drag on the Biden ticket. Now they are claiming that she is the greatest politician around. They are all liars who do not have the good of America at heart.

I fear that our nation is in great danger because so many people believe all the lies being told. Will enough Americans be fooled that they will vote for Harris and elect her as the next POTUS – just like they were fooled into voting for a senile Joe Biden? If so, America will quickly move further into socialism, and the Constitution will truly “hang by a thread” as foretold by a modern-day prophet of God.