Tag Archives: Watergate scandal

This scandal produced a suffix

Forty-four years ago today, some goofballs broke into the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington, D.C.

They rifled through some files looking for dirt they could find on the party bigwigs. They left.

The cops arrived and discovered that the office had been burglarized. They launched their investigation at the Watergate Hotel and office complex.

Thus, a political suffix was born.

The Watergate scandal took flight eventually. The Washington Post assigned a couple of reporters from its metro desk — Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein — to cover it as a run-of-the-mill cop story. They buried their initial coverage of it.

Then the reporters’ phones start ringing. “There’s more to this story than meets the eye,” snitches told them. The reporters badgered their editor, Ben Bradlee, to allow them to look more deeply into it. Finally, Bradlee relented. He turned the fellows loose.

They uncovered a scandal that would turn into a monumental constitutional crisis. We would learn that President Nixon told the FBI to stop snooping around, that he had ordered the CIA to spy on his enemies. Nixon would quit the presidency, Woodward and Bernstein would win the Pulitzer Prize — and their names would become synonymous with investigative journalism.

Since then, every political scandal under sun — or so it seems — has had the “gate” suffix attached to it. Here’s what I found on Wikipedia. I know, take it with a grain of salt. Still, it’s rather interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scandals_with_%22-gate%22_suffix

There’s more of them than I ever imagined.

But for my money, the original “gate” scandal — and it’s listed in there — remains in a class by itself.

June 17, 1972 is a date many of us will always remember — in the words of the president who would succeed Richard Nixon — when our “long national nightmare” was just beginning.

 

Sen. Thompson made his mark early

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There will be tributes a-plenty in the next few days and weeks as politicians — and actors — remember one of their own: former U.S. senator and former TV and film actor Fred Dalton Thompson.

The Tennessee Republican was a larger-than-life guy who died today at his home after battling a recurrence of lymphoma.

He ran for president once. Served in the Senate. Acted in some pretty good films and had a good run as the district attorney in the hit TV show “Law and Order.”

I want to remember this man in another fashion.

R.I.P., Sen. Thompson

The first time I saw him was in 1973. It was on TV. I was a college student majoring in political science at Portland State University in Oregon and Thompson was serving as chief counsel for the Republican senators serving on the Select Senate Committee on Watergate.

Its chairman was the late Democrat Sam Ervin, the self-described “country lawyer” from North Carolina.

Thompson’s role in that committee was to provide legal advice for the Republicans on the committee. The panel was investigating the Watergate scandal that was beginning to metastasize and eventually would result in the resignation of President Nixon.

Fred Thompson had really bad hair, as I recall. But appearances aside, he was a tough interrogator, as was the Democrats’ chief counsel, Sam Dash.

My memory of Thompson was jogged a bit the other day by MSNBC commentator Lawrence O’Donnell who opined — after the daylong hearing of Hillary Clinton before the Select House Benghazi Committee — that senators and House members shouldn’t be allowed to question witnesses. O’Donnell cited the work that Thompson and Dash did in pursuing the truth behind the Watergate scandal.

Leave the questioning of these witnesses to the pros, O’Donnell said. The Benghazi committee congressmen and women, he said, made spectacles of themselves.

Thompson, indeed, was a tough lawyer. My memory of him at the time was that he questioned anti-Nixon witnesses quite hard and didn’t let up very much on those who supported the embattled president.

He did his job well.

That is what I remember today as the nation marks Sen. Thompson’s passing.

May he rest in peace.

 

Woodward knows a ‘scandal’ when he sees one

Bob Woodward knows his way around a political scandal.

He once was a young police reporter working for the Metro desk at the Washington Post. Then some goofballs broke into the Democratic Party National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex. Woodward and Carl Bernstein, another young reporter, began smelling a scandal in the works.

It turned out to be a big one. President Richard Nixon ended up resigning when it was learned he ordered the cover-up of the burglary.

Woodward sees a similarity between then and what’s happening now with Hillary Rodham Clinton’s e-mail controversy. The e-mail matter deals with messages Clinton sent on her personal server that might have contained highly classified information while she was serving as secretary of state.

According to The Hill: “’Follow the trail here,’ Woodward said on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe,’ noting that emails erased from Clinton’s private server when she led the State Department were either sent or received by someone else, too.”

Clinton erased the e-mails, just like those audiotapes were erased back in the 1970s as the Watergate scandal began to creep up on President Nixon. That’s according to Woodward.

The man knows what a scandal looks like. The Clinton e-mail controversy isn’t a scandal. At least not yet.

Of course the question was intended to offend

Major Garrett, CBS News’s chief White House correspondent, and I have something in common.

We both worked for the same person, although at different times.

How’s that for name-dropping?

Garrett went to work for the Amarillo Globe-News back in the old days. The then-editor of the paper, Garet von Netzer, hired him; von Netzer later would become publisher of the paper and then he hired yours truly, although long after Garrett had moved on.

Having laid down that useless predicate, let me now say that Major Garrett asked a patently offensive question of President Obama, to which the president responded appropriately.

The question involved four Americans held captive in Iran and Garrett wondered how the president could be “content” that they’re still being held on trumped-up charges while he is “celebrating” the nuclear deal worked out with the Islamic Republic.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/obama-major-garrett-shuts-down-press-conference-120156.html?hp=b2_r1

Obama took offense at the tone of the question. He scolded Garrett, saying he “should know better” than to ask a question that contained “nonsense.”

The president said he isn’t “content” over the Americans’ continued captivity and said he and his team are “working diligently” to secure freedom for the individuals.

What irks me about the question and its aftermath is how Major Garrett insisted it wasn’t intended to ruffle the president. He didn’t apologize and he said it was not asked to call attention to himself.

May I be blunt? That’s pure baloney.

That’s how it goes among the White House press corps. It’s always about getting in a question intended to call attention to the inquiry and to the person making it. Such gamesmanship has been going on for, oh, since the beginning of these televised events dating back to the days when President Kennedy introduced them to the public and turned them into some form of entertainment.

CBS’s Dan Rather famously sought to get under President Nixon’s skin during the Watergate scandal; ABC’s Sam Donaldson did the same thing to President Reagan over the course of many years; Fox’s Ed Henry does the same thing today with President Obama.

Well, now Henry and others have company in the “gotcha” hall of fame.

Major Garrett asked an appropriate question. He just inserted a certain word — “content” — that framed it in a way that got Barack Obama’s dander up.

I would bet that was his intent all along.

 

Speaking in the first person … singular

President Obama can take credit for a lot of good things that have happened while he’s been living and working in the White House.

But as the short video attached to this blog post indicates, he seems all too willing to take all the credit.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/06/01/obama_under_my_leadership_the_united_states_is_the_most_respected_country_on_earth.html

Readers of this blog know that I’ve been a strong supporter of Barack Obama’s work to fix what was ailing the country when he took office. I hope those who’ve read it over the years also will understand that I bristle when he keeps using the first person singular pronoun when he speaks of the good things that have occurred.

The president took some questions at the White House and, by gosh, he did it again. He kept using the words “I” and “me” and “my” when referencing the positive accomplishments of the presidency.

“On my watch” the United States is the most respected nation on Earth, he said. “I” fixed the auto industry, he said. “I” got the country working again, he added.

Mr. President, you are part of a team that, yes, you assembled. But you all have worked together to do these things. Isn’t that correct?

President Nixon had an equally annoying habit of referring to himself in the third person. “The president” has the power to do certain things that others don’t have, he would say. Nixon’s use of the third person became prevalent during the Watergate scandal and it chapped my hide royally every time I heard him say it.

I recall something President Reagan once said. I am paraphrasing it here, but he said something about not caring “who took the credit” for positive outcomes. On the flip side, I recall him saying that “mistakes were made” during the Iran-Contra scandal that embarrassed him and his team — as he lapsed into that maddening passive-voice verbiage so common among politicians who refuse to take full responsibility for the policies that go wrong.

It’s fine for the current president to take credit as well for the plus side of his time in office. I just wish he’d be willing to acknowledge publicly, out loud, so everyone can hear it, that it’s a team effort.

How about a little more “we,” “us,” and “our,” Mr. President?

 

Hit the road, Gov. Kitzhaber

It’s looking like lights out for Oregon’s embattled governor.

John Kitzhaber is now getting the word from top state Democrats — his own partisans — that it’s time for him to go. A growing ethics scandal involving his fiancée, Cylvia Hayes, is now threatening to overwhelm his ability to govern his state — my home state.

It’s not looking good for the governor. He can’t possibly hang on.

http://news.yahoo.com/oregon-governor-planned-quit-changed-mind-074856606.html

His fiancée has been implicated in a scheme in which she funneled state business to her lobbying firm, allegedly using her connections as the state’s de facto first lady to fatten her wallet/purse.

As for Kitzhaber’s role in this, well, he is the governor and his fiancée allegedly was acting as the state’s agent.

It’s bad, man. Real bad.

As for state Democrats telling the governor it’s time for him to quit, this has a Watergate-ish ring to it.

Flash back to 1974. President Richard Nixon was in deep doo-doo over the Watergate scandal. It was revealed that he had told the FBI to back off its investigation of whether the president’s re-election committee was complicit in the break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate office complex.

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee then approved articles of impeachment against the president.

It was then that none other than Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater led a GOP delegation to the White House to inform the Republican president that he was toast, that he couldn’t be acquitted in a Senate trial. “You have to quit, Mr. President,” Goldwater said.

Nixon did resign a few days later.

History is sounding as if it’s repeating itself in the Oregon State Capitol Building.

You have to quit, Gov. Kitzhaber.